Steve_MND
First Post
It cuts me to the quick to see people post things like this. Sure, this may be how WotC views it, but who cares? OP is an intensely local thing, and is driven in massive part by the community. It's inevitable that the community will feel some amount of ownership.
Sure, it's inevitable, but it's also wrong. We don't own it in anything close to the sense that's being argued here, which was my point -- it's not a hobby club, it's a marketing campaign. And we're not members, we're consumers.
And OP is by no stretch of the imagination an "intensely local thing." Playing the actual games are intensely local, obviously, but virtually no other aspect of the OP is. We don't write the adventures at a local level. We don't create the storylines at a local level. We don't come up with the monsters or the situations, or the rules or the NPCs or the factions or anything else about OP at the local level. A few select conventions and a handful of stores that manage to run them quickly can perhaps report back on their tables to the people running the campaign about a recent mod via their QR codes and such, but even then, that's the closest thing, and that's often been so overly broad and vague in terms of what can be reported on, it's a tenuous connection to a 'local level' at best.
That's not to say that we can't create hobby clubs and form groups and make OP what we need it to be at the local level -- a potentially thriving social and fun experience. And in fact that's what we do all the time. But my point was that we shouldn't then project that local activity back up the corporate structure and expect them to play by our rules. And we certainly shouldn't get upset when said corporate structure doesn't capitulate to our expectations, when our expectations were incorrect to begin with.
The sentiment of "stop complaining and let yourself be marketed to" from people outside WotC drives me up the wall. Don't listen.
I'm in no way saying "stop complaining and let yourself be marketed to." Just that we need to make sure a) we actually have any sway over the thing we're trying to change and b) we're actually complaining to the correct people. If we're not on point with both of those counts, then it's just wasted effort and energy.