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Intro: “Now Get Busy” ~ Beastie BoysOutro: “Sister Saviour” ~ The Rapture
Announcements
The campaign calendar has gotten some updates, including a much smoother creating and editing process as well as improved notifications and updates. It also has been tweaked for better web calendar integration and more. Micah gives us the low down!
Headlines
Beyond The Stat Block
We discuss a community effort to put a splash of flavor into 4e D&D’s otherwise very mechanical monster stat blocks. A website called “Beyond The Stat Block” is attempting to change all of that by crowdsourcing flavor text for monster abilities. Is it going to work out? Listen up and check it out.
Crapping On Your Freelance Writing Dreams
Recently Robert Schwalb (Freelancer to WotC, Green Ronin, many others) basically laid out his personal experiences in the freelancing industry entitled “Crapping On Your Dream: Freelancing 101” with a very sobering stance on what it is like from the inside. We discuss in-depth.
The Death of Fourthcore
Something very near and dear to me (Jerry) has come to an end, Micah allows me to lament and further explain the expiration of the Fourthcore D&D movement. Please also see the original post detailing its demise as well as the follow up, which provides a much more in-depth explanation as well as an announcement for the future of the genre, it’s fans and contributors. If you’re not sure what fourthcore was, enlighten yourself!
Twitter Question
@Raddu76 asks “How do you manage combat? Online tools like power2ool or incombat4e?” Listen to find out!
That’s a Wrap!
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Obsidian Portal is the award winning Online Campaign Management System for tabletop role-playing games. It’s free to use, it can be accessed from any web browser and it's built from the ground up for gamers by gamers.
We host a huge community of tabletop RPG players who are all looking to get the most out of their tabletop gaming experience. You play your campaign and we help you manage it. It’s that simple.
“Sweeping Strike!” “Sweeping Strike!” “Crushing Blow!” Mwhahahah. That by itself would make this podcast worth listening to. Another great job guys.
I wish that article had been around about 5 years ago to slap some sense into me. When I went into the RPG production arena I didn’t think it would ever be my full-time job, but I kind of expected that it would be able to sustain itself. Unfortunately, even after putting together a small team of about a dozen hard-working folks, and publishing five rpg books and about four art-only books, and having about a whopping total of about 2,500 sales… I quickly realized that after investing time into planning, writing and pagination, paying for quality art, the cost of book production, paying for advertising, and maintaining a web presence, that profitability at the “free-lance” level is pretty much impossible if you want to try to have a quality product. I was lucky, and overall the sales pretty much broke even with investment (I ended up losing a couple hundred bucks instead of the several thousand it could have been).
Though, recently, I decided to start working towards revamping the company and concept, and we’re bouncing around ideas about a few new product lines, and resurrecting some of the old ones. However, this time it’s completely for the love of the genre and gaming, and I’m taking things much slower, and investing without any expectation of return to make it happen.
It shouldn’t be called “freelancing.” It should be called “hobbylancing.”
-Ben.
Thanks again for episode 6. With regard to the Twitter Question, I would like to say that for complicated up and coming combat sessions, I prepare an EXCEL sheet beforehand and print it out but at the table our group uses the GAMES MASTERY MAGNETIC INITIATIVE SHEET from Paizo. I don’t think there is a better way to keep track of combat at the table. If you have not used it, check it out!!!
Freelancing is not free… should be called life-savings-lancing….
Great episode.