For all you 2d20 fans out there: the Dishonored RPG

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Designers and Dragons is not a reliable source, Applecine just repeats what others claim often without often identifying the source and without cross-checking or any independent research to confirm the claim. It is riddled with factual errors.

At best it is an unresearched verbal history from select sources. At worst it regurgitates a bunch of internet rumours reinforced with bias and ax-grinding as if they were facts because Applecine was credulous enough to put it into print.

And similarly Dancey has already proven to be an unreliable source. James Ward who actually worked at TSR in the business end has refuted a number of Dancey's claims and the research of Peterson, Dewalt and Riggs have already located facts and figures that punch holes in Dancey's narrative.

Dancey's tone is that of the overconfident technocrat doing a post-mortem based on incomplete information papered over with broad assumptions and statements. It reminds me of the glib bullshit you see from CEOs in a TED Talk.
Dancey has effectively almost killed two RPG lines. He's the one who pushed the OGL, and that hurt Wizards of the Coast. We, the customer, made out like bandits, but without the OGL, D&D 4e would not have died as fast as it did.

He also called White Wolf's RPG 'Legacy products' and that put the nail in the coffin of their market that got them effectively sold them to Onyx Publishing.

Then he runs to another business.
 
Yeah as much as the OGL has worked out for fandom it was a pretty clear disaster as a business decision. Especially in the shorterm.

However Dancey may be as a person, whenever I read or listen to him I get a used-car-salesman vibe with the smug bravado and know-it-allness that impresses certain kinds of bosses, we can recognize the type in any business or office environment.
 
Well, ultimately it was indeed assumptions that caused them to fail: they assumed things would sell but they didn't!

My understanding is it was something of a 'flywheel' effect. They sell a campaign world and that starts a conceptual flywheel of customer interest turning. In theory the subsequent products keep the wheel turning. Each campaign world is, in effect, it's own flywheel and needs to be kept spinning separately with content.

On the surface level, adding new campaign worlds is good because there is more product for people to buy and different product for people who like a different emphasis from their campaign world.

The problem starts to come from two things. One is that you need more effort to spin more wheels, so your costs go up. And given the feedback-lag and upfront costs of printing at the time you can end up creating a lot of stuff that doesn't sell. Then the wheels start to go out of control and you keep spinning them faster (or at least, this is what TSR did) and that makes the problem worse.


True, but I think there are several factors at play here, again.
  • To use the new stuff, you need the previous books in the line, so you have a diminishing audience for each product
  • Due to the way book sales worked and how their business was structured they needed to keep making product on a regular basis to keep the money coming in to just continue operating
  • The end product of this is that you create more and more less-good product. Existing customers of the line stop buying the new stuff whilst new customers either look at all the books and decide the buy-in is too high* or they can't get the early books anymore because they are out of print and it's too expensive for TSR to keep them in print due to the economies of scale for that time period.
* This is the sort of thing that causes people to re-boot their lines from time to time, which is it's own double-edged sword.

It makes sense to me because they had to create that product (resource costs, including the opportunity cost of not creating a different product that would sell better), then print it (capital costs) and then that stuff was sent to the distributors on Sale or Return meaning that the risk sat with TSR. When the product didn't sell they were torpedo'ed.

Their scattergun approach of too many campaign worlds and not really knowing what was actually selling meant they invested money in creating product they then had trouble selling and the vicious circle repeats. In effect they acted like a gambler deep in debt trying to win big on the next spin of the wheel but just keeping digging.

Anyhow, the main thing is that the modern tools such as Kickstarter and electronic publishing mean that a lot of this stuff no longer applies to the same degree.
Yeah but what you’re describing isn’t what you’re defending.

”Cannibalizing each other” means you won’t diversify your audience ever, so you may as well give them one product. It’s idiocy.

What you’re describing is simply putting out too much product...period.
 
Yeah but without any facts to back it up it is just pure speculation, with a source who has proven to be pretty unreliable.
 
There are two conversation threads now:
  1. Whether cannibalisation makes sense as a concept
  2. Whether or not that is what did for them.
It is item 1 I was discussing with CRKrueger CRKrueger. I will happily concede I have no personal insight into item 2.
 
I'm not a fan of the 2d20 system. Which is a bit weird, because i like Genesys the system of FFG Star Wars.
Genesys has a lot in common with 2d20. But after having played in a Force & Destiny campaign, I found I really liked it.
Granted with Genesys it was really just an initial irrational dislike of the weird new dice.

Anyway as a superfan of the videogames. I'm going to buy this no matter what. So thanks for letting me know it was out.
 
There are two conversation threads now:
  1. Whether cannibalisation makes sense as a concept
  2. Whether or not that is what did for them.
It is item 1 I was discussing with CRKrueger CRKrueger. I will happily concede I have no personal insight into item 2.

Worth noting that Jeff Grubb has said that the Al-Qadim lines sold quite well and that he designed the line to have a beginning and end (I think over 4 years) to maintain quality control and avoid an endless treadmill of products and reboots.

Also Jim Ward has said that despite Dancey's claim TSR did regular audience surveys and that the only business decision he regrets is not more vigoroursly pursuing a younger audience for D&D. Ward was the longtime liaison between the creatives and the suits and worked in management at TSR, so he is one of the few with actual knowledge of the business end of TSR (although I believe Dewalt interviewed Linda Williams too) he has been interviewed by Riggs for his upcoming book as well.
 
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There are two conversation threads now:
  1. Whether cannibalisation makes sense as a concept
  2. Whether or not that is what did for them.
It is item 1 I was discussing with CRKrueger CRKrueger. I will happily concede I have no personal insight into item 2.
There’s some people who just don’t like Greyhawk.
There’s some people who just don’t like The Forgotten Realms.
There’s some people who just don’t like Planescape.
There’s some people who just don’t like Ravenloft.
There’s some people who just don’t like Spelljammer.
There’s some people who just don’t like Dark Sun.
There’s some people who just don’t like Birthright.

By picking only ONE of those to run with, there is NO guarantee the people who don’t like that setting will “fall in line” just because that’s all there is.

Group A is all the people who will possibly buy D&D. The people for whom any particular setting will be the one to get them to pull the trigger will always be smaller than A.

Basically Dancey’s argument is curbstomped to death by the OSR. Dozens of largely compatible systems, dozens of different settings and it’s still growing.

Now did TSR print way too many copies of everything without doing marketing research to determine the size of their market? Fuck yes, and that has way more to do with it than “Giving people so many settings means no one bought any of them.”
 
Basically Dancey’s argument is curbstomped to death by the OSR. Dozens of largely compatible systems, dozens of different settings and it’s still growing.
I don’t think it’s useful to compare TSR with it’s physical overheads and the industry methods of the day to the new realities of hobby-printing, desktop publishing and POD / PDF.

Like I already said, the issues which may or may not have been the downfall of TSR are now largely superseded by new ways of financing, creating, publishing, marketing etc. We live in a golden age for small-press publishing. :grin:
 
I'm not a fan of the 2d20 system. Which is a bit weird, because i like Genesys the system of FFG Star Wars.
Genesys has a lot in common with 2d20. But after having played in a Force & Destiny campaign, I found I really liked it.
Granted with Genesys it was really just an initial irrational dislike of the weird new dice.

Anyway as a superfan of the videogames. I'm going to buy this no matter what. So thanks for letting me know it was out.

This mirrors my sentiments with one big difference: I've never played a 2d20 game. And they own some licenses that call to me like a pack of half-naked Siryns forming the ultimate Mega Band. John Carter? Star Trek? Conan? Oh my!...

But so many people have bombed on the system I've resisted. But in fairness... I should give it a look. I have no love for Dishonored as a franchise (didn't play it) But it's an interesting setting, it reminds me that I should give 2d20 an official audit.
 
This mirrors my sentiments with one big difference: I've never played a 2d20 game. And they own some licenses that call to me like a pack of half-naked Siryns forming the ultimate Mega Band. John Carter? Star Trek? Conan? Oh my!...

But so many people have bombed on the system I've resisted. But in fairness... I should give it a look. I have no love for Dishonored as a franchise (didn't play it) But it's an interesting setting, it reminds me that I should give 2d20 an official audit.
The reason I dislike it, is because I tried it with the Conan quickstart. I just don't think it fits Conan. But I've not played any other version of the game system. I have also pointed out my dislikes as it felt a lot like Modern FATE which I am also not a fan of. But these are MY reasons. YOU should be the one to determine if it's for you or not.
 
This mirrors my sentiments with one big difference: I've never played a 2d20 game. And they own some licenses that call to me like a pack of half-naked Siryns forming the ultimate Mega Band. John Carter? Star Trek? Conan? Oh my!...

But so many people have bombed on the system I've resisted. But in fairness... I should give it a look. I have no love for Dishonored as a franchise (didn't play it) But it's an interesting setting, it reminds me that I should give 2d20 an official audit.
Good luck. The 2d20 helped me to discover that my players really don't like having a common pool of meta-resources:grin:!
 
The reason I dislike it, is because I tried it with the Conan quickstart. I just don't think it fits Conan. But I've not played any other version of the game system. I have also pointed out my dislikes as it felt a lot like Modern FATE which I am also not a fan of. But these are MY reasons. YOU should be the one to determine if it's for you or not.
Absolutely agree. I'm going to rectify that.

They question is *which* one? And quando? (sorry... been listening to Englebert). I'm thinking Star Trek... Ignore me, I don't want to make this about 2d20 (unless everyone else wants to), if everyone wants to talk about how the system applies strictly to Dishonored.
 
This mirrors my sentiments with one big difference: I've never played a 2d20 game. And they own some licenses that call to me like a pack of half-naked Siryns forming the ultimate Mega Band. John Carter? Star Trek? Conan? Oh my!...

But so many people have bombed on the system I've resisted. But in fairness... I should give it a look. I have no love for Dishonored as a franchise (didn't play it) But it's an interesting setting, it reminds me that I should give 2d20 an official audit.
Absolutely agree. I'm going to rectify that.

They question is *which* one? And quando? (sorry... been listening to Englebert). I'm thinking Star Trek... Ignore me, I don't want to make this about 2d20 (unless everyone else wants to), if everyone wants to talk about how the system applies strictly to Dishonored.
One thing I will say for Star Trek Adventures is that it is good for introducing to RPGs people who have played board games but have never tried an RPG. The tokens and shared resource pools make it a little bit of a midway point between a cooperative board game and an RPG and I found that made it easier for new players to grok the whole RPG thing since it still has some resemblance to a board game. Since I don't give a :crap: whether everyone is "100% immersed," this is fine by me as long as we're all having fun with it.

One thing I will say against Star Trek Adventures is that, at least for me, finding the rules I wanted was not easy even with the table of contents and index. The arrangement of chapters is counterintuitive to me. Also I hate white text on black backgrounds.
 
One thing I will say for Star Trek Adventures is that it is good for introducing to RPGs people who have played board games but have never tried an RPG. The tokens and shared resource pools make it a little bit of a midway point between a cooperative board game and an RPG and I found that made it easier for new players to grok the whole RPG thing since it still has some resemblance to a board game. Since I don't give a :crap: whether everyone is "100% immersed," this is fine by me as long as we're all having fun with it.

One thing I will say against Star Trek Adventures is that, at least for me, finding the rules I wanted was not easy even with the table of contents and index. The arrangement of chapters is counterintuitive to me. Also I hate white text on black backgrounds.
Dumarest Dumarest I know you have FASA Trek, how does the 2d20 version handle Starship combat by comparison?
 
Good luck. The 2d20 helped me to discover that my players really don't like having a common pool of meta-resources

Momentum becomes a personal pool with John Carter, which is nice.

Personally, I think 2D20 is perfectly fine. People with deep seeded hatreds of meta points are never going to be able to make piece with it, but otherwise I can't really find any fault with the games. I actually bought the entire John Carter and Conan lines, and found that between the two I vastly prefer John Carter as a lighter, quicker playing game. That doesn't mean I dislike Conan. I frankly do like it. However, by the time you get to Conan's level of complexity, I figured you'd be entirely right in questioning what its merits are compared to any number of other games you can run Conan with.

I haven't picked up Dishonored yet, but I gather from stuff I've seen on the webs that it's closer to the John Carter 2D20 build than some of the heavier, more involved iterations. It's on my list of games to pick up once the economy returns to some semblance of sanity.
 
LOL

It's no skin off my back that my friends in the Pub don't generally care for it. I'm not saying it's my personal favorite system or anything, just that I don't really have a problem with it and, in the case of John Carter in particular, I'm perfectly happy to run it.
 
I've only read the quick starts and the system seems fine to me on the page, just not a good fit for some of the settings and a bit clunky. John Carter being the lightest struck me as the strongest, I'd be interested in giving it a go sometime.
 
Dumarest Dumarest I know you have FASA Trek, how does the 2d20 version handle Starship combat by comparison?
I'll start by saying I've run/played probably somewhere between 50 and 100 hours of FASA Star Trek, mainly 2nd edition, and only a couple of Star Trek Adventures to date, so I can't swear I know all the ins and outs of the latter yet.

With FASA there are at least 3 different options for starship combat:

(1) The very simple, streamlined, and fun 1st edition rules that were somewhat abstract but still allowed for some tactical decisions. It also allowed every PC to contribute something. This is probably my favorite for Star Trek RPGs. It even feels like the show because damage is rated in %, so you'll have (for instance) Mr. Chekhov announce, "Keptin, shields are at 64% !" and it not only has in-game meaning but also sounds like something they would say on the bridge of the Enterprise.

(2) Starship Tactical Combat Simulator, which was originally called Star Trek III Starship Tactical Combat Simulator, which is the version I have. I believe the rules are the same verbatim. This is essentially a tactical board game you can play on its own or whip out for a grittier starship combat experience in the midst of your roleplaying. I've done both, though I'm far less inclined to do the latter nowadays. It's awesome: lots of different ship classes for the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, Gorn, and Orions, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. It also has basic and advanced rules so you could go either way depending on how detailed you wanted to be. The only real downside was that it ironically (given Spock's remarks about Khan in The Wrath of Khan) only encompasses 2 dimensions. However, an easy workaround we found was just to stack your starship counter on top of a die to represent how many hexes up/down you were in relation to another.

(3) 2nd edition's unfortunate deletion of the original starship combat rules and suggestions to use the board game, use a supplement that was never produced (Enemy Contact: Bridge Alert*), or to "use your imagination" with a few suggestions of what each PC might do.

Starship combat in Star Trek Adventures is even more abstract than the original FASA rules, I think. Definitely more than the board game. For instance, there are no real distances/ranges, just "zones" that you more or less eyeball. Ranges are based on how many zones away another vessel is. This works in 3 dimensions but is hard to represent at the table unless you do something like I did, which is stack dice as mentioned above.

Starship come in different "scales," from 1 ( example: the Galileo shuttlecraft from the original show) to 7 (a Borg sphere--which I know zilch about at the moment). To give a better idea of the relative sizes, the original Enterprise and Klingon D-7 battlecruiser are scale 4, the Excelsior from Star Trek III is scale 5, and the Picard-era Enterprise is scale 6. Starships don't really have any particular cool features to differentiate them as in FASA: the scale is always how resistant to damage a ship is and how much damage it can take, as well as how much damage they can do.

The only way to make 2 ships of the same scale feel any different is by giving them different "Talents" which for me feels a weird way to describe a vessel. I wish they had used another term rather than trying to make starships "sort of PCs." What it also means is that while you and I both have Constitution -class starships with the same baseline, our ships oddly have different "Talents" depending on what our ship's "Mission Profile" is: my ship might have "Improved Hull Integrity" while yours might have "Extensive Shuttlebays" and Jimmy's ship might have "Electronic Warfare Systems." For me it feels off to have ships presumably built to the same specs have different "Talents" as if they are unique individuals.

There are also too few starship classes provided in the main book for my taste: if you want to play in the original show era, all you've got is the Constitution class for the Feds, the original Bird of Prey for the Romulans, and the D-7 for the Klingons. The choices are almost as limited for The Next Generation era. You can't even run Enterprise vs. Reliant without googling for fan-made material. I presume they want to sell expansion books at some point? But coming from FASA, I miss my Nelson scouts, Larson destroyers, and Reliant cruisers, to say nothing of the other devastating powers. (I'm trying to work up either a Hermes or Nelson scout for a possible game set aboard a less prestigious ship.)

Combat is mainly luck of the dice as gas as I can tell. You combine your PC's applicable Attribute + Discipline (Control + Security to fire at an enemy) and try to roll less than or equal to that number for a success on 2d20. You also get assistance from the starship itself (because it's an NPC, sort of, though I express it as the targeting computer) and its Weapons + Security on another d20. One good thing is that, just as when on PC assists another, if the PC performing the Task (as they term it) gets no successes, any success by the starship doesn't count. You need a total number of successes equal to a Difficulty Number determined by what weapon you're using (phasers are easier than photon torpedoes), whether you want to target a particular part of the enemy ship (+1 difficulty), and how many zones away they are compared to your season's optimal range. If you hit, you roll Xd6 based on the weapon you used and apply the results.

So the only real tactics are (1) choose a weapon, (2) try to get at optimal range to use it (or reverse steps 1 and 2 and choose your weapon based on your range), and (3) make sure the PC with the best scores for the job is rolling the dice. There are a few other things you can do, like have the helmsman try rolling for an Attack Pattern, but the results are based on dice rolls, not so much on "is this a clever move so thought up ?" and certainly nothing like the resource management of the FASA board game. For me, like I said before, it feels midway between a board game (more like Risk than Diplomacy if you get my meaning) and a straight-up RPG.

Did you have any questions in particular?

* The board game was doing so well they realized there was no reason to compete with themselves.

edit: fixed all the autocorrect errors, I hope

edit 2: the things I do to keep TristramEvans TristramEvans happy...!
 
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The only 2d20 game I've read and played is Conan. Just like others have already said, I don't think it fits for Conan.
Basically if I was to run a Conan game, I would just use Barbarians of Lemuria or Savage Worlds.
But it's not really fair to judge the other 2d20 gamelines, solely on Conan 2d20.

I have the pdf of Dishonored, so have been thinking about starting a Let's Read thread about it.
Really like those types of threads on here. But it will take some time for me to read it. Can only read pdfs for short periods at a time. I get headaches from reading on screens. I could wait for the print book to arrive, but that will probably take too long.
 
The only 2d20 game I've read and played is Conan. Just like others have already said, I don't think it fits for Conan.
Basically if I was to run a Conan game, I would just use Barbarians of Lemuria or Savage Worlds.
But it's not really fair to judge the other 2d20 gamelines, solely on Conan 2d20.

I have the pdf of Dishonored, so have been thinking about starting a Let's Read thread about it.
Really like those types of threads on here. But it will take some time for me to read it. Can only read pdfs for short periods at a time. I get headaches from reading on screens. I could wait for the print book to arrive, but that will probably take too long.
Just make sure to not read so long that you'd get one of those headaches, OK? We pubbers enjoy Where I Read threads. Other members suffering because of it is something we don't like, though!
...countdown to someone showing strength and maturity by telling me to speak about myself initiated:devil:!
 
That'd be fun if you get the time.

speaking of, isn't someone supposed to be "Let's Reading" GURPS: Celtic Myth?

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