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Post by Josh Hilden on Jan 15, 2014 23:56:39 GMT
Kevin does not want books written for people with a higher than 8th grade reading level ... I'm not joking.
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Anybody
Jan 16, 2014 0:13:34 GMT
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Post by damianmagecraft on Jan 16, 2014 0:13:34 GMT
Kevin does not want books written for people with a higher than 8th grade reading level ... I'm not joking. well to be fair that seems to be the trend in hobby in general... |
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Anybody
Jan 16, 2014 0:42:31 GMT
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Post by joshuagoliath on Jan 16, 2014 0:42:31 GMT
To be fair, that seems to be a lot of writers today....
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Jan 16, 2014 1:19:44 GMT
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Post by ninjabunny on Jan 16, 2014 1:19:44 GMT
To be fair that mind set is insulting to readers.
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Post by Adam of The Old Kingdom on Jan 16, 2014 2:03:07 GMT
well he fails, I doubt an 8th grader could give consistent feedback that they comprehend the system their game is to be played in.
and whats funny about it is that when I read PB related rules, the person uses a similar style of description which leaves the actual rule unclear or lost in the flavour text.
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Post by damianmagecraft on Jan 16, 2014 3:54:52 GMT
To be fair that mind set is insulting to readers. only to those of us who can read above an 8th grade level. Few that we are... |
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Anybody
Jan 16, 2014 3:56:13 GMT
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Post by damianmagecraft on Jan 16, 2014 3:56:13 GMT
well he fails, I doubt an 8th grader could give consistent feedback that they comprehend the system their game is to be played in. and whats funny about it is that when I read PB related rules, the person uses a similar style of description which leaves the actual rule unclear or lost in the flavour text. depends on how you read it. Technical writing is not everyone's idea of a good read. |
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Post by Adam of The Old Kingdom on Jan 16, 2014 4:54:38 GMT
well he fails, I doubt an 8th grader could give consistent feedback that they comprehend the system their game is to be played in. and whats funny about it is that when I read PB related rules, the person uses a similar style of description which leaves the actual rule unclear or lost in the flavour text. depends on how you read it. Technical writing is not everyone's idea of a good read. not the technical. the key to comprehension is then you test or otherwise engage with a person to gauge how they have taken in what they have read. given the discussions about rules interpretations PB is failing to write in such a manner that adults* can give a consistent and uniform recount of what they have read. *alleged. |
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Post by Sci-Fi on Jan 16, 2014 5:04:25 GMT
well he fails, I doubt an 8th grader could give consistent feedback that they comprehend the system their game is to be played in. and whats funny about it is that when I read PB related rules, the person uses a similar style of description which leaves the actual rule unclear or lost in the flavour text. I played just fine in 8th grade. My son plays now, he's in 8th grade, and he's been playing over a year. |
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Post by Adam of The Old Kingdom on Jan 16, 2014 5:07:29 GMT
thats not what I was getting at, see my follow up to Damian's post.
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Post by damianmagecraft on Jan 16, 2014 5:15:47 GMT
depends on how you read it. Technical writing is not everyone's idea of a good read. not the technical. the key to comprehension is then you test or otherwise engage with a person to gauge how they have taken in what they have read. given the discussions about rules interpretations PB is failing to write in such a manner that adults* can give a consistent and uniform recount of what they have read. *alleged. No what they have "failed" to do is make it very clear that many of the rules are meant to be GM discretion on interpretation. (not a very popular stance in todays market). |
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Anybody
Jan 16, 2014 16:06:43 GMT
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Post by joshuagoliath on Jan 16, 2014 16:06:43 GMT
Side note: new study from PEW shows that roughly 25% of the book sales are digital.
Yeah, that's traditional reading books, but it is an indicator.
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Post by slaggdragon on Jan 16, 2014 19:45:21 GMT
Do you know what would kill Palladium's potential future potential book sales?
If weapons and armor were standardized. For instance:
Light Energy Pistol 3D6MDC Range-500m
Medium Energy Pistol 4D6 Range-550m
.....
Light Armor 35mdc
Medium Armor 50mdc
....
and so on. In my game I've standardized my weapons, just cuz it's a pain looking for them all over the frikken place. Think about how much of Palladium's sales is based of inching up or tweaking the toys.
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Post by writersblock on Apr 5, 2014 19:17:27 GMT
Doesn't make it right.
RPGs used to be about exercising a players imagination. Somewhere along the lines both PB and a lot of its players seem to have forgotten about that.
We need a return to the fun and freedom.
We need to put down the settings and the world books, put away the "official" rules, and PLAY.
We need to play using whatever house rules, derived settings and whole cloth ripped off genres or characters we WANT.
You want Pally to be fun again? Nothing Kev or his bootlickers does will make that happen. Nothing the forum trolls and such can say or do can make that happen.
YOU need to make it happen, for you and for your group.
Go out and create. Go forth and game. Go be....legendary.
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Post by juce734 on Apr 6, 2014 3:46:23 GMT
I have lost my desire for Palladium in the last couple years. It is really sad.
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Post by writersblock on May 2, 2014 23:24:10 GMT
Oh, I know that people want the finished stuff. And I did have some of that in there. But in a book that was pitched as the one stop creations book for all the high tech classes, he pretty much wanted me to pull stuff for creating new things and for character creation so I could pack it with finished off the shelf items and vehicles.
My PLAN had always been to make the one, then a second one along the lines of this "Gizmos" book that is coming out...
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Post by MacrossMike on May 3, 2014 0:08:32 GMT
RPGs used to be about exercising a players imagination. Somewhere along the lines both PB and a lot of its players seem to have forgotten about that. [...] We need to put down the settings and the world books, put away the "official" rules, and PLAY. Well, to a certain extent, the whole point of having a RPG is to have an agreed-upon and "official" set of rules as a framework within which the players can exercise their imagination. An RPG is still "thinking inside the box", done right it's just a VERY big box. But in a book that was pitched as the one stop creations book for all the high tech classes, he pretty much wanted me to pull stuff for creating new things and for character creation so I could pack it with finished off the shelf items and vehicles. As far as I'm concerned, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing to have a coherent guide with a certain quantity of "pre-made" items that could be fit into any given game. That, plus a coherent framework for actually organically scaling damages and capability would make for easy weapon generation on any tech scale. The problem is that in order for that to happen, the Palladium system would have to support a rational and linear scaling of damage from various classes of weapons. As it stands, their assigned damages are utterly arbitrary... to the extent that the Robotech game line puts very little difference between a weapon with power equivalent to a World War II-era anti-aircraft machine gun and a rotary cannon that boasts at least four times the stopping power of the tank-perforating rotary cannon on the A-10 Thunderbolt attack plane. (and don't even get me started on how mega-damage body armor is all kinds of impossible) |
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Post by writersblock on May 5, 2014 1:06:19 GMT
Oh, don't get me wrong, there WAS a certain amount of pre-made stuff in there. KS was expecting somewhere on the level of half the book.
But, look at the Hardware Section, Robot Section, Bionics/Cyborgs...on and on. How many of those sections have finished product in them?
My goal was NOT to create a catalog of stuff for players to buy, but a book that makes creating the stuff yourself easier to do.
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Post by Sci-Fi on May 5, 2014 1:34:15 GMT
Well if you don't produce what your boss wants, you don't tend to continue in employment. As previously stated. Having rules to make your own are nice, but the vast majority of players want the catalog to pic off the shelf.
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Post by Jaymz on May 5, 2014 1:37:41 GMT
Yet the main rule books has rules for building vehicles and robots but no complete versions........seems odd doesn't it?  |
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Post by Josh Hilden on May 5, 2014 1:42:41 GMT
Of course when your boss keeps giving schizophrenic and contradictory instructions...
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Post by MacrossMike on May 5, 2014 1:56:19 GMT
Well if you don't produce what your boss wants, you don't tend to continue in employment. As previously stated. Having rules to make your own are nice, but the vast majority of players want the catalog to pic off the shelf. Our boy Kevin is not, as many have attested, very good at conveying what he wants to the authors working for him... |
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Post by Sci-Fi on May 5, 2014 1:58:40 GMT
Well the point was that Kevin wanted more ready made stuff and Writersblock didn't want to do it, and the stuff wasn't published.
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Post by writersblock on May 5, 2014 2:22:18 GMT
Thing is, I was working on that book for ages, then they had it for almost 5 years, THEN they rejected it. His saying that not half full of finished stuff was one of the reasons he gave...and the FIRST TIME HE MENTIONED wanting anything like that. In fact, it was not even part of the initial discussion of not putting it out. He ADDED that in like our third or fourth discussion about it AFTER.
To be very clear, my initial pitch which was the reason I got to write it, IN NO WAY suggested that the book would be filled with finished product. So what he told me to write, and what he eventually said he had wanted, were nowhere near the same thing.
Basically, I was supposed to read his mind, as I got no input except stuff that turned out in the end to be lies. Through the years they had it, I continued to work on it and send updates, for free, because we were playtesting it and such. Kev would send me emails, letters, and even phone calls of how awesome it was, etc etc. Turned out he'd never even read it.
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Post by Sci-Fi on May 5, 2014 3:42:31 GMT
Sounds like Dead Reign.
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Post by MacrossMike on May 5, 2014 3:45:28 GMT
Well the point was that Kevin wanted more ready made stuff and Writersblock didn't want to do it, and the stuff wasn't published. Considering writersblock's most recent post, I think I hit the nail on the head... |
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Post by Sci-Fi on May 5, 2014 4:01:35 GMT
Or he told writersblock what he wanted and Writersblock turned in what -he- wanted to give, and it wasn't what Kevin wanted. Previous in the thread Writersblock indicated how he felt about it.
Either way, we don't really know. I'm not calling him a liar, I'm just saying we don't know. We have one version of events, where the writer is claiming he did all this work and then waited half a decade and then kevin made up new reasons why it didn't happen. It could have happened that way (Stranger things have happened) or it could be a case of pretty severe sour grapes, and someone pissed off that his stuff didn't get published.
Could simply be, if writer'sblock did turn it in and 5 -years- passed, Kevin actually looked around the industry and realized 'Build your own weapon/gear' is a nice option to have, but 99 out of 100 people pick off a list/out of a catalog, especially if there's cool art, and what he wanted THEN, 5 years later was different.
Writer'sblock said previously that he feels giving people the parts and letting them build it is the way to go. If that's not what Kevin wants. (or what makes the most money) Writersblock's views don't factor that high. I don't have hard numbers, 1000s of Roleplayers polled, I have just been in the game for decades. For every one time someone wants to sit down and build a custom ______ from scratch, you see people pick their gear from the gear sections 100s of times. Custom build rules are nice. Most times they just sit there.
We're discussing a book, that was developed, a decade ago? Two? Then sat for 5 years, then dropped? Was it ever even on the list of 'Coming soon's'? It's hard to say how it went down, all these years later, with just one pov.
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Post by MacrossMike on May 5, 2014 4:17:03 GMT
Or he told writersblock what he wanted and Writersblock turned in what -he- wanted to give, and it wasn't what Kevin wanted. [...] Either way, we don't really know. I dunno, man... considering this would be the fourth or fifth time I've heard almost this exact chain of events wherein Kevin tells the writer what he wants, then changes his mind without telling anyone, and ultimately acts like it's the writer's fault for not somehow sensing he had completely changed his mind about what he wanted despite making no effort to communicate that change, I'm inclined to believe that we're getting a fairly straight story from writersblock. Once is an oddity. Twice is coincidence. Three or more times is the emergence of a pattern. |
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Post by Jaymz on May 5, 2014 13:07:49 GMT
Yeah, seems to me this is EXACTLY what happened with Dead Reign as well and is VERY similar to what happened to Bill Coffin over LotD 2.
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Post by raiden on May 5, 2014 17:12:13 GMT
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