Recent content by bhandelman

Because these third party publishers now exist and thrive on such a market, I have no doubt if today an OGL for 5e was announced many would jump on it as soon as they could. The game is just too big, there is too much hype. DnD still holds the lead in mindshare, and the chance to tap into that...

The situation was very similar when 3e came out and the market flooded very quickly. Death in Freeport from Green Ronin hit the stores before any official adventures. Many of the companies you mention existed solely to provide d20 content at the time, and there is no reason a new group of them...

Weren't there also some individual licenses during 3e? I seem to remember Kenzer Co having a license to do Kingdoms of Kalamar as an officially licensed setting. You also had things like Dragonlance and Ravonloft licensed out to third parties to develop.

Personally, I like the mini campaign setting/large adventure idea. Something in the 96-128 pages area that gives you a decent overview of each world, what makes it different, and a good sized adventure to experience it. Make it softcover and release it for a decent price (less than $20 I would...

Printing costs have gone way up over the years, much higher than inflation. I realize none of us like to pay $50 for a rulebook, but cost in all areas of printed media have gone up substantially. A good comaprison of a niche product would be comic books; in 2000 a Spider-man comic would have...

This would be perfect, maybe a conversion guide for each edition to the new one. Hopefully the NDA is dropped towards the end of the week. Pretty soon enough people will have played it won't help, but I can understand if they want to limit information while the con is still going.

Right, but this box set was $20, not $4. $20 seems to me to be just right, priced about what I would expect to pay for a family board game. I can't imagine someone saying "Only $20? That's way to cheap, there must be something shoddy about it." Especially if the person making that purchase...

Well, I think you are misunderstanding the product. It isn't meant to educate people about the rules, it was meant to get people interested in buying more DnD products. That's why they refer to it as a gateway product. I can't speak to everyone, but in my personal case it is the product...

Three things I would like to see come from this I think this is great, and I'm sure it will sell like crazy. I hope it leads to three things: Collectable white box reprint Return of the PDF releases for all older content Some type of new material for older editions, even if just a one off...

My interpretation of their comments is the same as yours. What I was saying is I was surprised that their attitude isn't "OGL is bad because it caused Pathfinder to exist". I would think a business would look at it that way, but as others have pointed out the guys in charge now benefited...

Now I wonder if someone took all the posts in response and totaled those numbers, how would that compare?

It is debatable because there is no evidence for anything you are saying, just conjecture. Yes, it is a digital era, so it could be argued things like PDFs should be a given, but a VTT? None of the major TRPGs have a VTT. Pathfinder is doing just fine, Call of Cthulhu seems to have grown in...

This is something I find very interesting. As much as I enjoyed the OGL on the customer end, I would find it hard to argue with the idea that their main competitor exists solely because of the OGL. I like that Pathfinder is around, competition is always a good thing and D&D needed it, but from...

I think it's highly debatable that a VTT is "the only thing that can possibly invigorate D&D in the current era" or is even that relevant. There are tons of VTTs out there, some pretty decent, and they aren't making an impact. They also didn't say anything to lead one to believe there won't be...

Sure, you could run a game with all those Essential books and not the 3 core books, but all you are really doing is running a game using the 3 core books, patched with 2 years of errata, in a smaller paperback format. The rules aren't just compatible, they are the same rules. To me, a new...