Stuff I want (From you 3pp People)

[MichaelSomething]

What about adventures? Lot of people are complaining that WOTC adventures suck. Doesn't that scream "lots of people who would be willing to buy adventures form other companies?"

 

[Truename]

What about adventures? Lot of people are complaining that WOTC adventures suck. Doesn't that scream "lots of people who would be willing to buy adventures form other companies?"

ENWorld gets my $3/month because WotBS is fantastic and Scales of War is not. I've barely looked at their other downloads, except for Fantasy Money, which was execrable.

I also spent ~$50 on various Counter Collection digital products, so I could have nice counters in combat.

There was a time at which I would have spent good money for well-printed condition tokens of the sort Gabe at PA uses. But I've since made my own because nothing came in the quantity, price, and quality I wanted. (Alea tools--too expensive, too vague.)

I've probably spent more on ink, paper, and chipboard than on any 3pp products--money I would have happily given to 3pp if they had the product I wanted.

I find treasure parcels and magic item wishlists to be a dreadful pain in the ass, and I would spend money on a good solution, if a solution existed.

I love things that I can physically hand to my players. My willingness to pay goes up when it's more impressive than what I can do on my own printer, and it has to be useful to me in some way.

I have a subscription to DDI and I have all the high-quality rules content my heart desires. Their adventures are crap, though, their approach to treasure uninspiring, and they don't sell all the little physical fiddly bits I love.

FWIW.

 

[jmucchiello]

Well, what I'd like to WRITE, I can't because of the GSL. I'd like to update my Before Level One book for 4e. Characters in 4e start as Heroes. My Before Level One book would provide for gaming at the fresh off the farm level that 4e doesn't handle.

Why not?

Because, as I said, the GSL doesn't let me. If I can't redefine what it means to be level 1 that leaves me nothing to work with for those levels before level 1. The product I have in mind involves actually adventuring and fighting monster as a party against threats that are less than level 1 threats. The GSL doesn't let me create that crunch.

space retheme

So write them?

Not my strength. I'd like to play in them, but nobody wants me to write it.

Sure it can. You just have to make a product that's good enough that I will want to overcome my annoyance of it not being in the CB or the compendium as a whole.

That's one sale. But this thread has shown far more people want stuff I don't care about and my call for innovative, non-CB stuff, was met with meh. Not encouraging.

Publish a bunch of random feats or powers that maybe change things in a minor way? Sorry that won't cut it.

All the GSL really says is you can't change the existing elements. You can make up your own, and you can add to it though, so go ahead make something cool.

Yes, but level is an existing element that can't be changed. What it means to gain a level is an existing element that can't be changed. That makes truly innovative stuff difficult.

One thing I'd love to see done but haven't got the manpower for a real playtest would be to take an existing 3.x wizard, beef him up a bit, stretch his spell list to 30 levels, and run him 3.x style in a 4e world. This "class" (can I redefine that?) would not gain daily/encounter/at will powers at specified levels, he'd have spells (can I redefine that?) that he memorizes and casts a certain number per time period (I might mess with that or use the UA recharge spells thing).

And Scribble, it's not that I don't want your money. It's that I don't have the time to struggle against the GSL to produce something that I would not be satisfied with in the end. That is why there are fewer 3pps.

 

[catastrophic]

I don't know if it's really constructive for supposed 3pp people to derail the thread into making lots of excuses based on their personal taste and opinions of the GSL.

Ok, great, you're not interested. Maybe you can go bitch about the GSL somewhere else, and leave this thread for the people who are interested in buying 4e 3PP stuff, and the 3pp people who are actually interested in making products for fourth edition that people might actually buy.

I think it would be more constructive if people were able to talk about what they're interested buying in without people going on and on about it being 'boring' or impossible due to a dodgy reading of the GSL. And no, I don't think the omission of 'what swordmages do in this setting' would make one whit of difference to how well a campaign setting would sell- especially since ALL the power sources and roles are in the SRD!

BTW, there's nothing really stopping you from doing a before level one book. Just define your terms- make a bunch of new classes with the 'newbie' power source, explain what that power source means in the context of your newbiequest custom setting, and work from there.

 

[Mark]

(snip)

It is a very good thing for 3PPs who have spent time looking into the options for two years to lend their expertise and opinions to a thread that is bemoaning the limited 3PP support for the most recent system. FWIW, most of the bad news regarding what can and cannot be done has also been accompanied by helpful suggests of what a DM can do alternately to make up for the deficiency, which is constructive, IMO. Your mischaracterization of what some people are trying to do in this thread is erroneous. "Dodgy?" If what you were suggesting were true, what is being requested would have come to be in the last year and a half. If such could be done and money could be made, not just someone but a whole lot of someones would already be doing it in abundance. Thinking otherwise is what is "dodgy."

 

[catastrophic]

Mark, i'm not actually interested in continuing this tangent, you are of course free to post as many excuses and greviances against the GSL as you like.


So, getting back to the topic, what would people think about a book introducing a new monster or 'family' of monsters, which included a bunch of builds, fluff, background, notes for introducing them to a seting, and maybe even a PC race or two (which would only take a few pages, after all)?

I think a decent monster concept properly fleshed out could make a pretty good book, and AFAIK new monsters can be added to the WOTC monster builder quite easily, also.

One problem I forsee with this is that any monster would have to have a lot of character and a 'hook' to compete with all the monsters already in the MM, but otoh, the more distinctive you make a creature, the more likely it's style is to turn some people off.

In the Monster Manuals that just means they flip to another page, but in a book based around a single 'family' of monsters, that isn't an option and they might just put the book down instead.

 

[kenmarable]

It is a very good thing for 3PPs who have spent time looking into the options for two years to lend their expertise and opinions to a thread that is bemoaning the limited 3PP support for the most recent system. FWIW, most of the bad news regarding what can and cannot be done has also been accompanied by helpful suggests of what a DM can do alternately to make up for the deficiency, which is constructive, IMO. Your mischaracterization of what some people are trying to do in this thread is erroneous. "Dodgy?" If what you were suggesting were true, what is being requested would have come to be in the last year and a half. If such could be done and money could be made, not just someone but a whole lot of someones would already be doing it in abundance. Thinking otherwise is what is "dodgy."

At least how I see it:

A) This is more like a brainstorming thread for fans to say what they would like to see. In the brainstorming phase of idea generation a lot of naysaying can be counterproductive.

B) Constructive criticism is helpful, however. So props for those adding that.

C) Personally, I think interpreting the GSL to state that WotC can freely take ownership of your IP is "dodgy" but that's just my opinion.

D) The idea that if it hasn't been done in the last year and a half, then it obviously can't be done and make a profit seems wrong to me. Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed didn't come out for 3 years. Speaking of Monte Cook, 1 and half years after 3.0 release, he had only 4 products out. Green Ronin was just starting to talk about Mutant & Masterminds, Paizo was a couple months from even existing. In fact, from viewing archive.org from Feb 2002 (1 and a half years after 3.0 release), it looks Creative Mountain Games was just getting ready to release their first product. So looking at the first 1.5 years of an edition isn't a very good indicator, especially with pretty much all of the big name 3pp moving away from official D&D for various reasons. Just like 3e, other than Goodman, from what I can tell the majority of the 4e support is from small companies, many of them first publishing with 4e. So, claiming that if it hasn't happened yet, it can't, is not a sound argument.

Getting back to your original statements, though, regarding 4E, it seems clear that not much 3PP stuff is actually being produced, not much seems to be in demand, and that there must be reasons. As far as our agreement or disagreement, we seem to agree there is a obvious deficiency in support but you seem to believe it is not one of the casues of the dificiency in 3PP production. So, I have to ask, how would you explain the dificiency in 3PP production?

I'm certainly no expert and my opinions are only semi-educated, but I think it's a combination of many factors. Yes, the GSL is more restrictive and surely has scared away some, but not all publishers. Especially with WotC seriously dropping the ball on getting the GSL out on time and 3.5 sales plummeting after the 4e announcement (when they were down already), 3pp had to do something to fill the gap and for many of the larger ones, they went to other systems. So in this first year and a half of 4e, other than Goodman, there were no large publishers standing ready to release large products that could get into the distribution chains. Just small PDF/POD publishers and start ups. 3.0 had an incredible upswing in the whole market (for a while there, if it had a d20 logo on it, you were crazy to print less than 1000, and if your company was actually known then print runs in the tens of thousands were standard). Unfortunately, 4e didn't have that same whole market upswing, and I'm not sure it could have no matter what WotC did (other than perhaps wait for a better economic climate or make a worse 3.x system that fewer people would have wanted to stay with). So without that whole market upswing, the small 3pp and start ups have a much slower and tougher climb to profitability and robust product lines. Also, as others have mentioned, the DDI Character Builder does make most player-focused crunch products FAR less appealing to customers. Add in market fracturing between 3.x/Pathfinder and 4e, distributors and stores going belly up in extreme numbers, there are a ton of business realities conspiring against strong 3pp support for 4e.


Back onto the original brainstorming, something I would like to see if a book of patrons. Like what WotC has been doing with warlocks, but for all of the classes. And for those classes that aren't open, the power sources still are. So you can have general divine and primal patrons. Heck, I'll have to double check, but I believe the list of all planned power sources are in the SRD, so you can even have shadow patrons and so on.

It would be great if it also included information on contacts and minions as well as quests that could be worked into existing adventures. Especially make them kind of templated or with clear points to swap out to easily tailor to whatever PC and adventure. Extra bonus would be a discussion and/or quest ideas for the PCs themselves shaping into patrons through the epic tier.

Crud, sounds like a fun book to write. *sigh* Too many ideas, not enough time. Hey, if anyone actually wants to write this, I'd happily contribute some pieces.

 

[kenmarable]

So, getting back to the topic, what would people think about a book introducing a new monster or 'family' of monsters, which included a bunch of builds, fluff, background, notes for introducing them to a seting, and maybe even a PC race or two (which would only take a few pages, after all)?

That's a great idea! Interesting enough flavor, and I'd buy it.

 

[Mark]

I'll have to get to the other half of your reply a bit later but allow me to make some adjustments to the thoughts in the first half.

At least how I see it:

A) This is more like a brainstorming thread for fans to say what they would like to see. In the brainstorming phase of idea generation a lot of naysaying can be counterproductive.

I think there is a difference between simply naysaying and rendering an opinion based on circumstances. If someone says they would like to see water flow uphill and someone else explains the inherent difficulty, I'm not of the opinon that it is naysaying.

B) Constructive criticism is helpful, however. So props for those adding that.

I know I am mostly trying to be encouraging in some way but my alternate suggestions are meeting with some amount of naysaying.

C) Personally, I think interpreting the GSL to state that WotC can freely take ownership of your IP is "dodgy" but that's just my opinion.

I'm not too fond of that interpretation either (I won't get into it here) but there might be room for it and if someone believes that is possible, they certainly would have further grounds to believe it would be difficult to fight after the fact given the likely disparity in the ability to fight and win a lawsuit. "Dodgy" implies dishonest, though, not just difference of opinion, and I'm not comfortable with that term being applied broadly to 3PPs as it was above. I won't report the post because I feel the above poster was somewhat empassioned and ill-informed when posting the statement, but I can assure you if WotC had been accused of dishonesty there would have been a slew of reports and a moderator warning in regard to such an accusation. I'd be happy if we, as members of this community, could let calmer heads prevail and either just let the slight slide with some correction in the facts as has been done, or even for an apology to surface (ideally). I'm guesssing that the continued derision in the follow up statement to the insult makes the latter unlikely.

D) The idea that if it hasn't been done in the last year and a half, then it obviously can't be done and make a profit seems wrong to me. Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed didn't come out for 3 years. Speaking of Monte Cook, 1 and half years after 3.0 release, he had only 4 products out. Green Ronin was just starting to talk about Mutant & Masterminds, Paizo was a couple months from even existing. In fact, from viewing archive.org from Feb 2002 (1 and a half years after 3.0 release), it looks Creative Mountain Games was just getting ready to release their first product. So looking at the first 1.5 years of an edition isn't a very good indicator, especially with pretty much all of the big name 3pp moving away from official D&D for various reasons. Just like 3e, other than Goodman, from what I can tell the majority of the 4e support is from small companies, many of them first publishing with 4e. So, claiming that if it hasn't happened yet, it can't, is not a sound argument.

Again, there is such a difference between what can happen under the GSL and what did happen under the OGL, that such comparisons are fruitless. I'd first caution that things developed over time with the OGL because any type of such open licensing in gaming was new. At the point of the introduction of the GSL, there are literally hundreds (400? or more) 3PPs who worked under the OGL who had the opportunity to look over the GSL to see what could be done. Under the OGL there were some 3PPs who dropped out but more and more to take their place, even as the edition upgrade from 3.0 to 3.5 took place. What seems to be happening with the GSL is that many were interested, few came on board, and more and more are dropping off with no one replacing them. As to whether previous interpretations of the facts are sound, citing evidence of what is actually happening strikes me as a very sound assessment of the situation as it exists. As long as it can be kept objective and civil, I'm certainly willing to entertain other notions of why the situation exists but to my mind the simplest explanation makes the most sense. It is worth noting that most of the companies/people you cite (aside from Goodman, Monte Cook, Green Ronin, Paizo) not only chose to not publish under the GSL but have (search the Internet archives) made rather strong statements as to why they would not.


As said above, I'll try to address the second half of your reply to me a bit later.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

A big monster book focusing on one "class" of monsters would be pretty swell.

For instance...I love the Yuan-Ti. They are my favorite bad guys. If someone created the "BIG BOOK OF YUAN-TI" with bad guys to fight spanning levels 1 through 30, filling all of the monster roles and giving me options at every level to challenge my PCs....thats awesome!

Granted I don't fill every encounter of a campaign with just one type of monster, but having the filled in niches would be REALLY handy if that monster type was vital to your campaign.

One must-have for such a product is a way to cut-n-paste the statblocks so I can create and print out a page per encounter using the new beasties.

The same product for goblinoids and orcs would similarly get my monies.

DS