D&D General Kobold Press Going Down a Dark Road

[Bolares]

"Don't tell me why something else sucks. Tell me why your game is good."

PREACH!

 

[Bolares]

I've said this before, but maybe it was lost in the conversation....
I don't think they are saying there will never be a printed D&D book. They are saying there will never be a 5e book. And that's obvious and expected. What I take ofense to is (beyond focusing on talking about other companies instead of saying why their product is great) them implying that they will keep 5e alive. How? KP will not publish the 5e PHB, MM and DMG. They can't do that. So those books are still going away, and KP can't do anything about that.
SO they are saying that black flag will be more 5e than OD&D, wich is a blind guess at best, and looking at both playtests... they are REALLY similar...

 

[Parmandur]

I haven't read any logical or reasonable arguments "excoriating" the statement.

Just a lot of whinging and equivocating, which isn't at all the same thing. The fact is, WotC, are, realistically, stopping publishing 5E books in 2024. Pretending that they won't is shenanigans at best, and I don't think even WotC have suggested otherwise. Why would they? There's no benefit to them lying about this. Hell, if anything, I think KP are being unrealistically positive - they think digital version of the 5E rulebooks will still be sold - I think that's unlikely myself.

Thus calling it FUD is outright dishonest, frankly.

At worst it's fairly mild marketing.

I'm not even a KP fan, and much more likely to go with 1D&D than KP's take (indeed I use digital books only for D&D), but the absolute posturing and seemingly-pretend offense people are taking to a very straightforward statement here is 100% internet at its finest.

For me, the off-putting part isn't asserting thst the 2014 books will go out-of-print (because, obviously), it's the assertion that OneD&D will probably not really be Backwards Compatible because of all the changes, unlike Black Flag...followed by releasing playtest documents that make most of the same changes as OneD&D plus some even bigger ones. Bad taste in the mouth, honestly they could leave out any direct discussion of OneD&D and be doing better IMO.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I think the problem is that people tend to see it as:

WotC vs 3PPs

Lumping them all together. Rather than separating out different 3PPs who have very different standards for balance, and noting that WotC themselves have been all over the road on balance. By lumping them together, absolute car-crash stuff gets assigned to "all 3PPs", rather the small number of companies it should be assigned to. And "pretty bad" stuff like, say, virtually everything Critical Role-related is also assigned to all 3PPs, even though half of it is published by WotC!

WotC definitely, on average, do a better job than 3PPs, on average, but that's not a reasonable position, because why are you averaging all 3PPs, rather than looking at those relevant to you?

No.

Because you're not dealing with 200-300 more, are you? That's nonsense.

You're dealing only with what you actually choose to add. So you're illustrating the lie here - people pretending like 3PPs are this huge extra balance burden. They're not. You - as a DM - do not have balance/monitor "all 3PPs". You only have to look at the ones you're interested in and actually add to your campaign.

That's a much smaller number.

Wotc makes more balanced stuff than any of the major 3pps, on average, and is far from all over the road in terms of balance.

Even CR at worst makes somewhat less powerful than average stuff that is still within the power bandwidth of the phb.

Wotc’s “duds” “zomg so brokenz” are still within a pretty clean and narrow range of power.

I’ve had to modify more individual rule bits from Kobold Press than I have from wotc.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

PREACH!

Seriously, that's all people should want!

I want people to tell me why their game is great, not why some other game is bad. TBH, I understand the precarious position that KP is in- after all, they are going full steam ahead on a 5e variant, the major selling point of which is ... it's not going to be very different from 5e.

...which might have seemed like a great idea, especially during the OGL uncertainty, but now we are in a different market. And as we have seen from the playtests, OneD&D is also not very different (aka, backwards-compatible) with 5e. And there are already a lot of "close enough" 5e games either currently being sold, or going to hit the market. And given the CC, the barrier to entry is very low.

Anyway, I hope that KP pivots and goes to explaining why people should want to play their game because it's the best game.

 

[Bolares]

For me, the off-putting part isn't asserting thst the 2014 books will go out-of-print (because, obviously), it's the assertion that OneD&D will probably not really be Backwards Compatible because of all the changes, unlike Black Flag...followed by releasing playtest documents that make most of the same changes as OneD&D plus some even bigger ones. Bad taste in the mouth, honestly they could leave out any direct discussion of OneD&D and be doing better IMO.

Maybe people are thinking we are calling KP dishonest, when we are really calling their argument dishonest. There is a difference.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I've said this before, but maybe it was lost in the conversation....
I don't think they are saying there will never be a printed D&D book. They are saying there will never be a 5e book. And that's obvious and expected. What I take ofense to is (beyond focusing on talking about other companies instead of saying why their product is great) them implying that they will keep 5e alive. How? KP will not publish the 5e PHB, MM and DMG. They can't do that. So those books are still going away, and KP can't do anything about that.
SO they are saying that black flag will be more 5e than OD&D, wich is a blind guess at best, and looking at both playtests... they are REALLY similar...

Yeah if we accept the premise that the 2024 phb won’t be 5e (it will be), then Black Flag sure as hell isn’t either.

 

[Bolares]

Wotc makes more balanced stuff than any of the major 3pps, on average, and is far from all over the road in terms of balance.

Even CR at worst makes somewhat less powerful than average stuff that is still within the power bandwidth of the phb.

Wotc’s “duds” “zomg so brokenz” are still within a pretty clean and narrow range of power.

I’ve had to modify more individual rule bits from Kobold Press than I have from wotc.

My problem with 3pp is that in my groups they tend to "open the floodgates". If I allow one 3pp product, all the g'dam players will start bothering me to use some broken stuff they saw

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I haven't read any logical or reasonable arguments "excoriating" the statement.

Just a lot of whinging and equivocating, which isn't at all the same thing. The fact is, WotC, are, realistically, stopping publishing 5E books in 2024. Pretending that they won't is shenanigans at best, and I don't think even WotC have suggested otherwise. Why would they? There's no benefit to them lying about this. Hell, if anything, I think KP are being unrealistically positive - they think digital version of the 5E rulebooks will still be sold - I think that's unlikely myself.

Thus calling it FUD is outright dishonest, frankly.

At worst it's fairly mild marketing.

I'm not even a KP fan, and much more likely to go with 1D&D than KP's take (indeed I use digital books only for D&D), but the absolute posturing and seemingly-pretend offense people are taking to a very straightforward statement here is 100% internet at its finest.

There’s nothing dishonest or “pretend” about it, the KP faq is full of crap, and uses the “insult the competition to look good” method alongside the “this is scary but we have the remedy!” Method. It’s bad.

 

[Bolares]

Seriously, that's all people should want!

I want people to tell me why their game is great, not why some other game is bad. TBH, I understand the precarious position that KP is in- after all, they are going full steam ahead on a 5e variant, the major selling point of which is ... it's not going to be very different from 5e.

...which might have seemed like a great idea, especially during the OGL uncertainty, but now we are in a different market. And as we have seen from the playtests, OneD&D is also not very different (aka, backwards-compatible) with 5e. And there are already a lot of "close enough" 5e games either currently being sold, or going to hit the market. And given the CC, the barrier to entry is very low.

Anyway, I hope that KP pivots and goes to explaining why people should want to play their game because it's the best game.

I really think they should pivot to "KPs interpretation and evolution of 5e" because that at least sounds appealing. They can't stay on the same discourse from the OGL debacle, the industry changed after that, so they should change their argument too.