Charles Ryan on Adventures

[mearls]

I feel like there's a lot of material which is "hole-filler". As in - the information from WOTC is "light" on transmutation, necromancy, drow, devils, cavaliers - and to fill this single hole, an entire book pops up. My "need" was maybe 2-4 pages, but here's 100+ pages.

This sentence pretty much summarizes my frustration wtih d20 material as both a customer and a freelance designer. There were many times I had to design to an outline where 3 pages, not 10, was more than enough to cover something.

I think this is the strength of PDFs - you can give a topic as much space as it needs, not the amount dictated by the economics of printing a book. This is a big challenge facing print d20 publishers, IMO.

 

[scourger]

Third, the reason that many 3rd party companies focus on other material is that for the same effort as creating an adventure, other supplement material can make you more money and sell more books.

Notice my 3rd point. It isn't that adventures DO NOT make money, it is simply the fact that other material makes MORE money for the SAME effort. If you are running a business and employing people full-time (like Mongoose and Green Ronin as two examples), you have an obligation to your employees (and probably your family as well) to focus on the products that are going to earn more money. Notice that both of these companies are publishing (or planning to publish) adventure material, it simply isn't the main focus of either. I am sure people are going to argue with the idea of feeling obligated to earn as much money as possible, run a business and employ people dependant on your business for the $ to feed their families (not just your own) and you might have a different perspective.

This is why I refuse to buy "other material" such as sourcebooks that get no (or little) adventure support. For me, the best purchases aside from core books that I make for d20 are adventures. Yes, Dungeon is the proven performer. A product like Ancient Kingdoms Mesopotamia that is an adventure-sourcebook is a close second in terms of bang for the buck. I keep hoping that my economic votes will affect those people who are trying to capture my $$ for themselves (or company, family, employees, etc.). I'd like to think that the d20 downturn that I keep hearing about is in some way related to such financial pressures and choices. Anyway, I'm doing my part to send this consumer's message.

 

[scourger]

I can't speak for Charles, but I think his point is that d20 companies that release core rulebooks (whether for homegrown or licensed settings) in essence compete with WotC by offering a competing system, even if it's d20-based. If a game is too far from core D&D to be completely compatible, then it competes with D&D.

I think it's more a case that such books run counter to d20's strength. If you're using d20, it makes sense to make things as compatible as possible. The strength of d20 is that D&D players can quickly and easily pick up your book and add it to their games.

Exactly. I've already undertaken to learn 1,000+ pages for the core d20 (D&D) rules. A supplemental product should be completely portable to the kind of game I want to run. A bunch of weird variant rules that make an effectively new game won't attract me at all to the product(s). A useful d20 product uses the system as much as possible with as few changes as possible to appeal to as many users as possible.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't want to learn a bunch of new stuff unless it is really simple and really adds to the game. It's already complicated enough (almost too complicated). Don't try to compete with D&D--work with it.

 

[Uder]

I was not at WotC when they released 3.5, so I can't tell you if what happened with 3.5 was intentional or not.

I think they meant to release it. Unless you're implying something else.

 

[Rasyr]

As many people on these boards know, when third edition and the d20 License launched, we thought a lot of third parties would see adventures for D&D as a great opportunity. WotC published a spate of them early on (the adventure path, Return to the Temple) to sort of get the ball rolling, but after that we left the category to the third-party publishers.

I think that it is important to note here that one of the principle reasons given for the OGL was that doing adventures just did not make adequate returns for the investments. It is also important to note that the printing costs per book for adventures, for large companies such as WotC is actually often less than it is for smaller publishers. This is because WotC can have many more copies printed at a time, and thus get bulk discounts that smaller publishers cannot.

Unfortunately, over the past few years most of the d20 publishers decided that it was better for their business to compete directly with us, and abandoned adventures in favor of sourcebooks of the sort we already make (and make better than anyone else). As a result, the adventure market has been largely empty for the past few years. (And it's probably no coincidence that many d20 publishers seem to be struggling these days.)

No real surprise here. Publishing adventures gives less returns overall than other types of source books.

* I think it's a grave mistake to attribute the downswing in d20 sales with 3.5. The information I've had access to hasn't shown a slide downward that corellated with that event.

Actually, IMO, the glut of 3.0 products on the market at the time caused a downswing, which led to 3.5 (2 years earlier than originally planned), which led to another downswing (at least for the remainder of the year in which it was released).

* Finally, and this ties into the point above, none of the print companies understand or utilize the open source nature of the OGL and the d20 SRD. We haven't seen any steady, incremental improvements in the engine. Everyone just reinvents everything all the time. I think the PDF market has the print companies beat here.

The problem here is two-fold (or maybe three-fold). First off, I think that many companies are fighting being turned into consumers as opposed to creators. They are already paying authors to write products, they don't want to support their competitors by purchasing their products just to be able to complete their own.

Secondly, without a central repository for the developers/authors, there are no "incremental improvements". Notice that the only time that the SRD has been updated is when WotC released 3.5 and/or when they released information from other core products (notice that there are a LOT of WotC products that are not under the OGL, or had portions of their content released under the OGL). There is also no way for anybody else to update or add to the SRD. Without that ability, there is no way for "incremental improvements" to become "official". To add to this, many times several different companies would actually be doing paralell development on similar products.

Finally, and this ties into the part about the central repository, open source is about shared development, and freely allowing changes/modifications to the users. In the computer industry, companies based upon open source make their profits through services surrounding the product, not the actual product itself. This is impossible to do within a publishing business model, and thus is a major issue of attempting any sort of comparison of a GPL business model with an OGL business model.

I did a post not too long ago where I stated that I thought that the OGL had failed in a number of respects (not all, but at least some). The lack of adventures (one of the reasons given for the implementation of the OGL) was one. Well, it wasn't actually a failure of the OGL, just a failure of the reasoning of folks who seriously believed that any company using the OGL was going to concentrate on products that WotC didn't want to do themselves (yes, there are a few exceptions). A second big failure of the OGL was what I mentioned above about the lack of central repository.

I can't speak for Charles, but I think his point is that d20 companies that release core rulebooks (whether for homegrown or licensed settings) in essence compete with WotC by offering a competing system, even if it's d20-based. If a game is too far from core D&D to be completely compatible, then it competes with D&D.

I think it's more a case that such books run counter to d20's strength.

Umm.. you mean like Iron Heroes, the competing system that you wrote?

And as to printings, I'm fairly confident that the Player's Handbook was printed at least once between its release and the 3.5 release. So that really isn't a significant measurement of time.

First printing of 3.0 included a small section at the back that some monsters and stuff. The second printing reprinted a bunch of Q&A from Sage Advice.

I think they meant to release it. Unless you're implying something else.

I believe that he was refering to the effect that 3.5 had upon the third party market. In short, it ended up hurting and outright killing a number of companies. To many players just stopped buying 3.0 products after 3.5 came out, and there was too much 3.0 material still left in the distribution channels.

 

[mythusmage]

Respect for Pramas, waning...

Please, tell me who did the napalming of the d20 fields, and who initially planted the seeds? This is more like sharecroppers refusing to rotate their crops and ruining their leasors lands.

When's the last time your crops were napalmed? It's a metaphor (cf Simile).

 

[Uder]

I believe that he was refering to the effect that 3.5 had upon the third party market. In short, it ended up hurting and outright killing a number of companies. To many players just stopped buying 3.0 products after 3.5 came out, and there was too much 3.0 material still left in the distribution channels.

I get that.

If I remember right (and I have a terrible memory) things were trending down well before 3.5 was even announced. I've always been under the impression that 3.5 was an attempt to reverse that.

The thing is, it reads to me like he's implying that this effect might've been intentional, like there was some kind of conspiracy to rub out the competition. Which is paranoid to say the least. It's much more insulting than anything Charles Ryan said, that's for sure.

Or... it might've just been an unintentional slight on an internet message board. Just about everyone does it now and then. Hmmm, I know I saw one just recently. I just can't remember where...

 

[mythusmage]

I think they meant to release it. Unless you're implying something else.

I have a 1st printing of the 3e PHB. The one that produced almost as much errata and clarifications per chapter as Mythus. 3.5 was necessary. Wizards had a problem, Wizards had to do something about it, or risk seeing the market collapse as people turned their back on D&D because of all the mistakes.

I remember 3e. Even if you think the basic premise of the design was valid it still had enough mistakes to make it unviable in the long run. Without 3.5 Wizards would be a card game publisher and we'd be posting at RPG Net about the next D&D wannabe from Whoneedsenglishcompositionskills LLC.

How Wizards did it was wrong, but it needed to be done.

 

[Pramas]

The thing is, it reads to me like he's implying that this effect might've been intentional, like there was some kind of conspiracy to rub out the competition.

No. What I was saying is that I don't know if WotC's intent from the get-go was to essentially produce a new edition or whether that was an unintentional by-product of the design process. I know from my time at WotC that the original 3E plan did not involve a revision in 2003. That was decided on later. So did the folks in charge say, "We really need to do a new edition but there's no way the fanbase will go for it 2003. Let's call it 3.5 and pretend it's more of a revision than a new edition"? Or did the design process start with the goal of a revision and just go too far? I'd say the latter more likely than the former, but either one is possible.

In any case, several important factors contributed to the decline of the d20 market, as I mentioned before. The upshot of all this is that two years after 3.5 there are maybe a half dozen print publishers still supporting d20 in a meaningful sense. I would not be surprised if even this small number drops next year. If 2002 was the height of the glut, I believe we are approaching the nadir. The Green Ronin d20 strategy in 2004-2005 was to hang tough, keep putting out the quality books we are known for, watch a lot of our competition fade away, and then reap the benefits. Well, here we are, still supporting d20 with new lines like Thieves' World (and product #2 of that line is an adventure no less) and even doing a new d20 Modern setting (Damnation Decade), but we have yet to see the Great d20 Rebound.

2006 will be an interesting year.

 

[Hussar]

Exactly. I've already undertaken to learn 1,000+ pages for the core d20 (D&D) rules. A supplemental product should be completely portable to the kind of game I want to run. A bunch of weird variant rules that make an effectively new game won't attract me at all to the product(s). A useful d20 product uses the system as much as possible with as few changes as possible to appeal to as many users as possible.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't want to learn a bunch of new stuff unless it is really simple and really adds to the game. It's already complicated enough (almost too complicated). Don't try to compete with D&D--work with it.

I'd like to second this point of view. I'm not a developer, and I don't want to be. I do buy d20 products from time to time, but, only after a great deal of research and knowing exactly what I want. I'd been stung too many times in 3e buying crap to want to shell out cash for something that lines my catbox.

I've gotten so bad about not wanting to make radical changes to mechanics that I still refuse to even look at psionics. I know lots of people say glowing things about the XPH, but, in all honesty, why do I want to plow through another couple of hundred pages of rules, when I could simply create a sorcerer with a different spell list, give him some different feats, and call him a psionicist? Why do I need an entire new ruleset when the one I've got works?

To be quite honest, that's why things like AE, IH, et al don't interest me all that much. I actually LIKE 3.5 mechanics. I have no major complaints. I have no idea if I'm in some tiny minority here, but, really, I think there are a number of gamers like me who don't want to spend the next year or two working out new rules, we just want to game. Add in a new PrC? No worries, we can do that. Add in a new class? Not a big deal, done it before. Spend the next few months figuring out a complete rework the spell system into a point based system? Huh? What? No thanks.

I personally think Mr Mearls has hit it quite well. The d20 crowd seems to be cranking out variant games time and time again and, well, I don't want to play a variant game. I want to play DnD. And, judging by the WOTC numbers, I'd say that there are lots of people like me who aren't terribly interested in reinventing the wheel with every new book. Gimme something I can port directly into my game with a minimum of work and I'll buy it every time. Gimme something that's going to bite into my very small amount of free time before I can even begin to use it? I'll pass.

Just a couple of coppers.