41–50 of 64 posts
> Their conclusion guaranteed him a lifelong income but left him bitter at the feeling he was underappreciated for the creative work that made D&D a reality.
If any of my endeavors gets me a lifelong income, it frees me to pursue other endeavors in financial peace. Recognition is overrated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What's so special about D&D that makes it so it could only be created in an economic system where the person who created it would face poverty if they didn't? Pretty sure he would have created D&D anyway, yes. But if not for capitalism he likely wouldn't have done the work to standardize and share D&D with the world and instead just kept it as his own homebrew campaign rules. Today it would be easier, but back then…
I know you're not arguing this, but for the sake of expanding into the following point: There have been plenty of games and other creative projects that became successful ignoring or even despite the economic system. In fact I would argue that many of the most artistic games that had the most positive impact on me personally were made because they simply had to be made. I'm not a fan of table top games (haven't tried…
Anyway, I do think that the gaming industry would be much worse if not for capitalism. As you say you can find plenty of good passion projects to play, and even though most of them don't blow up some of them do, giving tons of money to people who have a passion for making games. If not for capitalism, the moment the person starts to add more workers to his project he no longer owns the IP since the concept of owning means of production is a core part of capitalism and IP is a means of production. Now I'm all for worker rights etc, but democratizing the decisions of how an IP should be handled and what should happen with game design etc isn't a good thing, I don't think the people he hires should have any say in that, I bought his products since I liked his vision and don't want new people to ruin it.
Please. Art is as dead as it wants to be. There will always be a spectrum in the market. A D&D will always taget the gourmand, no the gourmet. The gourmets require education. Be the educator, not the curmudgeon.
> Be the educator, not the curmudgeon. That's no way to sell subscriptions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open-source still struggles with quality and consistency -- two things important in a medium where aesthetics are important. That said, access to low-cost, high-resolution 3D printers (specifically resin-based printers) has enabled an explosion of the open-source Warhammer community (see https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedWarhammer/ for one example) -- and oddly, it's exactly the free market that is allowing this to flo…
https://www.thingiverse.com/devonjones/collections/openforge
We all know and laugh at "illegal primes", but my intuitions, about how this applies to (what will eventually be, at its final stage) a physical object, are confusing me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> you could argue that there would be no D&D were it not for capitalism in the first place. This is a fascinating thing for me to read because it is brought up every single time someone points out how capitalism encouraging the profit motive over anything else negatively impacts something. It's also incredibly sad though, as the concept of creating things out of pure joy seems like such an alien concept to some peopl…
> system where people don't have to be coerced to do things Was there ever a working system without some form of coercion? The common forms of coercion are either withholding resources (usually money), or restricting freedom (prison / labor camp).
Maybe historical data alone without other context isn't the best way to predict the future -- unless you're trying to make it look like the past. IMO much of the open-source world appears to function entirely without "some form of coercion"...
I stopped reading here: > Their conclusion guaranteed him a lifelong income but left him bitter at the feeling he was underappreciated for the creative work that made D&D a reality. If any of my endeavors gets me a lifelong income, it frees me to pursue other endeavors in financial peace. Recognition is overrated.
D & D was always money grubbing. Fun games, such as Toon , Paranoia and Call of Cthulu come as a single book that has everything you need to run the game including a sample campaign. With D & D you need a whole bookshelf. It has been somewhat reformed but those polyhedral dice are not as fun as they look because people are always looking for the 5th d4 that rolled under the rug. D & D is the one game I absolutely won…
We’re playing Old School Essentials (BX) btw and it rocks.
The thesis in the title makes no sense. There really isn't anything so special about the D&D systems that mean one person working from home couldn't come up with an artistic competitor. You don't need to spend any money on TSR books to run a campaign if there is an imaginative DM handy. The only reason D&D is so big is that the profit lets it advertise and have a presence, so more people know about it. That is a beni…
Couldn't agree with this more. The idea that D&D has hoovered up so much of the world as to deny people of their own creative expression is absurd and I couldn't get past the first paragraph without thinking the author is off his rocker.
While other TTRPG's are still free to exist, it is much harder to convince a new player to hop on board with anything else (or to even explain to them how there are games very similar to Dungeons and Dragons that aren't Dungeons and Dragons).
It doesn't help that things like the term "DM" are patented by WotC, too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> system where people don't have to be coerced to do things Was there ever a working system without some form of coercion? The common forms of coercion are either withholding resources (usually money), or restricting freedom (prison / labor camp).
The vast majority of conflicts were won with pre-modern weapons, but despite that overwhelming statistic, if I had to fight I'd prefer a rifle and modern armour. Maybe historical data alone without other context isn't the best way to predict the future -- unless you're trying to make it look like the past. IMO much of the open-source world appears to function entirely without "some form of coercion"...
So how can you get people do unpleasant but necessary work without direct benefit for them?
> much of the open-source world appears to function entirely without "some form of coercion"...
Does it? My impression is that the tedious and unpleasant work in large projects like Linux is often done by those who are paid for it.