Your host Ian McRae, alias FM, explores video and sometimes tabletop gaming as an art form and celebrates the things that make us love our controllers and dice.
The main column will be posted once a week, with other content posted whenever.
I dabble in tabletop game design sometimes, too. It's an RPG heavily inspired by Armored Core.
Aeon Genesis deserves more love for all the great work they've brought us. Go visit them, won't you?
Still moving. Being surrounded by crates, I need to push them all, without pulling, to discrete positions in the room, which is still really time consuming. Regular service will resume next week, so, in the meantime, here’s an old classic from everyone’s favorite Valve employees about crates and their place in gaming history.
Even in the worst possible light, Hepler said the same thing Final Fantasy fangirls have been saying for years. I’ll leave the rest to your own judgement, but this is basically why I don’t do multiplayer.
No Column This Week
My apologies, but due to an impending move and the various things that entails, I didn’t have the time to give my subject the attention it deserves. Unfortunately, this state of affairs might last into next week as well (emphasis might), but by then, regular service will resume.
Another update for the burgeoning tabletop system, where players become mercenaries known as Mages in a future era of change and conflict. Using customized mecha known as Armored Personnel Units, they fight using a battle system where speed is life, and Initiative is a resource - the battle order is never the same as mechs duke it out for position! Skill is paramount, but luck is always a factor.
If you’re all interested in the subject matter, give it a try! Adding some inspirations/related content to the tags.
Ask Box is Open
The Ask Box is available for use to comment on previous entries, ask me questions about games or gaming, or to suggest future entries in any series. If I find there’s enough demand and there won’t be abuse, I might open 4′33″ up to submissions, as well!
Category Links Added
For ease of navigation, I’ve added several new links to the sidebar for each of the main tags of this site.
I’m pretty sure that everyone, no matter what side of the edition war they’re on, knows this is an idea doomed to failure…except the Coastal Wizards, for some reason.
Exciting news for anyone who isn’t sick of edition wars! (I like 4e best, myself, but I play 3.5/Pathfinder as well.) This strikes me as kind of a bad idea, but we’ll see how the game turns out.
Someone named Rolibar made an insightful comment, which I’ll reproduce here.
Dungeons and Dragons is a product that is a real head scratcher for Hasbro.
Dungeons and Dragons just doesn’t fit the Hasbro sales model, a product that uses pencil paper and imagination was always a tough model for a business model. The fact that the brand name is so widely recognized in popular culture only makes the product more frustrating for Hasbro. The logic that “Rome wasn’t built in a day” just didn’t fit the Hasbro toy model of mass printed fire and forget games and toys, and the Holy Grail status of Dungeons and Dragons inside WOTC just didn’t neatly fit a balance sheet, and as Pokemon sales trailed off they started looking at the whole WOTC product portfolio.
As a practical example I can remember in 2001 when the Psionic Handbooks came out and all 50,0000 copies of the first printing sold out at the distribution level. Anthony Valtera who was a Business Manager for the D&D brand was thrilled, only to have a Hasbro executive ask why in the world we even made a product that only had a run of 50,000 copies. Now this was early in the Hasbro/WOTC merger, but it gave an idea of the disconnect on the product line. Hasbro couldn’t get a handle on how such a big name brand could generate such little revenue and demand such a large development team.
I can’t even begin to describe the level of tension between WOTC and Hasbro in late 2000 and early 2001 when Hasbro sold the electonic rights to D&D (Peter Adkinson resigned) which was seen as undermining WOTC’s ability to revive the brand. Of course there was Peter at Gen Con running demos at Gen Con 2001 for Dungeons and Dragons out of sheer love of the game. That sort of put it all in persepective, those grew up with D&D would love it forever. I guess the point is that while most of gamers might not like the churning of editions, it’s just business.
It’s been nearly a decade since I was at WOTC, and I had nothing to do with the gaming development, however I can say that the development team always asked first, is this good for our players, not will this increase sales. It’s a tough act to balance passion and profits!
