Pledge: Finish off more with my Harryhausen Hellenics

A reboot of a system is good beyond the 5 year mark. Ideally it might be 8-10 but the overhaul of a game is tricky to run with. White Wolf had some good work on their WoD and the tweaks were done piecemeal to the overall game universe which had no balance interacting with each other. D&D has been a longstanding part of rpgs that its been in quite a few directions. Battletech has had general small change in all of its lifespan in contrast to GW. Games like L5R and 7th Sea got serious work in their reboots so there can be some success stories outside of company woes.

One and done seem to be the best course of action unless game development see that their brain baby is healthy and running without their help.

On a separate note I am looking forward to the second Spaceballs movie (if there is any rebooting) and the second installment of the anime series Gate. How can you not love the premise of what happens when a magical kingdom assaults modern Japan and the FAFO doctrine ensues?

Spaceballs getting a reboot seems odd to me. The original was fine at the time, but the jokes are old… as are the actors and Barf is deceased. Pizza the Hutt almost put me off pizza!

On to the other stuff.

Pledge: Paint more Mythic Battles: Pantheon… maybe…

Buy MCP X-Men Starter Set… probably…

Get some use out of the second hand digital SLR I just bought because I used to enjoy photography (but film is very expensive now)… hopefully… weather permitting.

Refresh cycles of games… when it’s necessary.

I bought a couple of Kickstarters that had 1.5 rules later (Mythic Battles: Pantheon and Endure the Stars) and only updated one (Mythic Battles) because just buying the upgrade was expensive with shipping (I eventually bought the upgrade kit on ebay). Kickstarters of games are pretty much beta tests with the first edition.

Errata on rules (RPG and other games) annoy me. The whole point of having an editor is to make sure there are no typos. When designers change a rule during the pre-production step they should make sure the changes are applied.

Continually releasing new armies, or factions, or heroes tends to break the rules, but I understand the need of game makers to churn out new stuff as they need to keep money coming in.

GW and their constant release of new rules… followed by updated faction books… then when all faction books done they redo the rules.

It would be nice if a company did one game and released everything they wanted to do… and then… done… move on to a new project. Keep printing stuff for new players of the old game so it stays in print and doesn’t end up on ebay at scalper prices.

Pledge:  Get cracking with Warriors of Athena, Foundry Argonauts are next up.  My order from North Star isn’t here yet so I don’t actually have the rules.  I need to enhance my calm.  It was only published yesterday 🙂

Answer: Should there be reboot of any game at any given point in time?

It depends is the fence-sitters answer.  We all understand that companies need to sell new stuff continually and the easiest way to do that is to tell everyone to bin their rules and buy some new ones.  It also attracts new players who feel that they may have a chance playing against old hands who have become over familiar with the specifics of the mechanics.  This turnover is much slower in the historical rules market.  Production costs for a new edition are so high a publisher would prefer to try a different set entirely than issue a second edition of something.

A more controversial answer is, almost never!  It could be argued that the only reason to change rules so much that you need a new edition is in order to improve them.  Improve is a very loaded term.  Not everyone is going to think that changes made are “better”, even what most players might think of as ‘broken’ rules/units/factions are loved by some in our community (alpha strikers for example).

The best you can manage to do with a new edition is to make something that is similar but different to the original.  If written well and with due reverence to the previous version then maybe the new game is more popular or considered to be a better tabletop experience than its forebear.  My experience is that is seldom the case.  The best examples are probably the Dan Mersey ‘Rampant’ rules, most of which have had a second edition over recent years.  These are different games but often subtly improved from the first version and definitely enhanced by being in a bigger, glossier hardback version rather than the standard Osprey blue books.  Has anyone else found subsequent editions of a game that they preferred?

Loved the Fats Domino.  Friday afternoon and it’s time for a boogie:

I used to work for Royal Mail and know that the official line is that tracked are not being prioritied, but from my experience and what my former colleagues tell me, that’s bullshit.

The government want to speak to them in parliament about failing to deliver letters.

So in short, your concerns about 2nd class are valid. Unless you have a 1st class or tracked to go with it… good luck.

I’m also waiting for Warriors of Athena to be posted. I believe tomorrow is official release date.

Edit: Just checked the website where I ordered. It now says delayed until early march.

Refresh as and when needed, not because it is ‘time’ to do so.

No game is ever going to be perfect.
It is ridiculous to expect such things.

The better question : are the flaws big enough to warrant a refresh or are they merely part of how the game plays?

The GW model is beyond stupid. They do updates for the sake of doing updates.
8th edition was a refresh/reboot that the series needed since ages, but GW never cared about gameplay until it started to hurt their bottom line and the writing was on the wall.

The big issue at play is that what is good for business is not good for our hobby.
We think we need ‘updates’ because companies keep pushing us to buy more stuff and they don’t want us to be satisfied.

Shatterpoint/MCP is a perfect example.
There is a limit to the amount of interesting characters you can add to a game like that.
And if the media you’re using as a source starts to become crap then it’s better to cut losses instead of trying to push content that no one really likes or cares about.

I certainly don’t want to see expansion xxx featuring characters that got a few seconds of screen time in a series that lacked a good story. Games need things that matter. A character with an ability that already exists in some form doesn’t add anything to the gameplay. I’d rather have the option to create my own at that point …
(which is kind of what ‘The Walking Dead’ did … and the game got better for it as it became a sandbox for playing all sorts of interesting games)

I bet there’s a lot of people that hit “I’m in” at the start of the campaign and then forget to do anything.

I think it’s because the switch from ‘campaign’ to ‘backerkit’ mode is invisible with GameFound campaigns. You already pick what you want during the campaign.

With Kickstarter there usually is a separate system where you finalise the details of a pledge, pick the stuff you want and pay for shipping. The rare few that rely on kickstarter queries tend to be very basic in format.

I know that I found myself triple checking the Discworld pledge as a result of that email just to make sure shipping had been paid as well.

Found it in Canada in one google, @pagan8th – around $100 CAD.