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Steve

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  1. Like
    Steve reacted to DShomshak in Tropes for Magical Girls and Masters of the Universe   
    Here's the situation:
     
    One of my players has a fun idea for a character, but it involves genres I'm really not up on. Specifically, the character's backstory is that when she was a lonely 13-year-old, she imagined a fairly elaborate fantasy world in which she was Princess Moonray, heroine of the magical Moon Kingdom -- sort of an unholy mash-up of Masters of the Universe and Sailor Moon. When she was grown up, she somehow managed to help a supernatural creature that rewarded her by granting the deepest wish of her heart. Not what she wanted right now, but what she had wanted most strongly in all her life: to be Princess Moonray. And so that's her Hero ID.
     
    The thing is, this wish also seems to have created the entire Magical Moon Kingdom, too! Princess Moonray's friends/allies live there, like the magical hummingbird MoonBlossom and the hunky Dorian Silversword. And her arch-enemy Queen Nocturna, ruler of the Dark Side of the Moon.
     
    There's no way I'm leaving this undeveloped. There *must* be visits to the Magical Moon Kingdom, and her friends and enemies must visit Earth to make her life interesting.
     
    Only... I never watched Sailor Moon or any iteration of He-Man and She-Ra. So far, all I know is that Queen Nocturna needs to have a cadre of lieutenants who can implement her evil schemes to conquer the Moon Kingdom. (Or Earth, as they follow Princess Moonray.) Maybe her son, Prince Balthazar Blackheart, who looks suspiciously like Leader Desslok from StarBlazers (but more "bishi'?), and a daughter Princess Shadira, who is totally an Azula expy from Avatar: the Last Airbender. But that's all I got.
     
    I appeal to the wisdom of the Forum. What are the tropes? What powers are standard for someone like Queen Nocturna, and what minions should she have? Are there any must-have locations? Standard story elements?
     
    (At least I already have the character sheet for Princess Moonray. So I know that the way magical attacks work is that she points at her target and shouts, say, "Staggering Moon Strike!" for a Mental Blast or ""Moon Mind Invasion!" for Telepathy. This is, hm, a new magical tradition for me to learn, but I'm not sure I'll ever want to write a new chapter for Ultimate Mystic.)
     
    Dean Shomshak
  2. Haha
    Steve reacted to Cygnia in Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D   
  3. Haha
    Steve reacted to Cygnia in A Thread For Random RPG Musings   
  4. Like
    Steve reacted to Cygnia in A Thread For Random RPG Musings   
  5. Haha
    Steve reacted to Cygnia in A Thread For Random RPG Musings   
  6. Haha
    Steve reacted to Cygnia in A Thread For Random RPG Musings   
  7. Haha
    Steve reacted to Chris Goodwin in Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D   
    A lot of people played it as Vampions.  
     
    Dean Shomshak wrote the Cabal of Flamboyant Justice, a Mage the Ascension chantry whose purpose was to perform magic openly by pretending to be superheroes.  It was awesome! 
  8. Thanks
    Steve got a reaction from MrAgdesh in Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D   
    Like the webcomic Penny Arcade pointed out, D&D is a culture, not a brand. WOTC was already making money hand over fist thanks to MTG and D&D, but that wasn’t good enough. Oh no. The suits at the top (who aren’t gamers by the accounts I’ve read) wanted to have more money flowing into their coffers and boost their share price and annual bonuses.
     
    Paizo: Come play with us! We support the gaming culture and want to keep going with what’s been working. Buy books from us and the other creators you like and keep on playing.
     
    WOTC: We aren’t making enough money off this game system and want to charge everyone at every game table a monthly fee to play with our new VTT and access our digital libraries. If you don’t have a DM, we’ll even provide an AI to act as one. Oh, we’re also going to kill the OGL that brought us to the top of the TTRPG world and gave D20 mechanics about 85% of the TTRPG market because it isn’t bringing _us_ enough of the money being spent on gaming out there. All your dollars belong to us.
     
    WOTC caused themselves a self-inflicted wound by deeply angering the RPG fandom and Paizo skillfully stabbed them in the face while they were down.
     
    Well played, Paizo. Well played.
  9. Thanks
    Steve reacted to Old Man in Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D   
    To be fair, this was an act of self defense after WOTC, suddenly infected with corporate greed vampirism, stabbed Paizo in the back. 
     
     
     
    2011-2014, during the D&D 4e debacle.
     
    Looking at this chart it's kind of interesting how World of Darkness just fell off a cliff.
  10. Thanks
    Steve got a reaction from Chris Goodwin in Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D   
    Like the webcomic Penny Arcade pointed out, D&D is a culture, not a brand. WOTC was already making money hand over fist thanks to MTG and D&D, but that wasn’t good enough. Oh no. The suits at the top (who aren’t gamers by the accounts I’ve read) wanted to have more money flowing into their coffers and boost their share price and annual bonuses.
     
    Paizo: Come play with us! We support the gaming culture and want to keep going with what’s been working. Buy books from us and the other creators you like and keep on playing.
     
    WOTC: We aren’t making enough money off this game system and want to charge everyone at every game table a monthly fee to play with our new VTT and access our digital libraries. If you don’t have a DM, we’ll even provide an AI to act as one. Oh, we’re also going to kill the OGL that brought us to the top of the TTRPG world and gave D20 mechanics about 85% of the TTRPG market because it isn’t bringing _us_ enough of the money being spent on gaming out there. All your dollars belong to us.
     
    WOTC caused themselves a self-inflicted wound by deeply angering the RPG fandom and Paizo skillfully stabbed them in the face while they were down.
     
    Well played, Paizo. Well played.
  11. Like
    Steve reacted to Hugh Neilson in Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D   
    To me, the lesson of 4e was "slapping a D&D logo on it will not automatically cause gamers to change". If 4e had captured the gamers, and they all moved away from 3e, third party publishers would either have to stop publishing (not enough market for 3e material if 3e is obsolete) or move into 4e.
     
    There's a chicken and egg element here.  AD&D 1e and 2e did quite all right with no OGL.  Many games did. But WOTC realized they needed adventures, and they did not want to publish them.  Meanwhile third party publishers just filed off the D&D serial numbers and published adventures. So OGL legitimized those 3rd party adventures - and hoped that this would be the focus of 3pp.
     
    Then they moved to 4e and decided they wanted to publish more adventures (turns out older gamers have more money and less time, so buying rather than designing adventures is more popular - the market changed), so we'll shut down Dungeon Magazine (now licensed to Paizo anyway) and remove the OGL.  SURPRISE - Paizo did not lay down and die, but leveraged that OGL to publish Pathfinder and keep a version of 3e alive and well.  There were gamers who kept playing 2e, 1e and BECMI, but they didn't have a lot of published support.  Switch, or do it yourself.
     
    Now there were gamers who liked 3e more than 4e and did not have to switch to keep access to other published resources.  If 4e had been recognized as a better game, a lot of gamers would have moved there, and Paizo would not have had the same market available.  But many gamers did not like the 4e model, so they stuck with "3e under a new publisher". Lack of an OGL for 4e did not hurt WOTC nearly as much as the existence of an OGL for 3e enabling their competitors.
     
    5e brought back an OGL, but, although 5e did much better than 4e, it did not seem to hurt Paizo, who kept right on publishing 3e even when they had the option of moving to 5e.  It doesn't seem like any major 3pp would threaten to continue 5e when D&D moves into 6e.  And Paizo made a brilliant move saying "hey, come publish for our game instead of starting a 5e clone to compete against it".
     
    What did Paizo have to lose?  If shutting down the OGL means other publishers can't keep producing 3e-based product, it means they can't either.  Their mechanics aren't really their IP anyway.
     
    But now, of course, WOTC has a marketing problem.  Paizo has exacerbated that through their own shrewd marketing.
     
     
  12. Thanks
    Steve reacted to Chris Goodwin in Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D   
    My question was largely rhetorical. 
     
     
    Good luck is when it rains soup and you have a truckload of buckets.  
     
    It's possible Ryan Dancey had some idea of how wild the ecosystems around the various games would get, but maybe even he didn't.  
     
    But seriously... we've asked the Hero Games guys why they never published adventures, and they answered: adventures do not sell.  Not to the extent Hero Games would need them to.  And -- as I may or may have not said in this thread, again I don't remember and am not really feeling like going back and looking -- while Jason Walters has made it as easy as pie to publish third party products for the HERO System, you still have to ask first, and asking is a barrier, however small that barrier is.  
  13. Haha
    Steve reacted to Scott Ruggels in Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D   
    I have to say, thst zI admire the novels Duke has been writing with his phone these past few day.  Breathtaking…
  14. Like
    Steve reacted to Chris Goodwin in Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D   
    Not to put too fine a point on it, but what state is Hero Games in right now?  
     
    It's hard to argue that WotC did anything but benefit immensely from the OGL.  It did so in two eras: the D&D 3.0/3.5 era and the D&D 5e era.  In the D&D 4e era it tanked; in the D&D 4e era it had the onerous "Game System License" which, among other things, said that if you published anything under the GSL you could never, ever publish anything under the OGL.  
     
    Look what happened to D&D 4e.  
     
    Someone is inevitably going to say something about D&D 4e's rules.  I'm going to call that a red herring right now.  Every new edition of every game will have someone saying something about its rules.  People were saying how bad D&D 3's rules were when it first came out.  People were saying how bad D&D 5's rules were when it first came out.  (People were saying how bad Champions 4e's rules were when it came out!)  

    4e died on the vine because it wasn't able to attract 3pp support, and WotC wouldn't or couldn't provide it with the level of support on its own that an entire ecosystem sprung up to provide for 3e.  Now WotC are repeating the mistake with D&D 6e.  Doing the same thing, expecting a different result?  
     
    Anyone remember "T$R" and "They Sue Regularly"?  At least two companies went under directly as a result of TSR suing them over providing third party support for AD&D 1e.  I believe I've recently read that Game Designers Workshop went under not as a result of being sued, but as a result of the potential that they might be sued, over Gary Gygax's Dangerous Journeys game.  (When one is sued, and one has to provide discovery, one has to pay staff to go through one's documents...)  
     
    I've seen -- not here, that I can recall, but definitely elsewhere -- the idea that "lol u can just re-rite theyre roolz in youre own wurdz lol" and -- really?  Has anyone ever tried that?  I have.  It sucks.  Never going to again, until the next time.  Yes, copyright law allows you to do that -- but it doesn't say that the litigious large corporation can't sue you anyway for doing it, or for any other reason they want, and bankrupt you anyway.  "They Sue Regularly", remember?  

    The thing about the OGL (did I post this here?  I can't remember if I did, and I've been talking about this in more than one place...) is that it was a promise of a "safe harbor": that they wouldn't sue you over things they couldn't sue you over, in exchange for doing this, that, and the other thing.  Respecting rights to certain things, voluntarily choosing not to exercise rights that you might otherwise be permitted to...  That right there is, honestly, what built WotC into the billion dollar corporation it is now.  
     
    Sure, corporations are not your friend.  They can pretend all they want, and it's not people's fault for believing them.  It's not people's fault for believing them.  
     
    It's not people's fault for believing them.
    People liked D&D, and a lot of people build up an identity around things they like.  There's nothing wrong with that; we all do it.  Our house is a Honda household; others are Toyota households, or Ford households, or Chevy households.  I'm a Champions and Hero player from 1985.  
     
    Regardless of the motivations, WotC did something that really upset a lot of people.  They took away that safe harbor.  (Honestly, I'm kinda pissed over that, because I wrote some OGL stuff, and "published" it in forum posts here and there and occasionally on my Google drive.  Nothing to do with any WotC intellectual property directly, but I'm not sure of its status now.)
     
    It might not actually be legal for them to have done so, in fact, but until and unless that's tested in court any given person's opinions on that depends on what lawyer they're listening to.  
     
    Anyway, WotC will either succeed or fail, and the ORC license coalition will either succeed or fail, and the world will go on turning...
  15. Like
    Steve reacted to Chris Goodwin in Is it possible Hero Games could support the Open RPG Creative (ORC) License in some way?   
    I'm aware Hero Games will likely never release any part of the HERO System under any kind of open license, and I'm okay with that.  But, is there any way Hero Games could support the effort by Paizo, Kobold Press, and others, with the ORC?  
  16. Haha
    Steve reacted to Cygnia in A Thread For Random RPG Musings   
  17. Sad
    Steve got a reaction from Scott Ruggels in Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D   
    The problems going on with WOTC right now are due to decisions made by their upper management, which _is_ a who’s who of soulless corporate shills hired from Microsoft and other such companies, where the bottom line and stock valuations are the be all and end all of their existence. One of them admitted she doesn’t even play D&D and seems to view it like a video game franchise. In contrast, the creative types working for the company were hired from third-party creators and are aghast at what is going on now, and they are the sources of leaks being revealed to the public.
     
    One important thing to remember about the OGL is that it was a brilliant bit of viral marketing. You mentioned that the OGL stagnated gaming. This is true. Why come up with a new system when you could use d20 mechanics? So their share of the TTRPG industry went from around 50% in 2000 to around 85% today, and helped earn WOTC a BILLION DOLLARS in revenues per their public reports. They earned Hasbro MORE revenues and net earnings then their toy lines did.
     
    The consideration WOTC earned from enacting the OGL was gaining them an army of third-party publishers and the legions of rabid fans of those companies acting as their advertisers and proselytizers for the d20 system and helping people play the game using those mechanics. These creators took a chance and invested their own money to publish their works, print and online, each of which contributed to ever growing numbers of D&D core books sold. Sales of the core books were driven through the roof by this. Rather than paying for the uncertainty of advertising, they instead gave third-party publishers some crumbs of the pie without spending a dime of their own money.
     
    Now that its grown so large thanks to those independent efforts, they want the whole pie, and they have an army of lawyers ready to do their bidding in court to see that they get it.
     
    Will they win? Maybe. But it seems like it will be a Pyrrhic victory that fractures the gaming community into a myriad of competing d20-like systems, and other mechanics selling what books they can in the margins.
     
    The d20 OGL changed expectations of how a company publishing game mechanics can operate these past two decades. Those that don’t follow this model are in danger of being marginalized and left on the ash heap of gaming history. Gaming culture works on a principle of proselytizing by fans, and that is a big part of what enabled D&D to be where it is now, the most well-known TTRPG in the world.
     
    I do what I can to support Hero, buying books and using the mechanics in the games I run, as I’m sure other fans of the system do, but it seems to be a losing battle in the face of what the d20 OGL culture has wrought.
  18. Like
    Steve got a reaction from Khymeria in Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D   
    The problems going on with WOTC right now are due to decisions made by their upper management, which _is_ a who’s who of soulless corporate shills hired from Microsoft and other such companies, where the bottom line and stock valuations are the be all and end all of their existence. One of them admitted she doesn’t even play D&D and seems to view it like a video game franchise. In contrast, the creative types working for the company were hired from third-party creators and are aghast at what is going on now, and they are the sources of leaks being revealed to the public.
     
    One important thing to remember about the OGL is that it was a brilliant bit of viral marketing. You mentioned that the OGL stagnated gaming. This is true. Why come up with a new system when you could use d20 mechanics? So their share of the TTRPG industry went from around 50% in 2000 to around 85% today, and helped earn WOTC a BILLION DOLLARS in revenues per their public reports. They earned Hasbro MORE revenues and net earnings then their toy lines did.
     
    The consideration WOTC earned from enacting the OGL was gaining them an army of third-party publishers and the legions of rabid fans of those companies acting as their advertisers and proselytizers for the d20 system and helping people play the game using those mechanics. These creators took a chance and invested their own money to publish their works, print and online, each of which contributed to ever growing numbers of D&D core books sold. Sales of the core books were driven through the roof by this. Rather than paying for the uncertainty of advertising, they instead gave third-party publishers some crumbs of the pie without spending a dime of their own money.
     
    Now that its grown so large thanks to those independent efforts, they want the whole pie, and they have an army of lawyers ready to do their bidding in court to see that they get it.
     
    Will they win? Maybe. But it seems like it will be a Pyrrhic victory that fractures the gaming community into a myriad of competing d20-like systems, and other mechanics selling what books they can in the margins.
     
    The d20 OGL changed expectations of how a company publishing game mechanics can operate these past two decades. Those that don’t follow this model are in danger of being marginalized and left on the ash heap of gaming history. Gaming culture works on a principle of proselytizing by fans, and that is a big part of what enabled D&D to be where it is now, the most well-known TTRPG in the world.
     
    I do what I can to support Hero, buying books and using the mechanics in the games I run, as I’m sure other fans of the system do, but it seems to be a losing battle in the face of what the d20 OGL culture has wrought.
  19. Thanks
    Steve reacted to Duke Bushido in Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D   
    You have excellent points, Hugh, and were I able to log in here on my compuet instead of my phone, I would love to discuss them, but I think the outarge here can be specifically pointed out; the rest is pile-on or tangentially related, but the crux of the outrage comes first from the attempt to backpeddle on a legal agreement.  Yes: no company has _any_ interest in _any_ human being, customer, contributor, or even employee-- beyond where the wallet they carry fits into their cost-versus-profit plans lie.   (One thing I would like to discuss- but won't, because the phone screen /touchpas interface is the absolute $I:1tt125t means of communication ever devised-- is just how many citizens of a capitalist society in my age group are just now figuring that out, and they are absolutely freaking out).
     
    This is-not to younger folks who watched their parents work three jobs between them and celebrate victories like buying a car under ten years old or completing otherwise-unaffordable home repairs on their  own while they simultaneously watched their grandparents retire at 50 and travel the country in tri-colored busses with chandeliers in them after spendinf their lives twaching their kids to believe that it is almost their turn to be rich--
     
    Those younger folks learned early on that the monied people are not to be trusted, while my the largest part of my generation is only on the edge of figuring out that they have been lied to so as to keep them complacent and spending, and that there is no path to great wealth that is all three of legal, ethical, and moral.  If you are very lucky, you can hit two, and once you have the money, you onky need to hit one to increase it.
     
    Lots odbthe outrage comes from people who are seeing their first real-world example of real-world business practice.  Think of former presidenr Richard Nixon: he was _not_ the first high-level politician to do absolutely despicable things. He was, though the first _to get caught_, and,in a spectacular high-profile manner.
     
    I believe that a lot of the outrage comes from people who just notice that wealth is made imorrally and unethically every day.  It hits harder when it comes from a company for whom you have committed the cardinal sin of believing that they give even a single squirrel turd about any human being anywhere when the other choice is making money.  We should all know that no company has ever been founded to form tight-knit commmunity bonds. All companies were formed,for the single purpose of making money, and any food or wondrous things that they develop on the way, such as tight-knit community bonds or a Twitter profile of spectacular comebacks and sarcastic patter are _incidental_, having grown from the desire to make money, and ultimately will disappear the moment it stops making them money.
     
     
    There are people that are horridied that this might go in Wizard's favor.  This isnt an old antiquated contract: everyone incolved in the contract is still alive, and still mentally fit, and many have come forward to state that why is going on- the claims that are being made- are blatantly untrue, and what the original intent of the document were is counter to what is being attempted right now.  People are concerned that a court might read the language of the contract and state that what it says is something other than its verified intentions, and that scares them, too.  We live under contracts of one kind or other our entire lives, from wedding vows to bills of sale to business dealings of our own, and it is scary to the vast majority of us to think that it does not matter what sort of garauntees we believe we have for ourselves-- no mstter what personal investment we made or what protections we carvwd out for ourselves, a courtroom can simply declare "screw you; because of this particular word instead of that one, we have interpreted this to mean that must surrender twice as much as you promised, and are only entitled to one tenth of the agreed compensations.
     
    And frankly, they shouldnt worry.  It should be taken as a dorefone conclusion that it _will_ go in Wizard's favor, simply because the entire process turns on money, and Wizards has more of it.  Remember that there are people who make their living by redifining intent based on nothing more than word selection, and doing so "legally."  These professional pendants are called lawyers, and if you have enough of them, working diligently enough, you can, owing the fact that almost every word in our language has more than one meaning, making it possible to prove that the sentence "I went fishing" means both "I spent time extracting fish from a body of water" to "I spent a considerable amount of time  questioning witnesses while takinf great care to include only results that supported my desired outcome" to "I was goofing off near a boat," and it is quite likely that with enough lawyers out there fishing, that in spite of the claims of those involved in the original contract a court will rule that it says something entirely different.
     
    Why would lawyers do this?
     
    Money.  Wizarda has lots of it.
     
    Why would a judge allow this?
    Money.  They need it for their own political campaigns to get relected (in states where they are elected), or for the campaigns of the politicians that install them.  Again: Wizards has lots of it.
     
    So do not fear how this will come out; accept that it already has.  Still, the vast majority of us do not have money to buy the results we want, and the frustration has to go somewhere, and I expect that it is going into that road of outrage in the tiny, desperate hope that the noise will somehow make a difference, and with this they fight off the terror that it ultimately will do nothing.
     
    Even the piles of lies and nonsense oouring out of Wizards right now isn't what many hope it will be.  It is a series of efforts (and they will continue) to create an illusion of concern to lull the complainers back to being consumers.  Notice that there were a few days of silence- an ignoring of the problem?  There were even momenrs if "so what?!" And really, why not?  They already know they will win; it is a matter how much money they are willing to spend to get the outcome they want.
     
    I cant remeber the name of the 80's movie this is from, but a kid from a group of kids is grabbed by the wolfman, and one of his friends yells "kick him in the nards!"  The child does so, and is immediately dropped by a groaning wolfman, who then rolled around on the ground, cupping his groin, while the child wide-eyed marvels "wolfman's got _nards_!"
     
    Notice how Wizards did very little damage control until so many people stopped spending money that Wizards got scared enough to go into major damage control?
     
    Why the sudden change?  They got kicked in the nards.  As a guy who, when much younger, was very physical and athletic in pastimes,ranfing from ream sports to fighting the other drunks, I do not think it is possible for me to ever fully complete a list ofnthings that I would do to avoid being kicked in the nards.  Seriously; I cannot with one-hundred-percent certainty that "well, I would _never_ do _X_-!" If the oenalty for not doing it was getting kicked in the nards.  When tens of thousands of people are lined up for the world's most brutal game of hackey sack _ever_, I _know_ I cannot draw a line I wont cross.
     
    If corporate personhood is real-  heck, even if it _isn't_, the one universal truth is that the dollar is the corporate scrotum, and they will do anything to stop being kicked in it.  Hence the damage control and the blatant lies, unceasing since the servers were crashed by thosands of people taking their turn at a (from the outside) very brutal kickball game.
    (You didnt think any apology or claims of,accident were sincere, sis you?  You didn't fall back into thinking this company gave a single bloody booger about you, did you?  You do not matter, not to Wizards, not to Hasbro, not to- and this might hurt- not even to DOJ.  Neck, they wont even tell you who they are, because when something goes a way you don't like, they dont want to have to be bothered listening to you and your thoughts.  These are all companies, and were all formed for one purpose, and that purpose,is ont your nostalgia, your games, or your fun with friends.  They were founded for one purpose, and that is profit.  Your personal satisfaction is the monetized bait to start pumping oil from a known reservoir, period.   They are a company.  They want your scrotum dollars; they need them to keep going on and hopefully making more money.
     
    Lots od people making rhe noise are making it for this reason.  For too many, it id the first time they have figured it out, and there is rage, disapointment, and possibly for some truly devoted fanboys, actual humiliation, and the realization that there is nothing that can be done to stop it (unless you commit to kicking those nards _forever_, in a unified front (which we already know wont happen: attention spans are too short, and there are too many who find believing the lies that a company cares about you to be gar more comforting than the truth, and they will have much lower forgiveness points, and eventually the majority of them,will again be happy customers-  not today; not tomorrow, but eventually,most will be back, and will even return to evangelizing the company all over again.)
     
    Perhaps some,small portion od the uproar is disappointment in self on behalf of those who are disappointed in what they know of themselves, and are mad at Wizards for making them aware of it.
     
     
    For me (if any poor sod has waded this far into the pool), it is the extortion.  I have spent many evenings here over the years of my membership claiming to and,retelling tales of how being an anti-bully got me into trouble throughout my life, so I dont feel obkiged to do that again.  But for me- and I would like to believe for many others, but my own life experience has demonstrated that- at least among my generation, that while being against bullying as a general rule is quite common, being an active anti-bully is nowhere near as common as my idealized version of society would have it to be. 
     
    while I have no doubt that the lmoney and the lawyers that money can summon can (and will) make AP of this nice and legal (remember; when you already _have_ the money, you only have to check _one_,box, and for whatever reason, while money cannot make something ethical,or moral, it has almost _zero- trouble making things _legal_.  I suspect it is because lawyers are strongly motivated it, but never hwving been one, I cannot say.  I have seen that corporate lawyers don't seem horribly concerned about moral, and there is a rsther unique sense of what is ethical, but that is just observation; like many others, I shant live long enough to conduct meaningful research.)
     
    Anyway, I cannot help but look at "surrender your legally-created smstuff any time we want it or we wont let you make more stuff we agreed to let you make" as extortion.  I am,certain that a lawyer can explain to me why it isn't, but it is still "give us your stuff or we will force unoleasqnt consequences onto you" _is_ extortion:  I cant see it as different from "give us your a jolly Ranchers or we will hit you in the face," which I am pretty sure _is_ extortion.  All Wizards is doing is working on spending the money to make this instance of it legal.
     
     
     
    The short version:
     
    A core audience of people whose greatest escapism pleasure is getting together with their friends and liberating the oppressed and toppling unjust tyrants and rescuing the townsfolk have just realized that that someone they loved is the bad guy.
     
    It's going to be very ugly, and it saddens me that in the end, it is is going to spend it's way into perfect legality.
     
     
    Remember kids:  business are not,and never will be your friends.  You exisit to satisfy human,needs and,desires; they exist because you hwve a dollar that they do not.  Anything that seems like goodwill or outreach or friendship from a business is absolutely,_never_ anything more an attempt,to get that dollar deom you.  This is how it has always been, and will always be.  No business does,anything that isn't one-hundred-percent about getting that dollar, no matter how long-rangedbor tangential it may seem.  I am saying this is a fact, period.  I am not saying it is evil; I am saying it is thenature of things.  Even Piazo (or however you spell,it) isnt offering the ORC lisence out of the goodness of their heart: people will blindly throw goodwill at them for it, and many new dollars will,come,from,that goodwill, swelling their corporate nards to unheard of proportions.
     
    If we could as a planet of human beings, stop forgetring rhat every few minutes, life on earth could,be absolutely amazing.
     
     
  20. Haha
    Steve reacted to Cygnia in A Thread For Random RPG Musings   
  21. Like
    Steve reacted to Duke Bushido in Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D   
    LARP.
     
    Those are the crossfit gamers.
     
    Lots of these videos are no longer available
     
    So...   Google involvement, or a buttload of C and D orders flying about?
     
     
  22. Haha
    Steve reacted to Cygnia in A Thread For Random RPG Musings   
  23. Like
    Steve reacted to BNakagawa in Is there any point to Halflings?   
    Well, sure. Just create a halfling that is a spellcaster with healing and/or good buff/debuff spells and team it up with a beefy well armored martial character and go all Master/Blaster on people.
     
    I am currently playing a halfling Summoner in Pathfinder(1) who has taken feats that enable her to pass for a human child when she dresses and acts appropriately. She also has a stupidly strong humanoid outsider that she summons that has the appearance of a heavily armored man. They are doing the Little Sister/ Big Daddy schtick from Bioshock.
  24. Like
    Steve reacted to Christopher R Taylor in Is there any point to Halflings?   
    Phineous Fingers in the Dragon Magazine had evil theiving hobbits in it, mean little assassins.  That was back in like 1982
  25. Thanks
    Steve reacted to BigJackBrass in Darren Watts In Hospital   
    The final episode of Darren's podcast Explain This, Comics Guys!! has been released.
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