Scott Ruggels

It’s a Wonderful Life gets really dark.

We had surprise games like that back on the day, before everyone moved away after school. Good times.

May have been a Confederate Coastal Installation, and the HBCU acquired the land 20 years later to use the drained areas and existing buildings as a start. Currently has a very eclectic mix of architecture, but all in red brick, and white trim. One of the few Universities with its own port. Curriculum centers on Marine Biology, Environmental Law, Architecture, Marine Law and commerce. Ceased being a pure black university after a vote in 1970. Surrounding town expanded in the 1920s. And again after the war. During the war, the port facilities were taken over by The Coast Guard, for submarine chasing. University is governed by a council of 6 deans. (My mother’s parents lived along side the Charles River Estuary, where I was taught how to sail and handle small boats, and be driven to museums all over Virginia, so I am familiar if not fond of the area.)

All in all, I think that D&D wil survive but this will delay ONE D&D probably about a year or so, as the personnel will be shuffled around. D&D has been an artistically pretty publication. THe VTT They were working on will be mostly the reason for the delay, But there would be a lot of opportunities for rules rewrites. D&D's Market share my shrinke a bit, especially in comparison to Paizo's work, but D&D will still be dominant in the hobby, especialy if the rules revisions are lightly handled. On the other hand, Yellow Flash has an alternate heory:

A relevant Reddit posting: https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/18ibj22/hasbros_struggle_with_monetization_and_the/ Hasbro's Struggle with Monetization and the Struggle for Stable Income in the RPG Industry Discussion We've been seeing reports coming out from Hasbro of their mass layoffs, but buried in all the financial data is the fact that Wizards of the Coast itself is seeing its revenue go up, but the revenue increases from Magic the Gathering (20%) are larger than the revenue increase from Wizards of the Coast as a whole (3%), suggesting that Dungeons and Dragons is, yet again, in a cycle of losing money. Large layoffs have already happened and are occurring again. It's long been a fact of life in the TTRPG industry that it is hard to make money as an independent TTRPG creator, but spoken less often is the fact that it is hard to make money in this industry period. The reason why Dungeons and Dragons belongs to WotC (and by extension, Hasbro) is because of their financial problems in the 1990s, and we seem to be seeing yet another cycle of financial problems today. One obvious problem is that there is a poor model for recurring income in the industry - you sell your book or core books to people (a player's handbook for playing the game as a player, a gamemaster's guide for running the game as a GM, and maybe a bestiary or something similar to provide monsters to fight) and then... well, what else can you sell? Even amongst those core three, only the player's handbook is needed by most players, meaning that you're already looking at the situation where only maybe 1 in 4 people is buying 2/3rds of your "Core books". Adding additional content is hit and miss, as not everyone is going to be interested in buying additional "splatbooks" - sure, a book expanding on magic casters is cool if you like playing casters, but if you are more of a martial leaning character, what are you getting? If you're playing a futuristic sci-fi game, maybe you have a book expanding on spaceships and space battles and whatnot - but how many people in a typical group needs that? One, probably (again, the GM most likely). Selling adventures? Again, you're selling to GMs. Selling books about new races? Not everyone feels the need to even have those, and even if they want it, again, you can generally get away with one person in the group buying the book. And this is ignoring the fact that piracy is a common thing in the TTRPG fanbase, with people downloading books from the Internet rather than actually buying them, further dampening sales. The result is that, after your initial set of sales, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain your game, and selling to an ever larger audience is not really a plausible business model - sure, you can expand your audience (D&D has!) but there's a limit on how many people actually want to play these kinds of games. So what is the solution for having some sort of stable income in this industry? We've seen WotC try the subscription model in the past - Dungeons and Dragon 4th edition did the whole D&D insider thing where DUngeon and Dragon magazine were rolled in with a bunch of virtual tabletop tools - and it worked well enough (they had hundreds of thousands of subscribers) but it also required an insane amount of content (almost a book's worth of adventures + articles every month) and it also caused 4E to become progressively more bloated and complicated - playing a character out of just the core 4E PHB is way simpler than building a character is now, because there were far fewer options. And not every game even works like D&D, with many more narrative-focused games not having very complex character creation rules, further stymying the ability to sell content to people. So what's the solution to this problem? How is it that a company can set itself up to be a stable entity in the RPG ecosystem, without cycles of boom and bust? Is it simply having a small team that you can afford when times are tight, and not expanding it when times are good, so as to avoid having to fire everyone again in three years when sales are back down? Is there some way of getting people to buy into a subscription system that doesn't result in the necessary output stream corroding the game you're working on?

Ihavern't had pleasurable experiences with "Independent" TTRPGs, so I have been mostly ignoring it, and sticking with the old stuff that's in my bookshelf already. I never have been a fan of FIction Forward mechanics, or the thin slice limitations of a lot of these games, with their setting and mechanical specificity that make it suitable to only a narrow scope of play. No PBtA or BitD for me, thank you.

At what degree? A Nuclear Exchange wopuld cause a lot of problems, maybe up to extinction. But a Civil War would depopulate the large cities, but leave the countryside mostly intact. Governments would be severely weakened, much as Duke's scenario does. but travel would be hampered, Distrubution would be expensive or non existant. Local governments would be either the province of strong men, or strong ideologies, or hopefuly strong institutions/oprinciples. A lot of Mend and Make Do.

Funny but I disagree with all the points you made at the top of the quote. The fixed initiative is such a relief compared to die roll randomness. Most combat is sort of planned or at least has objectives. Champions was a Wargame of superheroes. The chaotic randomness is a product of melee or martial arts fights, when ranged combat is more planned out, or at least rules based. A lot of this chaos and randomness seems like a desire for more of a fiction forward flavor. My preference is not to mess with Champions RAW.

Arabian Knights playlist.

waits, and checks his watch.

Saw it this afternoon as well. Spectacular film. IT really captured the sorry shape Japan was in right after the war, and the tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union were in. Also this movie did more with a microscopic budget, than DIsney has been able to do all year with 300Million dollar budgets per film. But this film shows the importance of compelling characters, and a good script. The VFX were top notch. Godzilla was a scary creature, made worse by the Bikini Atoll tests.

Maybe this belongs here:?

Alex Toth may be the biggest detectable influence on my art style. Back in the day I would be lying on the carpet infront of the TV watching these with a small sketch bad, and a handful of pens and pencils. He was drawing right up to his end, and did designs for shows up until the 90's, though he slowed way down after the death of his wife, who started as the H-B Receptionist.

For those who are not old farts, this may explain what the hell we are talking about:

Agreed.

“Should”, or “Should not” it’s generally too late,now since Espionage had the same assumption. Strength is the key stat for heroes.

I have a lot of Herculoid Episodes on bootleg DVDs I picked up in the depths of the Dealers room at San Diego Comic-con. Always preferred the Adventure to the humor, because the humor never could get me to laugh. SO does the little donkey Zazoom, from THe Arabian Knights count? THe Arabian Knights were two fighters, two casters, a Rogue and a Donkey. And Yeah I am ancient as well. Watched most of these in first run.

Irs ! Exactly. A good hunk of my gaming revolves around tactical puzzles, which were a centerpiece of the team based fights in Champions. I need that map and counters/Miniatures. THeater of the mind for me is just not compelling for combat. It can be for dialogue, but not when it gets to combat. I had problems with some war game rules and as a result I got into WW2 Re-enactments. It made a lot of the tactical choices a lot clearer.