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Does WotC suck at selling games?
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6386014" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I think there are lots of examples of non-D&D games which have better ways of presenting and explaining how to GM the game.</p><p></p><p>I'm going to disagree with [MENTION=83398]roadtoad[/MENTION]'s post upthread - for me, Chapter 8 of Moldvay Basic is far-and-away the best version of GMing instructions ever written for D&D.</p><p></p><p>Because B/X is mostly an exploration-oriented game, those instructions tell the GM, step-by-step, how to construct an area to be explored. With a properly-worked example.</p><p></p><p>More modern editions of D&D make action resolution a much bigger part of the game. So the key to GMing becomes adjudication of action resolution. But the advice on that - incuding in 4e - is just terrible. For instance, both the 4e DMG and the Essentials RC/DM kit included examples of skill challenge resolution in which the GM uses techniques that are no where called out or explained in the instructional text. Only someone who was already familiar with those techniques (most likely from reading better-written rulebooks for other systems) would be able to work out how the GM did what s/he did in the example.</p><p></p><p>Perhaps the RPG market really is saturated. But that's really not an excuse for writing terrible manuals, when good examples exist and one of them is over 30 years old and wholly owned by WotC.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6386014, member: 42582"] I think there are lots of examples of non-D&D games which have better ways of presenting and explaining how to GM the game. I'm going to disagree with [MENTION=83398]roadtoad[/MENTION]'s post upthread - for me, Chapter 8 of Moldvay Basic is far-and-away the best version of GMing instructions ever written for D&D. Because B/X is mostly an exploration-oriented game, those instructions tell the GM, step-by-step, how to construct an area to be explored. With a properly-worked example. More modern editions of D&D make action resolution a much bigger part of the game. So the key to GMing becomes adjudication of action resolution. But the advice on that - incuding in 4e - is just terrible. For instance, both the 4e DMG and the Essentials RC/DM kit included examples of skill challenge resolution in which the GM uses techniques that are no where called out or explained in the instructional text. Only someone who was already familiar with those techniques (most likely from reading better-written rulebooks for other systems) would be able to work out how the GM did what s/he did in the example. Perhaps the RPG market really is saturated. But that's really not an excuse for writing terrible manuals, when good examples exist and one of them is over 30 years old and wholly owned by WotC. [/QUOTE]
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