Charles Ryan on Adventures

[Mercule]

Why wouldn't companies take WotC on with some of the generic books?

I didn't say they shouldn't. What I said was that WotC had cast certain product categories to the winds, and had laid a stake in certain others.

If you're going to wrestle the 800# gorilla, you might want to at least consider the strategy. If you're going to do it head-on, make sure you've got enough leverage to offset it's bulk. There are a lot of companies that didn't really think things through, IMO.

 

[Thorin Stoutfoot]

Adventures are a limited market no mater how you break it down. If the average group is 1 DM and 4 players, that is limiting yourself to 20% of the market. Given how long something like Shackled City can last the average group I don't see there being a high frequency of sales either. That does not even get into how many DMs homebrew which lowers the number of potential buyers further..

Except the DM buys more books than all the other players combined, on average. I know I certainly do! On top of that, if there's a compelling campaign product, it's not unheard of for the entire group to buy the product together (by pooling their money), and then having the DM run it!

 

[wakedown]

This thread's pretty entertaining... it validates that folks are almost never happy!

Lots of people look for a reason not to like something - whether it's your job and you think to yourself how much better it would be to start your own company and not have to be forced to compromise quality for a deadline. But then you start your own company, and you're addressing an unmet market need and thinking to yourself how good things are. But the market need was a time-based opportunity which believe it or not, the market leader was moving on, but wasn't as agile as your nimble company. Now you're thinking to yourself, this is unfair - I was here first! But the folks at the big company may have been started it sooner - they were in the market first, and probably saw many of the same signs that food was being left on the table.

Is anyone evil or bad? Not really, they are usually just moving as fast as they can to try to give their customers what they want to the best of their ability to execute. Both the big company and the small company. We all root for the little guys of course - this is one of the many reasons I'm using Firefox (which I mention low on my list lower than all the more feature-oriented reasons).

I would bet anyone here that the smart folks at WOTC (not saying WOTC as a whole is smart, but the more astute business folks at the company) are thinking more about how to make the whole pie bigger over how do I gobble up a bigger percentage of the pie. Technically, the whole P&P (pen & paper) pie needs to get bigger and from what I can tell this industry is as natural as any other.

I'll buy any product that resonates with my need, whether it's the market leader making it or a nimble start-up that got something hot off the press to me just in time for when I needed it most. The fact that folks from these companies are reading our forums is GREAT... we're probably all going to get what we want from someone.

I can just see the office banter now - "I'm telling you Bob, I have over a hundred data points that prove our customers will pay $50-60 for an epic hardcover campaign setting that can be adapted to any of the worlds"; "I guarantee you Janet, I have many signs if we produce a leather-bound PHB we can sell it to 20% of the folks who bought the standard version."; "No Jim, we cannot do release anything else on drow, my samples show 7/10 customers are drow-saturated and will not make another drow-related purchase for 12 months"

 

[Thorin Stoutfoot]

Compare that to a typical adventure: A creative, talented author with a good idea, a solid grasp of D&D, and a few thousand bucks can put out a really good adventure--perhaps as good or better than anything we can do. Aside from our brand, all of our competitive advantage is neutralized in this category.

Charles, I don't think that's true. For an adventure to work well, you need a really solid grasp of the rules --- better than the typical 3rd party game designer. (Note that most of those can't explain the difference between CR and EL and why the difference is important) Here's an example: templated monsters and monsters with classes tend to only come up in adventures written by WOTC or former WOTC employees --- I don't see a lot of those in adventures written by non-designers, even non-designers who submit to Dungeon, who have the benefit of editorial oversight from the editors of that magazine. I suspect many 3rd party authors have no clue what those do.

Contrast that with designing prestige classes, feats, or spells. Anyone can do it, especially if they have no concern with play-testing or the final quality of the result. Unless the reader is particularly familiar with D&D, it's not obvious immediately if something is broken, overpowered, or underpowered. An adventure with broken pieces, by contrast, is immediately obvious.

So, if you were a mediocre designer looking to publish something, which would you pick? Not the adventure --- your failures there will be immediately obvious. Better to publish a splat book.

Looking at my shelf, I realize that the only splat books I have (and are using) are the WoTC books. I got burned by a few earlier products (not the ones published by Malhavoc press), and decided that I'd rather have something safe.

 

[Yair]

[hijack]

Insulting one's competitors is. Anybody in sales knows this

Great way to drive the customer to the other guy.

Really? I've got no knowledge in this area, is this common knowledge in the sales buisness?
[/hijack]

On topic, I'm glad WotC is making more adventures, the way I see it the more adventures are being made the greater the chances one will fit me snugly. And frankly, both Goodman Games and Necromancer Games are focused on dungeoncrawls/classic-feel, which is not my first choice in general.

As for being the best... Ryan is entitled to his opinion and that shouldn't insult anyone. Though I admit smirking when I came upon his little bit of hubris. My "to buy" list didn't include a WotC product in a long time.
The only thing that suprised me was that he implied lack of adventures is linked to a lack of success; that's bad buisness-sense, and I believe he knows much better than that. I suspect he meant more that attempting to compete with WotC in its own shtick is bad buisness, not that making adventures is good buisness.

Oh, and thanks for weighing in Ryan!

 

[The Shaman]

The only measurable metrics of "quality," when comparing Book X to Book Y (assuming they're on roughly the same topic) are:

1) Reliability of rules/math.
2) Production values.
3) Sales.

Yes, those are poor indicators of quality. I'm not arguing otherwise. But they're the only measurable ones.

I agree, but the fact that other aspects of quality are, well, qualitative rather than quantitative doesn't automatically exclude them as a useful tool.

For example, comb through reviews of WotC products and note that proofreading errors, from text to stat blocks, are a frequent complaint among reviewers, a trend that suggests editing as a "production value" is lacking in many WotC books.

Another aspect of quality that can be discerned from reviews are problem rules - the myriad mistakes in d20 Past come to mind, including adopting a subsystem from D&D without regard for compatibility with d20 Modern. These are mistakes that reviewers and general gamers catch, and talk about, enough so that they contribute to an overall sense of the quality of the product.

Neither of these aspects of quality are as readily gathered and analyzed as numerical data likes sales figures, but they are as much a part of production values as the number of books with full-color glossy pages and speak directly to reliability, though not always to the gaming math.

 

[blargney the second]

For what it's worth, I think Mr Ryan's comments make a lot of sense.

However, the lack of politeness displayed by a very few posters in this thread is unpleasant. I don't care if you're outraged, on your behalf or someone else's - please keep it civil. That's why I like ENWorld.

-blarg

 

[Maggan]

Why the indignation? There are competitors ripping into WotC from time to time, claiming they don't know what they are doing, that D&D sucks, and what have you. But I don't see any outbursts of indignation then, no sentiments that "competitors should not criticise each other". WotC is fair game, it seems.

And his post was a post on their own messageboard. On D&D's own messageboard, folks. What do you expect him to say, on the official D&D messageboards? Are you expecting him to say: "Our stuff is quite ok, but there are others that make better stuff, go check them out, here are the links to their web sites. And btw, of our last books, [insert title of pet disaster from WotC here] totally sucked, big time"?

What are other publishers saying about their own books, on their own discussion boards?

Are you expecting him to say: "The 3rd party publishers are ALL doing fine, especially your favourite one"? There are several who claim otherwise, Chris Pramas and Eyebeems, to just cite two of them. Many of them are struggling. Like Charles Ryan said. Like others have said. [Insert favourite 3rd party publisher here] might not, but many do.

And fans have complained endlessly about the dearth of adventures, but when Charles Ryan says the same thing, people are outraged.

I think it's going to be interesting to see if WotC focus on short adventures, or huge adventures, or free print adventures bundled with the hardbacks, or strategic alliances with 3rd party publishers, or licenses maybe.

Who knows, maybe Goodman Games could supply WotC with adventures, thereby reaching a much larger audience?

/M

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

And what's wrong with arrogance?

It dulls your skills and you turn out crap product.

What keeps me sharp every day is knowing I have a worthy competitor the next town over (I'm a reporter) and I have to get up early every day and run circles around her.

If I woke up and decided I was The Man, very soon, I wouldn't be.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Heh... love the WotC hate.

I love the facile dismissal of relevant points.

If anyone here hated WotC, they wouldn't be playing D&D. There are precious few people at ENWorld not playing D&D or D20 fantasy games.