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If we're in the realm of absurd specificity, the answer is indeed, "yes." I am not required to restate examples over and over again. Once should be sufficient. Okay. No, you do *not* know this. You *think* you know this because it was told to you over and over again as part of a...

Good points about the Realms. As I mentioned in another thread, event-driven Things That Change Everything every year, and arcs that were tightly bound to a few real protagonists was not just a 90s RPG thing, but a 90s nerd property thing. Remember Marvel's Heroes Reborn? That stuff. (Marvel...

Listen, I'm just some schmuck with about 10 years of writing and content development experience who has been hired outside of the RPG field specifically because story worlds and settings are believed to be critical to intellectual property development. You read some press releases and a...

The choice to design a new edition is not a game design directive. It's a business management directive. So the time between editions has nothing to do with "design lessons learned" or anything else. 5th edition's primary challenge will be to make its game systems engaging from a narrative and...

They've failed to build a long term D&D miniatures business for a decade. This is due to multiple dumb ideas, and following instead of leading trends. They blew it. This is abandonment. Expect content to drop to blog-length items that are either cut from books or wrung out of house creators in...

The idea of individual characters as player-controlled actors in a fictional world is firmly in the set of ideas Wells lays out in Floor Games. It's all a bit obscure because none of the actors involved in framing the history of RPGs have any social or economic motive to call back the work of...

Uh, traditional boardgames get new editions all the lovin' time, both to get at a marketing niche (see the many gimmick versions of Monopoly) and yes, even to change the rules. In fact, Scrabble just had a big controversy over a rules change that would have allowed proper nouns. The reaction was...

The basic concept of RPGs that was later harnessed for D&D was invented by HG Wells in 1911, and is described in Floor Games. This used to be fairly well known.

How can a game have high first month sales through the book trade and make no money? Mod Edit: Folks, here's a hint. Don't declare that knowing a fact is a prerequisite to engaging in a conversation, and then continue to tease the conversation with said fact, after warnings and several...

No, I'm thinking of a specific point of fact that anybody who knows what they are talking about knows, and is why book trade sales are not immediately counted as indisputable examples of a trend. It is the reason why the actual creators of the DFRPG are not getting angry at Gareth the way you...

You immediately knowing what this is would have been a basic qualification to demonstrate that you are informed enough to have a conversation about this. So, no.

The top 5 are 2 versions of D&D and 3 licensed IP games. That represents basic creative failure. No, it's the other way around. Dogma is very much an amateur thing. Ask yourself who produces the screeds. Basically, community movements ask permission and fulfill expectations. That's a creative...

There is a reason why book trade sales aren't counted.

My reply is at: The Zombie RPG Industry | Mob | United | Malcolm | Sheppard Basically, "death" is harped on to shift goalposts when we're talking about "descent into an irrelevant degree of attenuation" and anyone with common sense knows it, and industry activity is in no way responsible for...

I was wading into an old thread and noticed lots of unrelated anchor text links ("diabetes" "Brown rice recipes" -- there were 50 or so): definite signs of a site hack. I saw it on Google's cache of...

Lighten up kids. Let me find my comments from Metafilter, clean them up, expand them and repost them here: (Warning: Mature subject matter that directly refers to the story. I'm not bringing anything in here that isn't there.) I have mixed feelings. Certainly Lypsite acknowledges social class...

I say "OSR." You lose. No, that was because of the intersection of Moore's Law and software development. This is restating the problem as a solution, so it merits no consideration. The term "financial research" is meaningless. Do you mean accounting? Market research? Are you talking about...

I think it's hilarious that you're saying this on a site that could not exist if it was actually too dangerous to talk about your games and house rules and such. The same is true for many fora as well as places like Obsidian Portal. The field left between fair use and the uncopyrightable nature...

The above demonstrates how the OGL has seriously damaged fair use in our community. I actually hope people avoid open licenses in favour of fair use whenever they can, lest any legal test that observes community standards decide that since you weren't using your rights, you never deserved them.

. . . or abandon it. We stand at the end point of a creative emphasis at Wizards that has led to . . . well, look around you. 4e is not some simple contrast with 3e. It's a logical extension of its design principles and the culture behind them, and that culture does not do narratives and tropes...