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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1953207" data-attributes="member: 10201">Yep, if WotC isn't consistently as good as or better than damn near everyone else, they're doing something wrong. From my POV, the fact that the last thing i bought from WotC was Faeries (for Ars Magica 4), while i've bought a fair number of products on topics that WotC also has products about, means WotC is doing something wrong. Their resistance to incorporating others' rules, and thus using the WotC OGL for their own books, is another example of this. I wish that the official D&D books would be pushing the edge, or at least incorporating the latest innovations, instead of being fairly conservative and constantly "out-done" by others. As is, WotC seems to insist on using internally-created stuff rather than bow to the terms of the WotC OGL, regardless of how good that existing material is.   Or maybe it's just a matter of personal taste--the one WotC book that actually does take significant chunks of existing OGC, and then works with them (Unearthed Arcana, of course), i didn't consider it that impressive. They may just be going for a completely different aesthetic than i am--almost none of the new bits in UA appeal to me, and every one of them that started with existing OGC i consider to be a mangling of the source--i think the UA versions are disimprovements over what they started with.    But only to the degree that players actually buy non-WotC books, which isn't nearly enough.    Which may be good for WotC, but is bad for the hobby. Not only are small-publishers' best-selling products probably better than WotC's worst-selling products, but i'd say that many competitors' best-selling products are better than WotC's best-selling products. And yet it doesn't really matter. I lament that RPGs, as a pure luxury good, as nothing more than packaged ideas, and where interoperability isn't an issue (it's not like software, where you have to have an OS and software that matches), don't sell based on merit alone. Even if some of that merit were judged by superficial qualities like the art, it'd be an improvement over judging based on brand name, as appears to go on.</blockquote>

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