dalekcaan@feddit.nl You know what was super fun about it all?

Most of us were co-workers, including the GM and his… target. We all got to see each other 6 days a week.

I promise you, there were no gods to be found that day.

blurntout@lemmy.ca Oh, no, that is… not the kind of cringe I’m talking about.

The GM was infatuated with one of the players, and forced a romantic/sexual encounter on them, in front of their partner. It was super uncomfortable.

Nope, nope, nope. I’ve witnessed the inverse of this, and it was not good. Absolutely deadly levels of cringe.

Unfortunately, Mr. Drader here may be suffering from some significant sampling bias. The people he’s spoken to may have fond memories of AD&D or 1e, and have a longing for a more deadly, chaotic time where the inability to truly internalize the world of monsters and men can lead one to follies that result in dread consequences, but seemingly the overwhelming majority of TTRPG players today want and expect either superball characters that bounce back like magic, or rigid and predictable rules that can be mercilessly exploited with the proper solicitor.

Neither of these groups really understands what balance is, but one of them would prefer never to think of it – for them, it just gets in the way of the Rule of Cool – while the other uses it as a cudgel to beat GMs with when they face something they can’t cut down with rote memorization.

There’s zero reason that balance and realism need be in conflict. They are not inherently opposing forces. But seemingly no one actually wants a balanced game, because those crying out for realism kick dirt at the concept just as often as those seeking to play as invincible superheroes or masterful exploiters do.

Oh, interesting. I’ve been wanting Paizo to do something like this, but with their money troubles it’ll likely be a long time before they ever consider it.

Oh, I love the burning and decayed versions. I wish I had them a year ago, when I had my party dealing with an exploding ship in dock.

INeedMana Mastodon continues to not play nice with other platforms. I’ve heard they’re going try to support more message types in the future, but who knows what they mean by that, or when that will be.

I also get inconsistent results and formatting from my NodeBB server.

From where I’m sitting, the link preview shows what the post is about, and the “clickbait” nature of the title is Mastodon’s fault and problem. Anyone who’s interested will click through and probably not notice the awkward title. Those who aren’t might put up a weird stink, but they’re not the audience for the post anyway, so *shrug*.

nocturne@slrpnk.net Anything’s compatible with enough time and effort! I’m definitely getting my hands on the bestiary PDF when this comes out.

…m… Yes, it’s totally possible they have a consultant or something in their ear telling them not to “waste” time and money on a partner that has provided them no real (i.e. measured) value. I know some of my last employer’s worst decisions cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars up front before they ever cost them good well and development time.

People do love paying large sums of money so they can have a scapegoat. “Accountability sink” is a phrase than entered my lexicon several months ago, coming from Dan Davie’s The Unaccountability Machine, though the context I was introduced to it was why everyone with an MBA, or with a job title that starts with “Director” or ends with “Officer” seem to have lost their minds over plausible-but-wrong text generation. But it’s all the same instinct: “Someone else told me to do it, so it’s not my fault.”

I’ve only gotten about 20 minutes into the video, but I’ve already hit some things I think I can comment on.

Some of what I’m about to say may come across as apologetics for Paizo, and I want to be clear up front that that is not my intent. I firmly believe that Paizo has made a poor and short-sighted decision on this, and that they’ve shot themselves in the foot for absolutely no reason whatsoever. But I’ve also spent the last few years working for a company that’s done many of the same sorts of things, and I think I understand what they’re doing right now.

For context, I have spent the past decade working as a data scientist and data analyst in the video games industry. My last company was one of these low-profile tech companies that did huge business during lockdowns and instead of using their windfall to prepare for the post-lockdown world, management instead treated the pandemic as their Arab Spring moment (the Arab Spring being the biggest factor in Twitter becoming a household name, and in the evening news turning into little more than a Twitter recap show). The pandemic was not their Arab Spring, though, and they spent the entire five years I worked there chasing that high and fending off their investors as their numbers slipped into the red.

Paizo is not a digital games or services company. It would not surprise me to discover that their business intelligence person is also, like, their accountant or something. The only data they would have that is their own comes from their website traffic and website sales, and their PnL statements. Everything else is either filtered through third party partners, or is totally inaccessible to them. And businesses today live off of LARPing data-driven decision making.

So, what data are they likely to have?

They’d have their website traffic logs, but I actually doubt they track that too intensively. Maybe they’re tracking which IPs are landing on their homepage, backlinks, and probably data about logins, but there’s probably many analytics hooks until you get to the store.

In the store, I’d expect them to have hooks for viewing a product, adding a product to the cart, checking out, and sales completions.

They would get sales information from Role20 for their various stores, i.e. DriveThruRPG(/Pathfinder Infinite) and Demiplane. For first party titles, we should expect that to be, at the very least, aggregated per-title sales, while things might be more abstract for third party licensed sales.

Then, of course, there are the sales numbers from their distributors – at least, the ones that are still distributing.

Archives of Nethys doesn’t sell any Paizo products, so they’re not getting sales figures from AoN. Importantly, though, AoN also doesn’t have very many links back to the Paizo website or Paizo store.

If people are buying Paizo products thanks to their usage of the Archives of Nethys website, that fact is invisible to Paizo. Every AoN-triggered sale is actually going to look like they came from Google, and they will be indistinguishable from so-called “organic” sales. They get zero credit for their contribution.

Management, looking at their dashboards – which, in all likelihood for a place like Paizo is an Excel spreadsheet – will see that they’re spending $X on CnDs, and receiving $Y from Roll20, but $0 from AoN.

For a company that is bleeding to death, this is an issue. They’re not thinking about the actual reality of things, they’re just looking at what their numbers say, and their numbers say $0 and a miniscule amount of web traffic credited to AoN. Meanwhile, they’re spending Z > $0 on servicing AoN (even if Z is small), which starts to look like a rotten deal to someone who is watching their business crumble around them.

It’s not real, but they have no numbers in front of them to challenge the idea that it is.

So, what do they do? They cut their lines, and cut their toes off in the process.

I’ve watched this happen over and over again in my professional life. Management approves something that is very obviously a good idea to anyone watching, management slashes the budget 4 weeks later, a half-baked and half-neutered version of the thing launches with zero fanfare and zero integration, and then it fails to generate revenue. All support for the feature is revoked, and six months later it’s removed from the product after 10s of thousands of dollars (or more) have been sunk into it in the least effective way possible. All because they hyper-focused on costs and revenue, and refused to look at the big picture.

I’ve seen lots of people upset at Paizo for the decision, and I’ve seen lots of people talking about how the situation with Diamond has caused this, but I’ve seen very few who seem to be worried about the future of Paizo. But this is the kind of behaviour that management engages in when the ship is sinking. The Diamond lawsuit is going to drag on for much too long, and they are still bound by the exclusivity deal, which means they simply cannot sell their books in major retailers in the US.

But they’ve also done very little to pivot to new revenue streams. Their eggs are all in this hardcover book business, and they’re currently limited in what they can do there. Their regular business model is largely denied to them right now, and they have no backup.

This is a big problem. And everyone is much too focused on the hypocrisy of the company right now, and not the reasons why they’re suddenly acting like hypocrites.

Man, he’s years late to the game. Thurston Hillman gave us a Jimothy in episode 1 of Rotgrind.

Zagorath Yeah, this is some incredibly poor PR, right down to the vague finger-pointing at the AoN folks for publishing the information. But it’s also the kind of head-scratching, short-sighted decision people make when under a lot of pressure, so I understand why Paizo’s doing this.

They’re wrong, and they just burned a ton of good will for the sake of a few bucks in lawyers fees, but I get it. Actually actively defending the choice is a fun kind of bootlicking, though, and has my days of not taking the Pathfinder communities on those platforms seriously coming to a middle.

HubertManne It will be quite a bit more than that. AoN contains a fair bit of Golarion lore-related text that will need to be removed, and it’s likely the pages that contain full chapters of the books will have to be pared down or reworded.

It will be work for the AoN team, and I’m sure they could use some additional volunteers to help out with the process.

supernovastar@lemmy.blahaj.zone People were very inflamed about this over on the subreddit. I’m not sure anyone walked away with the lesson that corporations are not frens.

They’re not even fren shaped!

BartyDeCanter Paizo has a well established business and licensing agreement with Roll20 that actually generates revenue, and their Demiplane product functionally competes with AoN. That business relationship is made less valuable through the AoN partnership, so even without speculating about potential loans or investments it makes sense on some level to end that arrangement.

The worrying thing – and the thing that no one seems to have dared to broach, even in the 800 different threads discussing this on Reddit – is that this is a significant factor when looking to sell. There are, obviously, other reasons for wanting to get their house in order, but a big one would be to either seek a significant outside investor, or to sell the whole company outright, which could have deep and possibly horrendous impacts on the future of the system.

Just another reason to get all of your rules in paper or PDF, so your table is resistant to potential paradigm shifts at the publisher.

Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary Paizo has absolutelly shit international distribution, and primarily relies on licensing deals for translations (which means there are limited translations). So it’s both incredibly expensive to get the books outside of North America, and to get it in yout language you have to wait months to years.

Even here in Canada it can be a pain in the ass sometimes.

Heydo That’s true, but we also don’t measure galaxy rotation by watching things move. The rotation rate of galaxies is incredibly slow on human timescales. Like, the Milky Way rotates once every 100,000 - 150,000 years.

Instead, we’re looking at differences in redshift from one side of the galaxy compared to the other. A rotating object – assuming it’s axis of rotation isn’t perfectly facing you (i.e. you’re looking straight down its north/south pole) – always has one side that’s moving toward you, and another that is moving away from you. The side that is moving toward you will be slightly blueshifted compared to the average, while the side that is moving away will be slightly redshifted. Finding a galaxy that isn’t rotating means finding a galaxy that doesn’t have this red/blue shift pattern.

etterra@discuss.online Sure, but it’s a really pretty blue colour.

The wizard should have been doing that while the Warlock was arguing with the GM about the number of spell slots they had left.