You reap what you sow - GSL.

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Hey, not so fast. We are still doing 4E products.

I just likely wont port over our Tome of Horrors to 4E because of the provisions of the license. We WILL do a 4E monster book, though.

Clark

Good to hear. I am still hoping for the Advanced Players Guide. I am actually looking forward on that. I don't want to wait a full year to get WotC interpretation of some classic classes. (THough I'll still buy the PHB 2, unless 4E for some bizarre reason turns into a disappointment... My group is very thrilled to run through the Keep on the Shadowfell this Friday as their first official 4E game - instead of a mere playtest...)

 

[Farland]

take a look at the Gleemax TOU!

I will do that... but not today. Between the GSL and the inability to unselect Firefox 3's new "awesomebar" I don't know if I can take more corporate top-down "we don't give a damn what the users want" information today.

 

[Orcus]

Woohoo.

I hope the "player's guide" is still in the works.

It is more than in the works. It will need a bit of tweaking. And, very likely, I wont be calling the classes "druids" and "bards" and will use alternate names (that has yet to be decided).

Here is the text of a post I just put up on our boards:

There seems to be a lot of speculation that I am "shaken" by the GSL and that maybe Necro will be going Pathfinder.

I am not shaken by the GSL. It is pretty much what I expected. It has a couple twists (such as the convert and cant go back provision). It has a few things I want clarified (does the "cant go back to OGL" also apply to new 4E products that werent conversions? why are the specific demons and devils in the SRD? what exactly does "redefine terms" mean?).

Most likely, because of the terms of the license, we wont be able to do a "Tome of Horrors" for 4E because that would mean having to stop selling pdfs of the Tome 3E, which I dont want to do. That was what led me to ask the "product by product" question in the first place. I was ok with what I thought the "product line" answer I got meant, but now seeing the GSL it is a bit more restrictive on that than I thought. Erik and I had already discussed doing a Tome of Horrors for pathfinder in print since we never did a print version of the Tome Revised and Pathfinder seemed like a great chance to do that. So that plan was in the works. This isnt a change to Pathfinder, it is saying that we are likely only doing Tome for Pathfinder and NOT for both Pathfinder and 4E.

There are also some singinficant unaswered questions regarding Tegel Manor. I just got off the phone with Bob Jr. Wizards is going to have to give us some very clear answers to some questions before Tegel can be a 4E product. It may well not be a 4E product. Now, that doesnt mean it will be a 3E product either. Its hard to say. That one is back up in the air, and a lot of the decision on this will be up to Bob not me. I certainly am not going to tie up JG content with a license if it means something bad for Bob.

That said, there will definately be some significant 4E products from Necro.

We anticipate the Advanced Player's Guide (with some slight modification) will be a 4E go.

We anticipate the Iron Tower Adventure Path will be a 4E go.

We anticipate several of our pending adventures will be a 4E go.

One or two of our adventures that are in the hopper will likely need some questions answered because of their use of content from prior 3E products.

So yes Necro will be doing 4E for sure. No doubt. We will also do at least one and maybe a few 3.5/Pathfinder products.

Everyone please let the dust settle on this for a few days.

Clark

 

[Aus_Snow]

(. . .) the inability to unselect Firefox 3's new "awesomebar" (. . .)

Muh?

I'm using FF3 right now, and I have no idea what you mean, sorry. Um, what is it?

 

[Alzrius]

It's worth noting that over in this thread Linae has answered a few questions.

First, section headings in the SRD are also 4E references that cannot be defined, redefined, or altered.

Secondly, the exclusion of various monsters, including the specific types of demons and devils, was deliberate.

 

[Mercule]

I don't think, in otherwords, that is has the slightest thing to do with some jerk moves by a limited number of 3rd party publishers. I don't think the juggernaut really cares when a few mosquitos sting it. It slaps them with its tail and moves on with life.

This is where I'm slowly heading towards.

My pre-GSL release opinion was that WotC was trying to shore up some jerk moves and that's where a lot of my initial reaction came from. I still maintain that there have been (and continue to be) a lot of jerk moves.

As the GSL sinks in, though, I'm changing my mind about why it was released. So, I've been trying to reflect that without recanting my opinion that there have been jerks. I don't know that there is any connection between the two.

I suspect that you're right that they want to see support for D&D, but no full-fledged 3rd party games. I think they also want to shut down things like HeroForge and PC Gen. On the latter, it probably really is for competitive reasons.

 

[2WS-Steve]

Mongoose's "Pocket Player's Handbook" is the cardinal example of the sowing, IMO. The simple existence of that book is pretty much a slap in WotC's face. It's insulting and shows a company that is crass and disrespectful.

I don't get many 3rd party supplements, and generally regard Mongoose as one of the lowest quality, anyway. But, publishing that book pretty well sealed that there's no way I'd buy anything from the company.

Mongoose has also paid money for the rights to classic game systems such as Runequest and Traveler -- then turned around and released those rules under the OGL for anyone to use for free -- including offering free downloadable SRDs for both rulesets.

Whatever one thinks about the quality of their material, they're definitely one of the good guys in the open content community.

 

[JVisgaitis]

I don't know everybody's sales numbers, nor would I divulge them if I did know, but I would be very surprised if there were very many products at all that broke the 5,000 mark after the release of 3.5.

We sold 800 copies of Denizens of Avadnu through distribution and we were the first 3rd party monster book released for 3.5. The sad thing is the presale numbers through distribution prior to 3.5 were 1800. We were the #1 company with Impressions for 2 months, and I was told that our sales were incredible considering the state of the market at that time.

 

[Darrin Drader]

We sold 800 copies of Denizens of Avadnu through distribution and we were the first 3rd party monster book released for 3.5. The sad thing is the presale numbers through distribution prior to 3.5 were 1800. We were the #1 company with Impressions for 2 months, and I was told that our sales were incredible considering the state of the market at that time.

Yeah, that sounds about right. That's a very good book by the way. I liked the print copy so much I bought the expanded PDF after it was released.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I suspect that you're right that they want to see support for D&D, but no full-fledged 3rd party games. I think they also want to shut down things like HeroForge and PC Gen. On the latter, it probably really is for competitive reasons.

I doubt that they want to shut down anything specifically. It's competitive, sure, in that they basically want their monopoly on D&D e-products, since that is a major new focus of 4e. But I bet free stuff mostly falls under the "fan usage," and you will still have generators for 4e characters if the WotC offerings aren't robust enough for some folks. I don't think WotC is so insecure about their offerings that they NEED them to be the ONLY ONES in existence, but I do think they don't want folks muddying the waters and competing with what they see to be one of their big cash cows in 4e.

What IS the value of ENWorld to WOTC when Gleemax/DDI is intended to be a commercial cash cow? ENWorld is direct competition. Why go to Wizard's buggy, slow, and over-moderated chat boards when there's a thriving community here? ENworld is making money -- not much money, I'm sure, barely enough to stay afloat, but money nonetheless -- by providing community support for D&D.

There's a LOT of answers to that question, but let's stick with some of the most obvious.

#1: ENWorld won't be the DDI. Even if ENWorld tried to put out its own online magazines to directly compete with the DDI, I doubt Russ would be interested in character generators and interactive maps and rules databases, and the content of any theoretical "EN World Insider" would be different than DDI's content.

#2: Gleemax isn't supposed to be a massive cash cow. The DDI is, that's why there's a monthly fee. Gleemax is there to serve as a user base. It'll be free, it will might have ads (probably mostly for WotC stuff), but it isn't meant to be much of a revenue stream. Instead, it is meant to cross-polinate WotC games, to get people who play Magic to perhaps get into D&D via an online acquaintence, and vice-versa, all along the product line. It's nothing more than a centralized message board system that reaches beyond the WotC core base.

To put it more pointedly, D&D doesn't exist without a community. Gleemax is there to keep the community alive. The more alive, rich, vibrant, and appealing the community is, the better D&D (and other Wizards games) fare.

#3: Competition is good for you. I believe WotC is smart enough to know that there is a portion of their potential audience that won't touch the Wizard's boards for various reasons. EN World can serve that audience, and it still gives WotC news releases a bigger slice of the attention pie than non-WotC stuff, just because the news that happens at WotC is usually bigger news (due to its juggernaut status) than most other news.

#4: Why create bad blood? If Gleemax isn't itself supposed to turn a profit, and if ENWorld members still buy the DDI subscriptions, and if the competition will still help serve the audience, why the heck would they knowingly and with deliberate intent irk a very large audience of potential fans? The quickest way to make sure Gleemax sinks is to send ENWorld into the darkweb where the people who know about it can still find it, and Wizards can't touch it except at insane costs to itself. If you go after ENWorld, you turn it, and, to a certain extent, a large portion of the entire 3rd party industry, into instant martyrs at the hands of the Big Evil Corporation. It's a bigger PR nightmare than criticising 3e ever was.

I am very interested in seeing what the terms of the "fan site policy" are, and if things like the "homebrew" forums in ENWorld technically violate them. The fact they even feel a new "fan site policy" is necessary is, I think, rather worrisome.

I'm sure it'll be more about clarification than about nullification. Stopping excited DMs from posting their cool new stuff would be a boneheaded move reminiscent of TSR's less glorious moments because it would chill the community, create bad blood, and ultimately stop something that wasn't hurting you in the first place.