The Gaming Den

hyzmarca wrote: The example text for sloth is of a building superintendent deciding to fix broken hallway lights tomorrow instead of today.

I know the disconnect between example text and rules text is pretty severe, but how the fuck is that an example of avoiding a difficult task? The superintendent isn't avoiding the task at all, he's just doing it a few hours later. While if you just told me that and asked "Is this an example of slothful behavior?" I'd probably say yes, which is why it's an example at all... Guh.

John Magnum wrote:

hyzmarca wrote: The example text for sloth is of a building superintendent deciding to fix broken hallway lights tomorrow instead of today.

I know the disconnect between example text and rules text is pretty severe, but how the fuck is that an example of avoiding a difficult task? The superintendent isn't avoiding the task at all, he's just doing it a few hours later. While if you just told me that and asked "Is this an example of slothful behavior?" I'd probably say yes, which is why it's an example at all... Guh.

There had been robberies in nearby apartment buildings recently that were preceded by burglars smashing hallway lights during the day, so it was possible that she was ignoring an actual threat. Though, in this case, it was just regular vandals so everything worked out.

Rawbeard wrote:So I just stumbled over this pretty image again, which in my opinion is the single best thing oWoD every created.



unfortunatly most fans (I have no idea how to call those people) seem to chocke on their angst if you even mention this was a thing, so I will not hold my breath for any fun Technocracy action in the future. But I really wanted to wallow in nostalgia a bit.

My werewolf group sort of recreated that in reverse- the enemy vamps were wearing anti-sun armor, and we were tearing them apart.

Umbra-sniping is a lot of fun.

FrankTrollman wrote:You activate it by being a murder hobo, or as they say in the book "whenever he acquires something at the expense of another. Gaining it must come at some potential risk (of assault, arrest or simple loss of peer respect)." Now I know you're probably thinking at this point that being a murder hobo is considered "playing the game wrong" by almost every Vampire player and literally every Vampire author, and that's true. But demonstrably there are games that exist where you can be a full time murder hobo and have the game keep going. Vampire wasn't supposed to be one of them, but there we are.

I'd say it fits into their idea of the game as long as, instead of just kicking doors in, stabbing people (preferably in the face) and taking their belongings (preferably in a sack) willy-nilly, you're playing a serial killer than could be described as "Creepy but I kind of want to have sex with him".

Basically, this.

I mean "A serial killer that is creepy but people want to have sex with them" already basically describes vampires. You could just work "actual serial killer for serial killer reasons" into your "vampire" career (that's a job, right? It seems to have promotions and everything) and make sure to take stuff after the fact, even though you're not looting their house wholesale, you're taking a specific keepsake. That way you technically do what the book says it wants, while remaining thematic and probably giving your MC a semi.

Longes wrote:Changeling the Dreaming kickstarter gathered 380,058$

If all of the people who backed them at different levels were different people (which I am pretty sure they are not, because there are some incentives to pledge twice at different levels), then their market was 2675 people. Let that sink in: the maximum number of real people willing to give them moneys is less than the minimum number of economical copies for a traditional print run (3,000). And yet, this project grossed a third of a million dollars because they managed to soak enough of those two thousand and change super fans for hundreds of dollars that it all worked out.

Now some of these kickstarter rewards and addons are close to free for them to give out. Like, for ten extra dollars they'll let you download pdfs of shit they have the rights to from a long ass time ago. Or if you give them $310 dollars they promise to use your character's name the next time they put out a fiction anthology. But some of these things are physical objects that cost quite a bit to fabricate. I'm not sure what the profit margin is on small runs of specialty dice or what print on demand costs are down to these days, but the overhead on a lot of that is shockingly large.

Still, the amount of money they wrang from the amount of actual fans they have left is instructive. That's a lot of take home cash for Richard Thomas for the amount of people actually supporting his coke habit.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:If all of the people who backed them at different levels were different people (which I am pretty sure they are not, because there are some incentives to pledge twice at different levels), then their market was 2675 people.

The thing at the top puts the total at 2,684 backers. Not a material change to your point, but one wonders how the other 9 people managed to not meet any of the pledge levels.
EDIT: That or Kickstarter can't count.

Since there are "addons" it's entirely possible that there are people who pledged $0 plus addons. Also, some of the upper levels give you multiple copies of the book which only makes sense if it's for multiple people pledging together.

In any case, it does look like the total number of real people is still significantly less than 3,000. That's an average pledge of about $128 per fan. Now that's gross, and kickstarter takes a cut and so on and so forth, but that's D&D 5th edition money. For Changeling.

-Username17

As one of the people who contributed to this, I can admit it is entirely for reasons of nostalgia. My wife and I played, heavily house ruled, changeling all through high school so now that I have the means I shelled out the 125$ for a copy of the book so as to give it as a gift. I expect no real content or mechanical genius, but the smile my wife will have when I give her the book and bring back those memories is worth it to me. I acknowledge the fact that I am basically paying just to see that smile which will be more about our youth together, but *shrug*.

Not trying to defend it just giving what viewpoint I can.

Covent wrote:As one of the people who contributed to this, I can admit it is entirely for reasons of nostalgia. My wife and I played, heavily house ruled, changeling all through high school so now that I have the means I shelled out the 125$ for a copy of the book so as to give it as a gift. I expect no real content or mechanical genius, but the smile my wife will have when I give her the book and bring back those memories is worth it to me. I acknowledge the fact that I am basically paying just to see that smile which will be more about our youth together, but *shrug*.

Not trying to defend it just giving what viewpoint I can.

That's a perfectly valid reason.

Yeah, if I had a career that paid me well, I'd probably be collecting the 20th anniversary WoD books, even if I didn't really plan on playing any of them any time soon, because of nostalgia, and my love of having tons of RPG books.

I'm kind of hoping this scheme lasts long enough for them to do Demon the Fallen in a few years, and that I can justify pledging to that.

Hey. What's the story on Rich Thomas's coke habit?

I assumed every writer for every version of every WotC product had a coke habit. Is that not the case, or does Rich Thomas just have a special and noteworthy coke habit beyond the baseline?

Koumei wrote:I assumed every writer for every version of every WotC product had a coke habit. Is that not the case, or does Rich Thomas just have a special and noteworthy coke habit beyond the baseline?

Seriously.

I mean, what are we talking here? Sherlock Holmes "I get Bored", or "I do it two or three times a week" or Richard Pryor's "Cost me $800 to get hard" or on up to fucking Snowflame/Doomrider levels of I DO COCAAAAAAIIIINE

doomrider doomrider doomrider please be doomrider

FrankTrollman wrote: But some of these things are physical objects that cost quite a bit to fabricate. I'm not sure what the profit margin is on small runs of specialty dice or what print on demand costs are down to these days, but the overhead on a lot of that is shockingly large.

Small runs of specialty dice generally run about a dollar per face that is non-standard. If we're talking different inked numbers on successes like nWOD dice had it probably is significantly cheaper.

We used to buy lots of 2d6 with individual faces on the 6 for games like Twilight Struggle and spent 5 bucks for the whole lot shipped. That left like a buck or so "profit" for the guy who organized the mess.

So, basically Onyx Path is living on "whales" like a Chinese freemium phone game?

Dogbert wrote:So, basically Onyx Path is living on "whales" like a Chinese freemium phone game?

The majority of phone games now. Possibly soon, the majority of video games period. People just don't want to pay for things up front, even if they'll pay 10x as much over time without complaint. But yes.

Dogbert wrote:So, basically Onyx Path is living on "whales" like a Chinese freemium phone game?

Yes. The weird thing about the business model is that they don't really offer anything free. Their pool of free customers are actually the people who played the old White Wolf line. People are paying over a hundred dollars for the premium feature of being allowed to spend money on the game they used to play. And a few are spending even more money for the premium feature of having their name associated with that game in some way.

There's a reason that new Paradox Wolf calls Onyx Path's productions "nostalgia products." Their entire business plan is simply to ask people to open their wallets for nostalgia. It's like a pledge drive more than a content producer.

They only get a couple thousand pledgers. But they only need a couple thousand people to throw down donations. The donations are individually pretty large.

-Username17

So remember when Paradox was going to make Vampire come back in 2016? What ever happened to that?

They trotted out some edgelord videos about how they are the first, last, and only cool people in the RPG market, but they still very much are not in the RPG market. Like, there's seriously no game. And no real evidence that there's going to be a game. I don't get it.

-Username17

I've heard virtually nothing credible about it.

They've... uh... announced a werewolf computer game in conjunction with Cyanide (the makers of Blood Bowl), which I assume means twice the DLC.
And published by Focus Home Interactive, rather than Paradox, which is simply... confusing.
For extra confusion, Focus is also publishing a vampire game (called, of course, Vampyr), so they're partnering with a publisher that's hoping to compete in WW's space, at least for computer things.


Also they put a shitty fanfic reader on Steam for Vampire and Mage.

But yes, the flagship product for the new White Wolf is a werewolf computer game of no real description (though the Focus website labels it an RPG)
http://nichegamer.com/2017/01/20/parado ... -consoles/

And as far as I can tell, the 'first real look' at the beginning of February never happened, and the 'website' is just a placeholder. Good times.

So, pretty much standard WW business.
At least we're getting a new edition for the tabletop, right?

Voss wrote:Also they put a shitty fanfic reader on Steam for Vampire and Mage.

And as far as I know, right now it only has two pieces of fanfic in it, and one of them is co-written by shitmuffin. How you could possibly launch such a thing without like fifty piece of fanfic in it or at least get anyone who has ever written anything for Vampire that got positive reviews to write something I do not know.

Smirnoffico wrote:So, pretty much standard WW business.
At least we're getting a new edition for the tabletop, right?

As far as I can tell we are not getting a new edition for the tabletop. The promise of a new metaplot and the promise of a new tabletop edition seem to be complete vaporware. All we have so far is some videos promising that they are the true Edgelords and also that people who play D&D are a bunch of uncool nerds. I genuinely don't know what they expect to accomplish by posting a bunch of insults at various parts of the fanbase without having any products released or even on the horizon.

Right now it seems like NuWhiteWolf is just a clique of Scandinavian LARPers who are using their ownership of the White Wolf IP to lord it over other groups of LARPers on the internet. Like seriously, that's it. They've spent more than a year and a half swinging their dicks around about how they own the White Wolf IP and you don't and that is it. It's fucking mind boggling.

-Username17

They do blather a bit about their super-transgressive full contact scandinavian LARPs

I did find this:
http://www.white-wolf.com/news/

apparently, 5th edition vampire the book is a 2018 operation. But mostly "As our strategy is all about delivering World of Darkness in different medias, we are working hard to develop our plan of having several video games released in the years to come. Games of different styles and by different developers and publishers."

So it sounds like someone is going to jerk off in a sock and publish it, but mostly it's a computer game IP now, with random hopes for TV shows and movies. And a license to be super-creepy at LARPs