Campbell said:
The word "build" is rather vague. I'll try to address this, though I fear I'll just add ambiguity. I have a ton of work for this afternoon and some errands to run. Anyway, here goes:
The process of building a product is far more involved and detailed than simply writing and designing it. It begins with the most important questions that a designer or company has to answer: what does this book seek to do? What is its purpose? What does it do that no other book does? Is that purpose worth pursuing?
This is the key point where the staggering majority of products die. In some cases it's simply ignorance - a company hasn't done much work before, the "industry" wisdom on sales and success is, at best, distorted (no one aside from John Nephew will ever come out and say "product X just didn't sell well for us"), the company ignores its own sales data, and so on. There's also an impulse to shoot for the fences - a lot of companies seem to try to push out books that cover areas or subjects that haven't been touched yet in hopes of hitting on some raw, hungry portion of the market.
The big problems here are lack of marketing data (the company/designer simply doesn't know what gamers want) and, specific d20, a fundamental ignorance of the culture of D&D. The second bit is the tricky part - I've long believed that a designer has to have a fundamental love of D&D, the essence of the D&D play experience, its tropes, and its somewhat undefinable "je ne sais quoi" that makes it so sticky for gamers. In other words, someone who plays D&D, loves D&D, and embraces D&D is much more likely to come up with product ideas and concepts that appeal to D&D players.
(Here's a simple analogy: consider processes and ideas at work that come from people on your own team or management level and those from above. Which tend to work better? The same thing is at work here - the designer who is engaged in D&D is much more likely to understand the game, what it needs, where it is, and where it's going than someone who isn't).
So that's step 1, and that's where most game products die. They're DOA.
At the finer level, we have mechanics and story design. Story design is all over the map - Sturgeon's law and all that.
Mechanics design is trickier. I talk about this on my journal, but I think there's a few factors at work:
* Story design is sexier and leads to novel contracts, so designers focus on it.
* The economics of freelancing and publishing reward speed - more contracts equals more income. More books released, in theory, means more income or (maybe) better cash flow. Good mechanical design takes time. It takes testing. It takes study, analysis, comparison, and research.
* There is no culture of learning, study, analysis, and growth in the RPG "industry".
* Since most smaller companies can't compete in terms of playtesting, some of them actively push the idea that rules are bad for RPGs. This bleeds into the design community.
* RPG work pays poorly and demands a fair amount of time, even for a freelancer. Thus, we have a brain drain where capable people go into game design work in other industries or they stick to gaming as a hobby.
So, once you go through all those filters, I think you end up with less than a handful of people in the d20 industry who can concept a viable product, build interesting, useful ideas into that product, and then deliver a final, complete draft.
The key consideration is that for a D&D player or DM, there's no need to have the same rigorous ability in design as a professional. A DM can produce material balanced and usable for his specific game with ease - the key is when you try to port that material to the game as a whole.
The challenge to the industry, IMO, is finding those DMs who are producing really cool, useful, professional grade material, and recruiting them to write professionally.
