Charles Ryan on Adventures

Vocenoctum said:
Also, I've been gaming since the 80's, yeah. Earliest product I bought new was Dragon #90, which drew me in. The internet has changed the industry a lot though.

And there was no SRD file in the 80s. You bought the books. Your friends bought the books.


This is another case where WotC releasing the SRD -- for publishers -- is making some people think everything should be free. The SRD exists so that publishers will create products that then support the products the SRD was built from.
 

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philreed said:
The SRD exists so that publishers will create products that then support the products the SRD was built from.


I don't know why anyone would dispute that fact. I will add that when a "fan" builds a website and puts up a feat of their own creation they are acting as a defacto "publisher" in that case and in relation to your truism that I quoted.
 



Mark CMG said:
I don't know why anyone would dispute that fact. I will add that when a "fan" builds a website and puts up a feat of their own creation they are acting as a defacto "publisher" in that case and in relation to your truism that I quoted.
But there are some who are disputing it. Right here in this very thread. There is at least one person who has been saying that he thinks SRDs (plural) are part of support for products, support that should be given away for free to the public.

Mark, the rest of this post is most definitely not aimed at you. :D It is meant as just a generalized comment on things.


A few weeks ago I started a thread where I had stated that the OGL had failed in general. I was derided, laughed at, and argued with over my opinion (no real biggie, I normally have thick skin hehe). Then along comes Merric post something that Charles Ryan stated over on the WotC forums. And you know what? Mr. Ryan's comments actually support my opinion that the OGL has failed in some respects.

There were several motivations and goals for the creation of the OGL (and the SRD to go along with it). First of all, it was to allow other companies to produce products that support D&D (not d20, but D&D). Products that WotC did not want to do because they felt that those products would not produce enough of a return to make them worthwhile (i.e. adventures and such).

Also, the OGL (in conjunction with the d20STL, which was envisioned and created at the same time) was to allow companies to create and share the mechanics that they came up with to produce a better system overall. And to do all of this with as little direct supervision from WotC as possible.

THe OGL was meant to reduce the total number of systems on the market overall, by getting companies to switch over to using d20 (thus ultimately supporting D&D in their eyes).

Now these are quite likely not the only reasons, but they are the three that stand out the most. And in the long run they failed, all three of them (to one degree or another). (the bolded portion is important here..)

Now, how did they fail, you ask?

1) Support of D&D through 3rd party products - When first placed under the OGL, the number of companies that jumped on the bandwagon, or came into existance (and jumping on the bandwagon) was higher than expected, by several orders of magnitude. I can see you sitting there saying that that means it was successful, but sorry, your wrong. Something can fail by not doing well enough, but something can also fail by doing too well, as in this case.

So many people jumped into publishing that the market was very quickly flooded with product, the vast majority of which was outright garbage. You had multiple books on just about any topic. And guess what? Relatively few of them were the adventures that WotC had been hoping for. There were at least a thousand products out for 3.0, and out of those thousand, you had maybe a few dozen adventures. The vast majority of products were of the type that WotC itself was planning on doing. There was also a small number who went in different directions and started experimenting (M&M, Spycraft, etc.)

So, out of so many products, very few were doing what WotC wanted them to do. That means that this goal failed.

2) Cross-polization of development - This is another failure. Those products that include material from products produced by other companies stand out as the exceptions. They are not the rule. The total number is just a tiny fraction of the total number of d20 products produced and IIRC, none of them are from before 3.5 was released (I could be wrong about this, am just saying that I don't remember any).

Thus, this goal also failed overall as well.

3) Reduction of the number of systems - Did not happen, plain and simple. While some companies toyed with d20, or did dual-statted material, most of the companies that existed before the OGL never touched it, or kept it completely seperate from their normal system (such as White Wolf did). New systems continued to be released (HARP, Omni Sytem, Dogs in the Vineyard, Meddling Kids, etc.). Revisions of older systems took place (GURPS). Systems that that were thought to be dead came back (WEG's d6 system). Thus this goal also failed.


Now of these three goals, the one that WotC is currently addressing is the first one, the support products. WotC is getting back into doing adventures. That alone says that WotC thinks that #1 in my list has failed. Here is Mr. Ryan's quote from the first page again so that you can read it in context with what I have just said.
Charles Ryan said:
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.

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.)

D&D players have made it clear that they're interested in adventures (as you make clear in this very thread), and we're listening!

As you know, we don't generally discuss titles more than about nine months ahead of release, so I can't give you any specifics. I will say this: we think this hole in the marketplace is a long-term phenomenon, so we're looking at long-term solutions!
 


Yair said:
Actually, Ars Magica 5e is significantly more successful than predicted, which to some extent is likely the result of the free pdf thing, but even Atlas doesn't know just how much the free pdf contributed. There is just no way to isolate its effect.
If you want to attribute all the "extra" sales to the free pdf, including the impressive sales of accessories such as True Lineages who sold out a few months after publishing, I believe the ovreall effect of the free pdf was positive for the company. Of course, you can just as validly claim the free pdf had no substantial impact. The data is just not there.
I don't dispute that the free pdf of 4th edition may have boosted sales of 5th edition, but that's a completely different scenario than what we're talking about here. 5th edition isn't a supplement for 4th edition. There's a big difference between releasing a book for free to boost sales of its supplements at the expense of core book sales, and releasing a book for free to boost sales of a future edition that invalidates the book given for free.

When releasing a new edition of a game, a publisher has very little to lose by giving away the old edition for free as advertising. The old edition's sales are going to drop off to nothing in a short while anyway, and sales of the new core book have a higher profit margin than supplements. But when a game edition is still alive, and supplements are being made, a publisher stands to lose a lot.
 

Breakdaddy said:
You and Joe are rich, so quit complainin'! :lol:

I used to do reviews for Shadis and Pyramid because they helped pay to support the hobby prior to publishers actually sending me stuff.

And I buy most of my Warhammer stuff from Amazon.com or Buy.com. At it's retail price, I wouldn't be able to afford it and even then, I've stopped buying the adventurers because while I can justify $10 on a crappy d20 adventure, I can't justify $25 on a crappy Warhammer adventure and they have not been of high quality in my opinion.
 

Rasyr said:
And guess what? Relatively few of them were the adventures that WotC had been hoping for. There were at least a thousand products out for 3.0, and out of those thousand, you had maybe a few dozen adventures.

Sorry, but you are wrong. I own at least 500 hundred titles of the first d20 books that came out (don't ask how much money I put into that), and there are significantly more than "a few dozen adventures" in my extensive collection.

Most of them are not very good. But they were there.

I'm not at home now so I don't have access to my library, but take FFG as an example [EDIT NO 2: I was actually thinking of Alderac, but I think FFG had those small adventures as well]. Their short adventures came out early, and there were lots of them. Necromancer had adventures out, some that turned into classics like Rappan Athuk, and Necropolis later on. Come to think of it, Nerco alone has "a few dozen" adventures for 3.0, if I'm not mistaken, which I might be. Privateer Press had their Witchfire-trilogy out, and Fast Forward turned out their initial trilogy (which became history for being crap on a level not seen before). Hmmm ... the Freeport trilogy from Green Ronin, Mystic Eye Games with the Pit of Loch Durnan stuff ... the list goes on and on and on.

So if your argument for item 1 on your list hinges on there being just "a few dozen adventures" available from 3rd parties for 3.0, I think you should fine tune that a bit.

:)

EDIT: The situation for 3.5 is different, and I do not have as many adventures for 3.5 in my library.

/M
 
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For the first years of d20, there *were* lots of adventures and other support materials in the market. And guess what? At that time, you didn't hear WotC complaining that the 3rd party publishers weren't 'doing their job'. Leap forward o the present when complete OGL games have overtaken the d20 market, WotC is complaining. it really isn't that difficult to make the connection.

What I wonder is how does WotC intend to make adventures profitable? Obviously, there is an issue with the margins on modules, else d20 never would have happened in the first place. Now, going back in, WotC must have a plan to make those modules more profitable. I am not sure, though I think one way to do it might be to make them 'complete packages' -- i.e. include battle mat scale maps, counters or at least a list of the D&D minis to be used (meaning, of course, that you'll only see encounters with creatures that have had a mini), and integrated player handouts. Perhaps they could even build them in such away that there is little to no prep time -- page 1 is an overview and/or flow chart, lots of boxed text, Core rule page references for rules, etc...
 

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