Back to WordPress that is.
I’ve left the old forums over here, where they can languish in obscurity like the rest of the site :o)
And we liked it !!!
I’ve seen this post resurface from time to time over the years, it captures the nostalgia of old Dungeons and Dragons.
The post is from August 15, 1999 and references the soon to be released Third edition.
Source: https://prismatictsunami.com/archives/1325OK. I’ve been reading all this balderdash and hooey about you people not “not likin’ this” and “not wantin’ that.” Well, you guys today got it made! If it weren’t for us “old-timers” you guys wouldn’t know a Dungeon Masters Guide if it broke into your house and stole all your Rush albums! Here’s what it was like back in my day:
We didn’t have FANCY, SPECKLEY, SWIRLY DICE back in the old days. Our dice were PLAIN and they were BLUE! If you threw the 12-sider too hard, IT EXPLODED! Then you had to buy another Expert Level Set to get another one! And we COULDN’T EVEN READ THE NUMBERS on our dice! We had to COLOR them with a CRAYON for crying out loud! We had Cruddy, Blue, Exploding, Crayon-Coated
Dice – AND WE LIKED IT!!!Our MONSTER MANUAL was BLACK & WHITE for Pete’s sakes! We had to COLOR in all those pictures! And we didn’t know what color things were back then – we HAD TO USE OUR IMAGINATIONS! God forbid if we used all our Red Crayon on our dice! Then all of our monsters had Orange Eyes! And what kind of crazy ecosystem was represented on the cover of that thing anyhow? They had every monster in the food chain living together in perfect harmony! We had Colorless Monsters that lived together peacefully – AND WE LIKED IT!!!
Then there was that DUNGEON MASTERS GUIDE! It had that SCARY BIG DEMON LOOKING THING on the cover! And everytime your Mom saw it SCARED THE BEJEEZUS out of her and she would RIP IT UP or THROW IT AWAY or sell it to your best friend at a garage sale for $1.25! We had to buy the same book over and over again cause our Moms threw it out – AND WE LIKED IT!!!
And, don’t get me started about SOURCE MATERIAL! We didn’t have “Complete This” and “Player’s Option” that! We didn’t have any Core Rules for the Computer-thing-a-ma-jig! All we had was some CRAPPY INTELLIVISION GAME. All of our dungeons were drawn on graph paper! All of our rooms were 10′ x 10′. But (and this is where we got you young fellers BEAT) ALL of our dungeon rooms were FILLED WITH TREASURE! Heck, all you had to do back then was BREAK DOWN THE DOOR, KILL THE MONSTER, and TAKE THE TREASURE! We didn’t have PLOT LINES or CAMPAIGN WORLDS or STORYLINES to bog us down! There was MOUNTAINS of TREASURE! Heaps of it!!! You know why you don’t find treasure in every room in your silly dungeons and modules anymore? CAUSE WE TOOK IT ALL! HA! AND YOU CAN’T HAVE IT! We had plotless, storyless, 10 foot by 10 foot dungeon rooms FILLED WITH TREASURE, AND WE LIKED IT!!!
Now you all are complaining about the quality of a “Dungeons and Dragons” movie! Oh My Stars and Garters! Count your sheep lucky that you get a MOVING PICTURE! We had a cartoon with a Unicorn that shot a laser beam from his horn, and an 8-year-old barbarian…AND WE LIKED IT!!!
Finally, you guys with your “LEAD FREE” miniatures! I had to get a new puppy every month because of the things I grew up painting! Heck, now I feed my dog Vrock entire Warhammer Armies cause they’re nothing but 28 millimeters of cheap scrap metal and plastic! We had lethal, cancer-causing miniatures that killed our pets, AND WE LIKED IT!!!
Maybe this post will knock some sense into your ungrateful noggins, and you’ll stop your whining about petty things like TURNING THE ARMOR CLASSES BACKWARDS! You’re gonna BUY Third Edition and you’re gonna PLAY Third Edition and you’re gonna LIKE Third Edition. And if you wanna scrap with me about it – I’LL TAKE ALL OF YOU ON! You go ahead and keep playing those older editions that I grew up with, and I’ll convert my character to Third Edition – then we will see whose Armor Class is better! Besides, it will take an army of you whippersnappers to get my treasure!!
Forest Encounter Maps
I guess I should really post here from time to time.
So here’s two simple encounter maps I knocked up for a recent game where the party where making their way through a forest.
I’ve become a fan of the simplistic nature of the maps created using Dungeon Draft.
Less is more, is my thinking these days when it comes to VTT’s.
Leaving the players imaginations to fill in the details rather than having overly detailed maps to set the scene.
DnD – Lost Mines of Phandelver
Our group is currently bumbling their way through the “Lost Mines of Phandelver” in their usual unhinged manner. And as part of this they needed to visit a Banshee in the woods, for which unfortunately no map was available.
So here’s a quick one I knocked up in DungeonDraft, which I’m posting here since it might be of use to others.
DungeonDraft – An affordable map-maker
If you’re looking for an affordable map-making tool for RPGs suitable for use with a VTT a good contender is DungeonDraft which comes for an affordable $19.99 which weighs in around €20.
While it doesn’t offer the same rich variety in terms of assets out of the box as say for example Inkarnate. There are many free assets available for it on CartographyAssets which closes the asset gap quite quickly.
The fact that it’s a once off payment rather than an ongoing subscription means it quickly pays for itself. Can recommend enough if you’re looking to create quick maps for VTT sessions. Added to which there is nice integration with Foundry VTT if that’s your thing.
Here’s two examples of maps I’ve recently used in RPG game made only using the default installed assets.
The Blacksmiths Shop
A section of a village the party recently visited showing the local Blacksmiths store and accommodation. The store having a open stall window at the front with the smithy to side and family quarters behind.
The Old Watchtower
A point of interest the adventures had to explore was a recently abandoned watchtower and the mysterious cavern linked to it below. Where the recent disappearances of villagers connected in some way to its sudden abandonment? Probably not.
Concord Shutting Down
Say what you want about Sony, but they’re not ones to get taken in by the sunken cost fallacy.
Having spent upwards of 150 million dollars by some estimations on developing the game, they have now announced that it will be shutdown only two weeks after it was released on September 6th.
The full announcement on playstation.com can be found here:
https://blog.playstation.com/2024/09/03/an-important-update-on-concord/
If you build it, they won’t come.
Dustborn and Concord are rather notable cautionary examples of what happens when you build for what is either a nonexistent audience or one which is unwilling to commit to actually supporting your endeavours.
Mozilla sells out their users again
Mozilla with Firefox positions itself as a user privacy focused company but it looks like this is changing, having recently acquired an advertising tech company itself.
And following that acquisition it has sneaked in an opt-out piece of tracking into the latest Firefox version.
Under “Privacy & Security” in settings you will find a “Web Site Advertising Preferences” section with the option enabled by default.
Clearly the next step you need to be doing if you are a user of Firefox is to disable this option.
Further details and analysis of this can be found at the privacyguides.org site.
https://blog.privacyguides.org/2024/07/14/mozilla-disappoints-us-yet-again-2/
Planetside II – There’s a heartbeat there still, I think
I thought looking at an older game might be instructive with respect to the decline of games over time.
Planetside II can be seen very much as a spiritual successor to the Tribes franchise, released by SOE back in Nov 2012. It’s a game which never really got much exposure but maintained a loyal core following over the intervening years.
The PC version of the game is available either stand-alone or though steam, so the numbers reported by steam charts is not representative of its actual player counts showing Steam only, but the movement in player count probably tracks well.
The following graph shows the player count over the intervening years, with the dramatic drop-off at the start and a largely stable if waning player count in the following years.
This slow decline in player count can be seen in the numbers for the more recent months, showing a game clearly still pulling some new players to replace those who leave. But unfortunately not quite in numbers to reverse the overall slow decline.
Helldivers II – Player count slide
Helldivers II is a bit of a one-trick pony, but it’s a pretty good trick in fairness.
But like anything without much variety it runs the risk of becoming stale and losing people’s attention. Which is what we can see now by looking at the player numbers over the last few months.
Moving from a massive peak of 458,208 players, there has been a consistent slide in the player count of about 34% month on month.
Though for a newly released game in the first 5 months, such a drop-off as the novelty factor wanes is not unexpected.
The expectation is that the player-base will stabilise to a core audience that can be maintained going forward; with an expectation of a more gradual decline going forward.
This looks like that is happening with the player count now.
Having settled from the 22th May onwards around the 50k mark with a much less pronounced attrition in numbers.
The new patch released on 13th June saw a slight spike in numbers , with a peak of 91,692 players following its release. But did not result in a notable increase of the player count.
To truly revitalise the player-base something bigger is going to be needed. Possibly the release of a third faction (The Illuminate from the original?) is the one to watch for and maybe that could reinvigorate the player-base and count.