D&D DMing is not playing chess against the players!!

[Scribble]

Oh, I don't think I am. I know quite well that I'm a lone voice and companies like WotC will treat me as one. But what I won't do is overestimate what my lack of patronage sends as a message.

Well sure... You alone are not sending a message.

But if there are a lot of people out there like you sending that message it gets more powerful.

And when all those people stop buying the product the company is selling, and start buying products they like better, or talk about what they want a company is going to see a change in their target market.

Or they might also see another market opportunity to sell to.

Whether they decide to sell to that market is another story, but bitching on the internet isn't going to increase that chance.

The vast majority of people aren't customers for any particular game product. So what's the difference between my not buying it and a random Joe not buying it?So little as to be negligible. The publisher can't infer a single thing from my lack of purchase. They get no useful information about it whatsoever without elaboration.

You were/are part of the market- You effect sales reports by nature of being a number that no longer appears on the report, as opposed to a number that never appeared in the first place.

It's even hard to get useful information about why a lot of people didn't buy a product. Was it because the product was poorly marketed? Did the economy go south causing a lot of people to hold off on luxury purchases? Did it a fill a need nobody had? Did it have high competition from another product? Again, elaboration is necessary to glean useful information.

Sure- I don't think I'm arguing that you shouldn't be able to express any dislike about something. (Info is always useful.)

I'm not even going to argue that bitching about stuff will have no effect at all. (Even limited info is better then no info.)

It's just a lot more will be accomplished, and more quickly if you spend more energy talking about what you actually want.

Red Cans suck.

vrs

I'm not partial to Red Cans, but man I would really love to see an Orange Can with a big yellow Happy Face on it!

 

[ExploderWizard]

What perplexes me is why some people feel the need to mention this ad nauseam all the time to people who don't care: EG people who are buying what WotC is releasing. I'm not wizards, I don't care if someone wants to repeatedly and in every thread complain about the exact same things (as happens on the 4E General Board on Wizards constantly).

Email Wizards or something, or just make a single post on the forum or something. Relentlessly complaining about the same things over and over eventually just produces people who backlash against your views when they get sick of it.

Fair enough but giving someone a pat on the back for something that you believe is subpar will get you more of the same.

 

[Aegeri]

Fair enough but giving someone a pat on the back for something that you believe is subpar will get you more of the same.

Uhhh, I don't think its subpar so what does that have to do with what I argued?

My point is that the optimal way of doing anything is to send a letter to the company or whatever, maybe make a single post on their forums and just don't buy it. I mean it's pretty straightforward.

I happen to like 4E and another example, most new World of Darkness settings and so I buy them. I get relentlessly bored of people who think they should be entitled to rant on and on about their hatred of either in every single thread (even if it is not relevant to them) for eternity.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Uhhh, I don't think its subpar so what does that have to do with what I argued?

My point is that the optimal way of doing anything is to send a letter to the company or whatever, maybe make a single post on their forums and just don't buy it. I mean it's pretty straightforward.

I happen to like 4E and another example, most new World of Darkness settings and so I buy them. I get relentlessly bored of people who think they should be entitled to rant on and on about their hatred of either in every single thread (even if it is not relevant to them) for eternity.

If there is product marketed to me (a DM of a 4E campaign) that I think reaches levels of epic fail (Revenge of the Giants) then I will talk about it. If there are products that I think are cool (Hammerfast) then I will talk about that.

As consumers, many of us go online and voice opinions on all kinds of things that we like and that we don't like. Movies, books, games, whatever. That is simply free speech combined with a public outlet.

As a player of fantasy rpgs, how are such products not relevant to me?

What you are saying would make sense if I went onto a messageboard dedicated to various types of music and started to complain about rpg product quality or if I were to come here and go on and on about how a particular band is churning out crap now.

 

[Aegeri]

If there is product marketed to me (a DM of a 4E campaign) that I think reaches levels of epic fail (Revenge of the Giants) then I will talk about it. If there are products that I think are cool (Hammerfast) then I will talk about that.

That's not really my point. I hate psionics in 4E mechanically, because they are broken and I also dislike skill challenges immensely as well (they way they are written by RAW anyway, not the actual concept). The difference is that I only bring up such dislikes in threads it is relevant in to bring them up. I do not relentlessly complain about what I dislike about X or Y in every single thread. I did write my complaints about Psionics to Wizards, in fact I actually put my complaints directly to Mike Mearls using the PM function. Being an awesome dude that he is, I even got a response from him saying that they were looking into it - and yeah they are still looking into how to correct some of the flaws with psionics (it will take a while IMO and shouldn't be an errata they just jump into quickly).

I don't make a habit of relentlessly bringing up my hatred of psionics in every thread now. I've made my point, it's being looked into and I can wait or houserule it if I feel like it. I've not discouraged my players from playing psionic classes - even if I personally despise them and try to work with them. If there was a thread on this forum about psionics, I might point out my feelings about them but I'm not going to bring up that "I HATE PSIONICS" in every thread, regardless if I hate psionics or not. That's my point.

To make what I'm saying clearer a better example to get my point across is that I don't like Pathfinder. Now I dislike pathfinder a lot, I don't feel it is much of an improvement on the core flaws that I didn't like about 3.5 at all to really make it something I ever want to bother with. I did try it at least and I think it was worth playing for a while, but it didn't enthuse me at all.

Now, here is where I make my point: Find a single post about how I dislike pathfinder from me in the official pathfinder forum* or in the pathfinder forums here on this website. In fact you'll probably find this is the very first time I've ever actually mentioned that I don't like pathfinder on this forum. That is because, what I think of pathfinder is irrelevant to 99% of topics I post in and I don't deliberately post in threads dedicated to pathfinder because, well, I don't like it. Why would I bother posting in it? Is my opinion on it important to people who play pathfinder [it's not actually]?

I could tell the people who make it that it's horrible or whatever and I don't like it. But given I dislike 3.5 I don't think I was ever someone they were targeting when they made pathfinder, so I don't think they are going to be bothered they never sold me on their variant of a system I don't like.

That's really my point. It's not expressing a negative opinion, it's being relentless about it and effectively trying to troll every thread on that topic because you dislike it. There is a difference between these two things.

*Considering I have no idea where that is, good luck with that.

 

[billd91]

You were/are part of the market- You effect sales reports by nature of being a number that no longer appears on the report, as opposed to a number that never appeared in the first place.

Unless they're making sales with some kind of subscription model, they can't really infer much if a number goes up or down. Maybe they can infer that someone who bought x product didn't buy y product. Of course, that can be wrong. What if the people buying x and y are largely different subsets of the customer base? Maybe all the sales figures are telling you is that the subset who bought y is smaller than the subset buying x. That's part of my point. Even if the numbers go way down, what do they know? That sales weren't the same. And that's all they know. They don't know why. So, ultimately, not buying the product tells them very little of use. A whole lot less than actually buying the product does, I'd say. At least then you can say that X customers, barring a few scattered weirdos who might have used to the product to balance out the wobble on their dining room table or somesuch, thought the product was appealing enough to buy it for the price offered.

 

[billd91]

What perplexes me is why some people feel the need to mention this ad nauseam all the time to people who don't care: EG people who are buying what WotC is releasing. I'm not wizards, I don't care if someone wants to repeatedly and in every thread complain about the exact same things (as happens on the 4E General Board on Wizards constantly).

Email Wizards or something, or just make a single post on the forum or something. Relentlessly complaining about the same things over and over eventually just produces people who backlash against your views when they get sick of it.

You may think it comes up ad nauseum, but message boards don't work efficiently. One poster ambles along, post what's on his mind, discussion ensues. There are a lot of people here for a lot of conversations, and lots of other posters just kind of drive by, participate and are gone. So, yes, lots of topics come up again and again. That's the nature of message boards. Should someone who finds a conversation kind of interesting withhold from it because they've participated in a similar one before?

 

[coyote6]

Should someone who finds a conversation kind of interesting withhold from it because they've participated in a similar one before?

Yes, there should be a strict "one person, one participation in a particular topic of conversation" rule.

Actually, I think there might be such a rule already. Probably in the secret part of the Constitution, where they talk about the alien space bats, the designated hitter rule, spoilers for Buffy, and similar miscellanea.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

Um, my point is that not only do I not like that style myself, but I think it's a damn bad attitude if it gains widespread use by others who may not have had the experience of RPGs like older folks have, and it becoems a dominant way of playing D&D
this is best discouraged by showing better ways to play, by grumbling to bring the topic up, etc, not by a boycott!!

 

[Saeviomagy]

RPGs should be written by people who understand the maths and tactics in such a way that they work and are understandable by people who don't.