Why the lack of 3rd party adventures

[buzzard]

I was thinking about this the other day and I believe I came up with a pretty good explanation. Sure, there is a fair selection of 3rd party adventure publishers, but given that WotC has decided to go back into the field due to what they perceive to be a lack of material, there must be some sort of problem.

What I decided was that WotC simply hasn't OGLed enough of their material. People like new stuff to play with, and we are all pretty familiar with the fact that WotC sells the most toys. Just take a look at the amount of stuff in the SRD vs. the amount of stuff WotC publishes.

In Living Greyhawk you end up with access to most of the new toys once the Circle approves them. Thus you encounter new monsters, spells, prestige classes, and base classes in the adventures. You can't see this in 3rd party products because WotC keeps the rights to the expansion stuff off the market.

What really made this stand out for me is that I've been running The Drow Wars. Being a lazy git, I opted to find a whole campaign in one easy package to DM. However also being a fairly avid LG player, I have a host of expanded WotC rules. Thus using the stuff from the Drow Wars feels rather thin. There's so much more material that I'm used to having present in the adventures I play in or run. Now sure, I could modify Drow Wars to bring them up to snuff. That would probably be for the best since players have access to much more stuff than the authors (I allow a good amount of stuff, but none of my players are real twinks so we don't have problems). However, as I said, I'm a lazy git.

Personally I think the best solution would be for WotC to simply offer access to more of their materials in an OGL fashion. I mean what really is the point of MM II, MM III, MM IV if the monsters don't really get used? I thought the whole point of OGL was to farm out the aspects of the business which WotC didn't want to do, which was namely adventures. It appears to me that their limited OGL exposure has undermined this philosophy.

buzzard

 

[The Thayan Menace]

True Dat!

What I decided was that WotC simply hasn't OGLed enough of their material.

Agreed; my myconid module is currently thwarted by this issue.

-Samir

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Clark Peterson of Necromancer Games recently discussed this very issue on his own forum. He was lamenting that, as a third party publisher, he couldn't use a lot of cool stuff from WotC because it wasn't OGL. I agree that it would be very good for WotC to OGL some of its more recent stuff to let third party publishers provide support for those books.

 

[Dog Moon]

Agreed; my myconid module is currently thwarted by this issue.

-Samir

Just call them 'Fungus People'.

 

[Diremede]

I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head there. WotC only lets you use what is in the SRD, so for anyone who uses any of the class specific add on books or any of the "fluff" books, you won't be able to use any of that information when creating your 3rd party adventure, and sometimes I think that is hard to do once you become accustomed to using said materials.

I would also have to say that most 3rd party publishers have decided to publish their own settings with their own feats, some new skills, spells, classes, etc. Now 3rd party publishers may decide to put forth a line of adventures, but more likely than not, they are going to be campaign specific. Most DM's can adapt these types of adventures but for the lazy DM this is just no good.

I also think that for most of the publishing companies out there the concept of published adventures may not be something they want to do. I would have to say that most creative DM's come up with their own material, and would shy away from most printed adventures, not wanting to feel railroaded themselves nor to railroad the players.

 

[Drkfathr1]

I really wish they would throw some more bones into the OGL. Some of the newer Core Classes and Monsters especially would liven things up a bit.

Heck, wouldn't that spur some people to go buy the books they were in, just to see what esle was in there? It would at the very least provide a slight spike in sales of some of the splat books.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Just out of curiosity, how many adventurers do we need for 3rd party people to provide?

Pick a number because I bet it's already been hit.

Adventurers don't need to come out every month or day, especially if they're large adventurers. Heck, I've been playing the Shackled City for 20 weeks. Sure, 'official' material, but I've also run through the Witch Fire Trilogy (updated to 3.5 recently), the original Freeport trilogy (updated to 3.5 recently), and numerous others.

I think the adventurers are indeed already out there and people just gloss them over.

 

[Nebulous]

I've never thought too much about this topic (i don't contribute to the d20 world professionally) but i can understand the concerns voiced. There's a TON of monsters from WoTC, and it would make sense to make a lot of them, if not most, available in OGC. It seems like it would surely spur some backsales of older books. What harm could it do to Wizard's money purse? Again, i'm talking about a subject i don't know much about so maybe someone can enlighten me.

 

[DaveMage]

Clark Peterson of Necromancer Games recently discussed this very issue on his own forum. He was lamenting that, as a third party publisher, he couldn't use a lot of cool stuff from WotC because it wasn't OGL. I agree that it would be very good for WotC to OGL some of its more recent stuff to let third party publishers provide support for those books.

Ditto.

Even if they just released the monsters it would be a nice boon.

 

[The_Gneech]

Well, even items that aren't OGL (Complete classes and so forth) can be licensed, can't they? I don't know what (if any) policy WotC has on this, but I'd think that a nominal fee and a "THIS PAGE NOT OPEN CONTENT" blurb should be reasonably doable...

-The Gneech