#ogle play

[bardistraee]

dragon's dogma ii (avraham 3/∞)

[khaliissa]

new dnd character! drow echo knight, and only character in the party with any strength whatsoever 

[danmeichael]

hey not a fetish anon here like those other weirdos. heres one for you, ahem. what is sy and sj's respective favorite game at an arcade and how often is yqy carpooling them there?

the fact that you went out of your way to assert that this isn't fetish-related immediately makes me more suspicious that this is a fetish thing

sj can obviously drive himself because he'd absolutely hate to be truly reliant on anyone, but since they're presumably on good terms he might ask yqy to chauffeur so his pet service top can feel useful.

i honestly am not sure what sj's favorite game at an arcade would be, partly because i've never been to an arcade and don't have a good idea of what all goes on, and partly because sj is just so suited to universes where you can kill things recreationally that i'm not sure playing pacman would be enough for him.

two player games have the appeal of competition so i think he would maybe enjoy playing air hockey or the fighting games with sy (or yqy, if he joins in). the rush of obliterating a rival would be the only thing at the arcade for him. i think he would be exceptionally good at crane games, because the crane machine would be scared of him.

sy is the right kind of insane to be really into maimai or ddr-style games if he has the energy/mobility for it. he's one of those people who grabs the bar.

otherwise i think he'd probably enjoy other less physically intensive timing or strategy-based games as opposed to anything based on luck. votes are out on if he'd actually be good at it or not.

i think yqy is also a ddr guy because an addiction to dancepad games is the closest thing you can get to whatever xuan su does to him. also the gapmoe of extremely tall handsome guy in a full suit doing his little dancepad shit.

[squishyliger]

still so deeply shaken by the fact that people genuinely think shattered memories is the best western silent hill game.

it’s not that I think they’re idiots or anything I just think they’re probably like… so deeply wrong & confused about a lot of things in their lives.

like… is this even your right series? david cage is right there, guys. you can go play his games right now.

[naggingatlas]

you have to forgive me for posting mostly abt characters that are men (in canon) as a bisexual woman. i am obsessed w lots of #girl characters but like 80% of them are kids and teens or if theyre grown theyre comic relief. and my brain feeds off two things: tragedy and horniness. so posting about jevil and hob it is.

[dndidiots]

Man. Fuck Hasbro.

[theonyxpath]

On this day in 2020 we took you to the Festering Fields — a region overrun by undead — as part of Vigil Watch for Scarred Lands! Vigil Watch is NOW available in a collected pdf and POD through our partners at DriveThruRPG https://drivethrurpg.com/product/348192/Vigil-Watch-Collected-Volume-5e-OGL?affiliate_id=13&src=OPPTumblr

[melancholia-ennui]

So one thing that seems to get overlooked in a lot of the discussions around the current state state of D&D, the OGL changes, etc., is why it's D&D 5e that accrued such an mass following - not Pathfinder 2e, not previous versions of D&D, not any other OGL game.

Part of it is, of course, brand recognition. Part of it is "right place, right time" for the nostalgia cycle. But imo there's more to it than that.

At least to me, 5e seems to hit a surprisingly good sweet-spot between a bunch of conflicting trends in TTRPGs.

It's crunchy enough that you can optimise and build around cool combos and synergies if you want to, but also,

It's rules-light enough that it's very easy to pick up and learn for new players and GMs.

The balancing is robust enough that it mostly feels fair and yet flexible enough that it's easy to mod with homebrew content without breaking anything (as long as you understand the basics of bounded accuracy and action economy).

It's got enough of a default setting that you can just pick up and play without needing to build a whole world of your own, but also,

It's setting-agnostic and genre-agnostic enough that you can easily world build your own settings, as long as you're happy for it to be high magic and use the D&D-style magic system.

For all the "just try another system" posts I've seen - and for all the other RPGs I've played - I'm yet to find another system that works so damn well as both an entry point to the hobby and as a fairly robust "default", in the sense that while in many cases there will be some RPG that's better suited for a particular game, it's very rarely the case that there's any kind of game you simply cannot play in 5e without a little tinkering under the hood.

I adored playing Pathfinder 2e, but the simple truth is that I played in two campaigns for the better part of 2 years and I still don't feel like I have a strong grasp on all of the rules and tags and nuances of the system, and it's so thoroughly balanced that I never felt confident doing any homebrew for it because I was worried I would accidentally break something. (I also have more fundamental issues with the play feel of the game - I dislike action economies that punish movement, and I also dislike the way that a lot of the feats and magic items seem to amount to minor "number get bigger" rather than being able to do something new - but these are more personal judgment issues and there are also many points that I feel Pathfinder 2e gets more right than 5e, and you can actually see a lot of those in the bits that WotC is shamelessly stealing for OneD&D.) I would absolutely recommend PF2e to experienced players looking to try something different, but I would never put it in front of a new player who'd never touched TTRPGs before.

On the other end, there are plenty of systems that could work as good introductions to the hobby, even ones with a lot of brand recognition - your Call of Cthulhu, your Vampire: The Masquerade, etc. - but most of these are so thoroughly embedded in their setting and/or genre that they just do not have that capacity to work as a robust default, as a system you can pick up if you're not sure which system would be best for your game and you're feeling too lazy to check (or too broke to buy new books!). They're also fairly limited to being played by people who enjoy the particular genre they are designed for, and that can also just reduce their general mass appeal.

So it's not as simple as "try another game" - while it's very true that there are players and GMs who suffer unnecessarily trying to cram their game into D&D rules when another system would work better, and it's very true that you'll get more out of the hobby in the long run if your do diversify your systems, it's equally true that 5e serves a very particular niche which no other system has managed to satisfy to the same degree.

Which brings us back to the OGL

and one thing that I think a lot of people seem to be missing in the #OpenD&D campaign: any victory we get here is only a temporary concession.

Hasbro is a big international company deeply embedded in neoliberal capitalism. It wants da money. It's primary prerogative is constant growth - a constant increase in profit. D&D - TTRPGs generally - are not good profit making machines. It is entirely possible with D&D for one person to buy three books and then run weekly sessions with a group of six people for four years without ever giving another penny to Hasbro.

From a corporate perspective, this is a Bad Thing™. From a player perspective, it is a Good Thing™.

We already knew before the OGL 1.1 announcement and leak that Hasbro were worrying about D&D being "under-monetized". The move to make D&D more "monetized" would partially mean expanding into new media forms - more books, more toys, more TV shows and movies - but it also means finding more ways to wring money out of the player base.

Given the company's clear focus on D&D Beyond, it seems likely to me that the main direction for this will be a move towards increasing amounts of subscription-only content, which everyone who wants to use the content will need to individually pay for (as they also see DMs being the main people who pay for content as a "problem" to be "solved"), likely associated with attempts to suppress alternatives - e.g. one of the OneD&D announcements seems to be an attempt to push their own VTT, which in part explains why VTTs are specifically targetted in the proposed OGL 1.1.

All that said, it seems very likely that OneD&D is being set up to be much more player-hostile than 5e was.

Through this lens, it's pretty clear that part of the point of the OGL 1.1 changes is to try and force a captive audience. The one thing which would absolutely sink WotC/Hasbro's plans for an increasingly hostile but increasingly profitable D&D space would be someone doing a Pathfinder to 5e - that is, creating an alternative system that has all of the merits of 5e, potentially with a number of improvements, but is provided without the constant profiteering and hostile environment created by WotC/Hasbro's monetization policies. The changes to the OGL are an attempt to pre-emptively prevent any such alternative.

As such,

even if we get the OGL 1.1 decision reversed in the short term, we should expect WotC/Hasbro to try and pull the exact same BS down the line.

It could be months - a revised OGL 1.1 that claims it fixes the complaints people had but doesn't. It could be a year. It could be several years. But they will try and pull this again, for one very simple reason: the popular backlash to this decision may prove that people hate it, but it also proves that for a lot of people, they don't have anywhere else to go.

If people felt like there was a viable alternative to 5e, they would've just jumped ship on mass the moment the OGL 1.1 was leaked - and sure, a lot of people did that, but a lot more people didn't. So while the player base are showing an excellent display of solidarity in face of WotC/Hasbro, they're also half-acknowledging that they do have us just a little bit cornered. We're stuck in this room together.

So what can we do?

Well, signing the #OpenDND open letter and making a fuss about the OGL 1.1 changes is a good start.

However, even if we win the fight over the OGL 1.1, this is only a temporary victory - and we need to start looking to build a serious alternative structure to take power back from WotC/Hasbro.

The smallest way to do this is to avoid using the OGL if you can - get proper legal advice on this, but from what I can tell, a lot more of the 5e system would fall under noncopyrightable material than the OGL/SRD lets on. One lawyer even went as far as to say the original OGL actually gives up rights to material you could've potentially used. If you're making third party content and it only uses noncopyrightable material from 5e, simply release it without the OGL, and then WotC will be unable to pull the rug out from under you.

Of course, the ideal would be for someone to do a Pathfinder and release an alternative to 5e - something which is largely compatible with 5e and third party 5e materiesl, which captures the main merits of 5e (as outlined above), but which is released under a Creative Commons or similar open license, something which irrevocably guarantees the rights of third party content creators far more robustly than the OGL ever did.

This would require walking a fine line - Pathfinder, after all, is an OGL system, so if you were hoping to circumvent the OGL entirely you'd have to work a lot harder to make sure your system only overlapped with 5e/OneD&D in its noncopyrightable material. And that's in addition to the actual difficulty of, y'know, building an entire new TTRPG system from the ground up (or at least from a little above the ground).

But in the long run, creating a really open alternative to D&D - one which was a genuinely community collaborative effort, and which was guaranteed for third party creators under a robust and reliable license... well, it would be an absolute game-changer. (Especially if you could get the content creators and third party authors who've really driven the 5e boom on board, though that in itself is a whole other issue!)

I am aware that Kobold Press are already talking about creating a new system which they describe as "available, open, and subscription-free" (see here), and that could be one direction to keep an eye on in this regard. That said, while I will be keeping my fungal feelers pointed at that project, I would warn that any D&D alternative developed by a corporation and not released under a sufficiently robust open license could easily run into the exact same problems a decade down the line - or worse, be bought out by WotC/Hasbro and folded into the same hellscape that D&D is becoming.

All told, the response of the wider D&D and TTRPG community to these proposed OGL 1.1 changes has been very encouraging, but I feel like our sights are still too narrow - and if we want to avoid this becoming a perpetual war of attrition between WotC/Hasbro and the fans, we really need to be willing to think bigger, and consider more drastic measures to guarantee the future of our favourite game.

[enquiringangel]

Hey Lost Boys fandom, did you know Dirty Dancing was released in 1987?

:-)

Not saying Paul and Marko would recreate that last dance scene for shits and giggles while high or anything…but they would.

[sixworldmeme]

WoTC is a megacorp. Never forget. Burn them down chummers.

[faldarith]

The lawyers and the bean counters said to change the license because you should never fund the competition. So then they spent months trickling out the changes and tracking the conversation.

And now they’ve risked alienating three generations of tabletop gamers while simultaneously losing their most popular content creators.

If you play a non-wotc ttrpg, get busy talking to your dnd-only friends about it.

[games-franco]

Abducted - solo/co-op story telling TTRPG

👽🛸

Since the start of the year, I’ve been developing a simple story telling TTRPG about a human being abruptly abducted by extraterrestials.

The game mechanism revolves around drawing cards from a standard deck of playing cards and resorting to tables with prompts depending on what you pulled.

Play throughs could have you facing off against hostile or inquisitive extraterrestials, discovering flora or fauna that’s stored on their ship, and even coming across weapons or alien artifacts on board.

Whether you wish to cooperate with the aliens or plot an escape is completely up to you.

I’ve included rules for co-op play that encourages 1 player acting as the human, and 1 player acting as the extraterrestials.

I’ve commissioned a pixel artist to render the game cover, and I couldn’t be more please with their results 👾

(WIP pics below)

I can’t wait to share with you all the final product :)

I’m planning to upload it to itch.io for free, so stay tuned!

[bugpoasting]

johnmike is soooooo funny you dont get it it really is comedy

[traegorn]

Reminder! Trae Makes a Game!

(Uh here's a link to actual info on the system)

[utilitycaster]

This has been bouncing around in my head since the combination of listening to the NADDPod Behind the Screens episode and reading the further OGL 1.2 planned updates per the survey results, particularly around VTTs. Anyway, you know how the Mercer Effect isn't real on any broad scale, but those who claim it is do appear to feel bound by it? I feel like there's something of a similar backlash against D&D actual plays in general and how they portray D&D or TTRPGs, but also, the people who are hating on actual plays are desperate for their home games to be them. The way the three-action economy almost forces "cinematic" creativity? People arguing that their virtual table-top must have the capacity to animate spells? There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but it feels like a drive to move these games from out of theater of the mind...and in doing so, into something narrower and more commercial.

[ultrakeencollectionbreadfan]

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard about the leaked draft of Dungeons & Dragons' new OGL 1.1. It seems some people never seem to learn from their mistakes, but I digress. If this ultimately goes through, it could certainly mean some changes for some Actual Play systems. Critical Role is probably going to be okay, since they have a deal with Wizards of the Coast. It's Dimension 20 I'm really worried about. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can certainly say that Brennan Lee Mulligan and his crew should've invested in other systems besides the D&D system for their RPs. So, let me ask you this:

Which systems could the D20 crew have used besides D&D for each of their seasons?