Dragon 334, Malhavoc's Surprise = Ptolus

[eris404]

5. Monte Cook Presents: Does It Matter? You Know You'll Buy It.

I'm was just going through this thread and this post made me laugh so hard that I had to reply. I resemble that remark. Thanks for the laugh!

 

[eris404]

Arcana DEVO-lved, with featuring new feats such as: Uncontrollable Urge, and Whip It; PC races such as Mongoloids, Beautiful Mutants, and Spudboys; and new prestige classes such as Smart Patroller! Are you through being cool and wish to dare the Gates of Steel?

Second best post on this thread.

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

Uh, what he said was that you were being silly, and were nothing but a "basher."

No, what he said was that raving fan boys would provoke a reaction in the opposite direction, and that both sides should cool down.

So let's do that.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

For me it's partly because because mr. Cook IMO, after he left WotC, was very busy telling everyone that 3rd Ed. could have been so much better if his hands hadn't been tied, how he would change things, how a better CR system is needed, how spells should be nerfed etc. This is simplified, but still. A lot of washing hands off his own work.
The same way, he knew that 3.5 was planned from the beginning, the game was designed that way, more or less. And Monte didn't care a great deal for the changes made in 3.5
So instead, he 'evolves' his own Arcana Unearthed. Was that a plan from the start like 3.5?

A good question...

It seems at least as if he was never entirely content with Arcana Unearthed (otherwise he wouldn´t have done AE), and one might wonder why - but maybe he had to face the fact that he had to put something out to feed his family (and wouldn´t be able to include all material he thought of within the limits of his small company), and so he did put it out. (And it´s not as if AU stank - it was great, AE just enhances it)
But comparing AE and AU (+ Diamond Throne) to D&D 3.5 and D&D 3.0, I think AE gave me more material.

Secondly, I'm just not that impressed with his products.
But you're absolutely right, I should and will give the man the benefit of the doubt. The book might just be exceptionel.
Guess I just expected more from a 'big announcement' than the print form of Monte's homebrew, which has been more or less available for years already.

What is available from his homebrew is only a "story hour", not the setting. Except for Banewarrens, I think there is nothing available detailing much about Ptolus, and Banewarrens really concentrate on exactly that, the Banewarrens.

 

[MulhorandSage]

Essentially the industry needs two kinds of products to grow.

The first kind is similar to what Ryan Dancy was talking about recently; find a niche that fills a GM's need (particularly if they don't realize they need it until they hear about the book) and fill it. The bottom line is that being a GM is hard, and we need products that make it easier to GM and we need products that produce better games.

The second kind is produced by someone with enormous talent who's been told to go crazy, and given the production values to back up their vision. This doesn't always produce great games, but it often produces interesting work (eg. Everway). Repeat this process enough times, and eventually someone will produce something that's a quantum leap above the hobby (as, say Garfield did with Magic: The Gathering for card games). Ptolus strikes me as this kind of book, so I have my hopes up.

 

[Waylander the Slayer]

I think it is going to be an "adventure path" from the playtest of 3e which highlights several of the "cool" aspects of 3e via Plotus.

 

[JoeGKushner]

If it is 640 pages with a $70 price tag, I'll be interested to see how it, and Shackled City, sell. I'm not saying it's going to be too epxensive for the content, but as I've noted on RPG.net, it may be too expensive for casual purchase.

Heck, that's one of the reasons I buy so many miniatures these days. Price point. I don't carry a lot of cash on my person, so if it's past the $25-$30 dollar mark, I'll have to either come back, or buy minis.

I love minis.

 

[Staffan]

What is available from his homebrew is only a "story hour", not the setting. Except for Banewarrens, I think there is nothing available detailing much about Ptolus, and Banewarrens really concentrate on exactly that, the Banewarrens.

The earliest Ptolus articles are an overview of the setting. Nothing very detailed, but still an overview of the city itself and the world around it.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It seems at least as if he was never entirely content with Arcana Unearthed (otherwise he wouldn´t have done AE), and one might wonder why - but maybe he had to face the fact that he had to put something out to feed his family (and wouldn´t be able to include all material he thought of within the limits of his small company), and so he did put it out.

On a forum allegedly full of creative people, there sure are a lot of posters who don't seem to understand the creative process.

Never being satisfied with something you worked on isn't a sign of a sellout just putting out stuff to "feed his family," it's a sign that they're deeply involved in the process and have higher expectations of the work than they can necessarily achieve. This isn't a bad thing, unless we want to decide that William Shakespeare -- who made numerous revisions to his plays up until his retirement and in some cases beyond -- and many of the greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance, who often viewed their masterpieces as incomplete and imperfect, as hacks.

In contrast, if there's ever a creative person who views their work as perfect, and not just "I had to eventually stop, even though I really wish I had another 10 years to fiddle with it," I think those people are the folks just doing it for the paycheck, and no other reason.

 

[Monte At Home]

For me it's partly because because mr. Cook IMO, after he left WotC, was very busy telling everyone that 3rd Ed. could have been so much better if his hands hadn't been tied, how he would change things, how a better CR system is needed, how spells should be nerfed etc.

It was certainly never my intention to do that. My hands were not tied. In fact, I wrote about it being just the opposite way back when, assuming that my hands would be tied, but in fact we were given far more freedom to make changes than I ever thought possible. In a way, it scared me--I expected that some of the "old guard" would be there to put the kibosh on some wacky idea I might put forth. A safety net, so to speak. I can remember, for example, saying that I thought we should add the barbarian back in, expecting Skip to explain why we couldn't do that. Instead, he said, "good idea." Right then and there, I saw that the sky really was the limit, in a way, and I had to learn to self edit rather than count on someone else to reel me in. It made me a better designer.

I certainly have, however, talked about things that we could have done better. Harm and blade barrier, for example, weren't thought completely through enough. Not tested enough. There's no place, however, that I could shift the blame to for things like that, even if I wanted to. Things like that were our fault, many specifically my fault, and not the fault of someone tying our hands (and both those spells were fixed nicely in 3.5). The CR system does need some work, but usually I find myself defending it, not attacking it. Perhaps you're thinking of someone else on that one?

The same way, he knew that 3.5 was planned from the beginning, the game was designed that way, more or less. And Monte didn't care a great deal for the changes made in 3.5
So instead, he 'evolves' his own Arcana Unearthed. Was that a plan from the start like 3.5?

3.5 was planned from the beginning, but not by the designers. By the people managing the business. In fact, I don't believe I'm speaking out of turn when I say that Skip, Jonathan and I were a bit put off by the idea--maybe even a little offended. If you think about it, how could we not be, after working on something for almost three years, doing our best to make the best game we could, and then at the end be told that people were already planning on updating the material before it was even released? But that wasn't our call. Maybe that's what you're referring to when I talked about our hands being tied. I can't think of any writer or designer that would purposefully not put his all into a project specifically so that it can be revised later. (And for what it's worth, I still stand firmly behind AU, and I'm very happy with it. Most of the AE changes are format changes, not content changes, or just brand new stuff.) Similarly, AU/AE doesn't exist because of any kind of disatisfaction with D&D on my part. I love D&D. I'm back up to playing twice a week now (for the last two years, it had only been once a week).

I apologize for the tangent. Mostly, I just wanted to make it clear how very, very proud and pleased I am of D&D 3E. I don't know when I did, but if I have ever given the impression otherwise, I apologize (mostly, that apology would go out to Jonathan and Skip). To bring it back to the topic at hand, in many ways, Ptolus is a kind of love letter to the game that has occupied my creative energy since I was 10 years old.


Edit: Added link.