If all the designers who left WotC...

[Daztur]

With Monte leaving WotC (again), it seems that there is an ongoing trend within the corporate, Hasbroified atmosphere to alienate and cast-off great designers at the drop of a hat. With the success of Pathfinder, it made me wonder: why does everyone still flock to WotC?

WotC provides an excellent severance package.

 

[Janx]

So you'd never team up with Erik Mona, Monte Cook, Bruce Cordell, Heinsoo, Wyatt, Collins, etc. to make a super challenger to D&D?

It's like nobody wants to engage your Original Point.

I'll bite.

Each of those guys is a big shot. I think you'd have a problem of getting all their ideas and visions aligned and meshed into a cohesive, good product.

It's too easy for each of them to have the "one true vision" and spend too much time trying to get everybody else onboard their own idea train.

Now if we allow for the some room that these guys understand teamwork, and can bounce their ideas off and accept other ideas, I'm sure they could make a good RPG, given that each one of them can do so by themselves.

But will it be the one to topple the giant? I'm not so sure.

I think with some products, they hit this optimal resonance where it gets the majority share of the market, despite there being "better' products out there.

Without getting into bashing, consider the iPhone. it's another sweetspot product. Everybody knows what it is. Lots of people like it. People who don't, tend to own a clone product that has a better feature on it, justifying the purchase to them, but not really differentiating itself by taking the market lead in sales and mindspace.

Everybody who has a smartphone has an iPhone or a clone. If you test for name recognition of the clone's name, you'll get poor results. if you test for iPhone, everybody will know what it is.

D&D is like that. Whether gamers play it or like it, they all know what it is. Not everybody knows what PathFinder is.

There's a ton of factors that enable this effect. Including the name "Dungeons and Dragons".

if you can't get that name, you're product is stuck behind it, no matter how good it is.

At least until WotC totally hoses the product up, and I mean beyond whatever edition war hate people think is wrong with it now. I'm talking CareBears and Candyland rules crappiness beyond anything we've yet to see. Possibly FATAL-like.

 

[fireinthedust]

Raw design work, or modules and supplements?

 

[Kzach]

Without getting into bashing, consider the iPhone. it's another sweetspot product. Everybody knows what it is. Lots of people like it. People who don't, tend to own a clone product that has a better feature on it, justifying the purchase to them, but not really differentiating itself by taking the market lead in sales and mindspace.

You know, the iPhone is the perfect analogy to this situation and I'll tell you why; what was before the iPhone?

Before the iPhone, the market was dominated by Nokia. Phone-makers pumped out the same old boring crud with little to no innovation. They battled over small design ideas like flips and slides. Whee.

Then the iPhone hit and suddenly it changed the entire mobile phone landscape. Here was something that utterly blew everything else out of the water and so everyone wanted one.

Now the game is more even in terms of technology but if Apple hadn't of introduced the iPhone, we'd still probably be stuck with Nokia's woeful ideas of GUI's on tiny screens and with less computational power than a C64.

 

[fanboy2000]

One of the things I like about Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet teaming up is that they're to designers who's idea of a great RPG is most like mine.

When 3e came out, I was most interested in Monte because he worked on the DMG, and I prefer to DM. But as time went on, I realized that it was Tweet's work that I most enjoyed. This isn't a dig on Monte or Skip, I still love their stuff, it's just a matter of personal preference.

 

[Umbran]

Before the iPhone, the market was dominated by Nokia. Phone-makers pumped out the same old boring crud with little to no innovation. They battled over small design ideas like flips and slides. Whee.

If you dig around, I think you'll find that's not quite true. Almost every feature on the iPhone (and iPad) was developed earlier, by someone else, but with technology that either didn't do it particularly well yet or did it well, but was too expensive.

The iPhone and iPad are not really all that innovative in design ideas. They simply managed to put them together in working order at an affordable price point first.

The analogy, then, would be that you don't need the superstars of RPGs to design an entirely new system. You just need some competent designers to cull through the history of gaming, and find the cool features that appear elsewhere and collect them into a solid working package.

 

[Janx]

The analogy, then, would be that you don't need
the superstars of RPGs to design an entirely new system. You just need some competent designers to cull through the history of gaming, and find the cool features that appear elsewhere and collect them into a solid working package.

Not just solid, but well presented. I think the iPhone wowed a lot of people. Right before it came out, companies were working on making phones smaller. I mean REALLY small. That completely died out once the iPhone came out. It had a mechanical sense of style and naming that appealed to people.

Kind of like D&D.

The problem is, you can't call it D&D, except in China, where the rights to the name were sold, but they werent, because the chinese found out who really bought the name and wants more money, and D&D is manufactured there, so it would seem, like if they really want to keep the business, they'll decide in favor of whomever helps china better. Oh wait, wrong topic.

 

[Morrus]

WotC provides an excellent severance package.

Not to freelancers. Monte was not on staff; he was a contractor.

 

[Janx]

Not to freelancers. Monte was not on staff; he was a contractor.

that's another wierd thing, what idiot decided to let a contractor run the team?

I worked 13 years at a Fortune 20-something company. You don't put a contractor over full-timers. It's insulting, and a misalignment of resources and talent.

leaders should be fulltimers who have full ties into the company and organizational knowledge (as in knowing who's who). A Contractor is a short-term helper. A fulltimer should have been groomed for a team lead position (to eventually become a manager).

A contractor is hired to tackle a specific problem for a time period.

There may be companies that'll hire a contractor to PM a project, but I would NEVER bank my company's project success on a guy who has no stake, no business relationships and no bond with the team? No way.

Maybe that worked for WotC, but I'd have to wonder if some on his team were wondering "why ain't I running the show?"

 

[Morrus]

that's another wierd thing, what idiot decided to let a contractor run the team?

I worked 13 years at a Fortune 20-something company. You don't put a contractor over full-timers. It's insulting, and a misalignment of resources and talent.

leaders should be fulltimers who have full ties into the company and organizational knowledge (as in knowing who's who). A Contractor is a short-term helper. A fulltimer should have been groomed for a team lead position (to eventually become a manager).

A contractor is hired to tackle a specific problem for a time period.

There may be companies that'll hire a contractor to PM a project, but I would NEVER bank my company's project success on a guy who has no stake, no business relationships and no bond with the team? No way.

Maybe that worked for WotC, but I'd have to wonder if some on his team were wondering "why ain't I running the show?"

I don't know how it works at WotC, but I imagine the 4E team is small enough that - job titles aside - it's really just "Mike Mearls in charge of a half-dozen people in a room".