Why We Should Work With WotC

[Jer]

D&D is only the gateway if enough people play it. To keep it as the gateway, funneling money back to you, you need to ensure the maximum amount of people play your game or use your rules. You accomplish this by getting the game so big that everyone plays it and keeps playing it.

Exactly. D&D only becomes profitable because of network effects. Grow the network and reap the benefits in the long term. It's exactly the insight that had Dancey create the OGL and the SRD in the first place - better to have 3pp supporting D&D and growing the game Wizards would profit from than to have everyone fracturing the market into tinier networks that weren't supporting D&D.

And it was controversial at the time among game creators precisely because what the end result could be was one system to rule them all, one system to bind them. Everything becoming D&D. And if you are not a fan of the D&D model of gaming, or you don't trust that one company owning D&D would be a good steward for the entire ttrpg industry, that sounds awful. The market actually looked like it might go that route for about 3 years until Wizards made their first product blunder - releasing a 3.5 edition of the game that was just different enough to invalidate a whole bunch of 3.0 products on the shelves just 3 years after the initial release! That was the first point where companies that were doing third party stuff took a step back and started saying "do we really want to hitch our wagons to Wizards' business plans too tightly?" The first real point of broken trust, if only a minor one compared to the ones that would come.

 

[TheSword]

It's the exact same phenomenon. That the situations are different in societal impact (and number of likely deaths) does not change the underlying logic.

Only if you cast 3pp as hapless, powerless underclasses struggling to feed themselves and not successful entrepreneurs thriving in a exploding market. Which judging by the proliferation (what 15,000 according to one thread here) means it can’t be that bad a gig.

 

[Autumnal]

Adventures were always the lowest selling books for WOTC D&D. They always rank lower than core and options books.

We'd need internals to see exact numbers.

When Paiso was founded, I’d have confidently drawn on the experience of many publishers to say that adventures just don’t pull it in like other kinds of supplements. Then Paizo made an ongoing success with its adventure paths. It turns out that with the right mix - or rather one of many possible mixes - of contents, they can sell great, in conjunction with other kinds of supplements. I’ve learned to be a lot more cautious in how I generalize.

 

[Minigiant]

When Paiso was founded, I’d have confidently drawn on the experience of many publishers to say that adventures just don’t pull it in like other kinds of supplements. Then Paizo made an ongoing success with its adventure paths. It turns out that with the right mix - or rather one of many possible mixes - of contents, they can sell great, in conjunction with other kinds of supplements. I’ve learned to be a lot more cautious in how I generalize.

Pathfinder runs on having its core rules, players options, and monsters on a free wiki It focuses heavy on its adventure paths. And its setting books are few as it focuses on the base setting.

WOTC, on the other hand, focused on core books and option book sales. It's setting books are hit and miss. And it's adventure books are either TSR conversions, packaged with a settting, or bad.

And we all know about TSR.

It seems that no matter what, a company can't do everything well and be big. And that's bad for business if your goal is to be huge.

 

[Mistwell]

No. This is a mess of their own making, and they made it out of greed. We are the wronged parties here. You do not compromise with an abuser in such a manner as to give them the opportunity to victimize you again.

They walked up and slapped us. We do not need to and should not let them bully us into taking steps back.

This is not a abuser and victim situation. Nobody slapped anybody. Do not send a message to victims of actual violence that a license negotiation is the same as their physical harm from actual violence.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

If you don't think there is an underlying logic to how people behave and how crowds react, then there is no way for you to predict anything to do with human behavior, so no then I guess there wouldn't be any reason for us to keep discussing this topic.

Yeah, no. There isn’t. Humans do not behave logically, and because of that all prediction is guesswork.

In fact, emotional intelligence is much more useful than logic to predicting human behavior.

 

[Haplo781]

This is not a abuser and victim situation. Nobody slapped anybody. Do not send a message to victims of actual violence that a license negotiation is the same as their physical harm from actual violence.

With all due respect - you are not the language police.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Only if you cast 3pp as hapless, powerless underclasses struggling to feed themselves and not successful entrepreneurs thriving in an exploding market. Which judging by the proliferation (what 15,000 according to one thread here) means it can’t be that bad a gig.

Yeah, and like…wotc isn’t a king, no one in this situation is afraid of starving to death because of what wotc does, wotc doesn’t impose order on anyone via force, and we aren’t in a situation where the only path to freedom is fire and blood.

And no one is dying.

The idea of equivocating the two is just too wild to credit.

 

[Mistwell]

With all due respect - you are not the language police.

Free speech is free but it's not consequence free. If you're going to compare a FREE license negotiation over a role playing game to actual physical violence, expect a logical consequence to be called out for going way over the top with your hyperbole.

Nor is my calling it out me being the language police. He posted it publicly for response, and that's my response, and I think it's a widely shared one.

 

[raniE]

Only if you cast 3pp as hapless, powerless underclasses struggling to feed themselves and not successful entrepreneurs thriving in a exploding market. Which judging by the proliferation (what 15,000 according to one thread here) means it can’t be that bad a gig.

Most of the people shouting down with the king were middle class people who had it pretty good but wanted influence on the government that they didn't have under the monarchy. That's how the 1789 revolution and the constitutional monarchy happened, and those were the people who led the later revolution that deposed and later killed the king. So no, it doesn't require that at all.