Interview with Scott Rouse, Chris Perkins & Bill Slavicsek

[LeaderDesslok]

It's way, way too early. The DI is a major initiative requiring tremendous resources. Revealing their hand now:

1. Sets up a future PR calamity (see Daikatana, and any number of products that overpromised and underdelivered)
2. Gives competitors time (a lot of time) to come up with something comparable
3. May be considered communication of insider information

Basically, if they're still in the scoping stages it would be irresponsible to speculate.

(stuff deleted)

It's unfair to ask for a full and accurate feature list for a product that is still being scoped.

-z

I don't think anyone is asking for anything close to a full and accurate feature list. What we are asking for is some kind of sample content, but none has been shown. If they've been working on this for a year, they cannot possibly still be in the scoping stages. If they are, then they are WAY behind schedule, considering that there are just 4 months left until the print mags are gone! I'd say that gives them until October 1 before another metaphorical mob armed with pitchforks and torches comes pounding at their door.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

2. DRM (if any) should be as unobtrusive as possible. Don't be like the movie and music industries - realize that if you make a good product, your customer will buy it. The folks who want the content and don't want to pay for it will find a way to get it for free no matter what you do, so cater to the people who will buy it. Basically, make the content as user-friendly as possible at the expense of fancy copy protection methods that aren't going to work anyway.

This is I believe the one thing that will make or break DI. DRM is one of the worst examples of corporate incompetence I've ever seen, ticking off customers without actually doing anything. I personally avoid DRM of any form like the plague. When it's absolutely unavoidable to associate, I do whatever is necessary to remove it and I'll say this I've never seen a form of DRM that hasn't been beaten, EVER. And I'm aware of a not-insignificantl number of people who would be in the market for the DI but won't touch it if has DRM.

 

[00Machado]

Regarding Chris' question of what I'd like to see...

Here it is. Probably not everything that I'd like. But at least the stuff that first comes to mind.

Make the game easier to play, not harder. Right now the crunch makes it one of the harder games for me to play. Create tools that make it one of, if not the easiest. I'm not talking about just a forum where I can meet people who play (because this is the largest gaming brand), I mean specifically create tools that literally make it more time consuming to play anything else, and then content that inspires me to want to play. Do that, and you'll have 1) justified the online format in my mind, and 2) hooked me as a GM.

Open things up with options, but don't go crunch crazy. Any new mechanic is a thing to remember. Every thing to remember needs to be worth that mental weight, book lookup time when you can't remember it, etc.

The game needs mysteries that aren't always explained, and magic that PCs can't always replicate, or can't fully replicate. There is no sense of mystery when literally everything a villain might use, a location (even a long forgotten tomb!) might have, just turns into something the PCs can repeat ad nauseum.

Maps. Floor plans and miniature scale. The fantastic location products can become part of the service, combined with the below idea to make up "adventure builder components", or "adventure builder kits".

Encounter locations and adversary tactics that you can build larger adventures around. Instead of always making everything a full adventure, make a few pieces that I can interpret in multiple ways. I will flesh out the details from there. Ease of use, without making me read too much, or really memorize more than an isolated encounter or two. It's easier for me to remember (and to adapt on the fly) something that I've made up, rather than something you've made up and I've read.

Start making the downloadable 3D terrain products again. Make them more than just buildings. Trees, walls, furniture, all the good stuff. Make them so that you can have matching miniature scale maps for encounters. Make fold up card stock counters that you can print out too, because I don't have a bunch of miniature, and don't have money to buy them all, or room to store them all.

Put up archives of all the old Dungeoncraft articles.

Put up other things that are pivotal to strong and efficient GM sills - the relevant opening section of DMG II, the AD&D DM Design Kit, maybe 2e Campaign Sourcebook & Catacomb Guide, or Complete Book of Villains. Content that builds all the various GM skills that are needed to plan and execute at the table. And write more of it. GM skill development is a woefully underdeveloped topic in gaming.

Build in a mechanism for subscribers to review "everything". Every article should get ratings by those who have read it. Even a response thread/blog where it can be discussed, expanded upon, and authors can chime in to clarify if they wish. Or a link to the message board thread for any content that ends up prompting an online discussion.

Provide a mechanism to preview the ideas that are going into future products, and to help shape the content of those products. I don't want any more products that feel like modern pop albums - with one or two good songs, chapters, etc. I want products that are stuffed with page after page of excellence and stuff I can't wait to use. I want the classic rock albums of gaming products. Hero executes on the idea via their 'What would you like to see?' threads when development of new products begins. I want the subscribers to be able to send ideas that no one is interested in to the cutting room floor, to make more for the stuff people want.

I'd like expansion of content from other books that was too lengthy for the printed product. For example, the Stronghold Builders Guide is said to have a system for building something from the ground up, but not for expanding, taking over something that's ben abandoned, and so on. So, a system like that which can make the print product more useful, or stand on it's own, would be welcome.

I might like playtesting options. The chance to test out rules before they're finalized. I probably wouldn't use it much, but I think others might like it.

This may sound weird, but I'd also like the type of content that will go away with 3.5e to be weighted toward the online service as much as possible. I don't want a bunch of obsolete books when 4e comes out. I'd rather have printed content that's still relevant, and online content that can be replaced. Books that support a mechanic that's gone are just shelfware at that point.

Greyhawk please.

Offer some benefits that are simply not possible in a printer format. Examples include the following two ideas.

Something to make NPC creation fast. I'm talking drag and drop fast. Type in stats. Drag and drop feats. Auto calculate bonuses. Fill in a character sheet/encounter sheet I can use. One format for encounters, and one fully detailed. Let me login and drag and drop modifiers onto the NPCs during play. Post an encounter cheat sheet that tells me which condictions apply to whom.

I want to plug in any two locations from a WotC setting, and have a menu option of travel methods/routes to select that are relevant, weather conditions to overlay on top of that, and have it auto calculate travel times, identify common stopping points like inns, camp sites, Portals/shortcuts, or note any conspicuous absence of safe places to rest. As GM, I'll pick the place my PCs decide to stay, and the service will display a few possible encounters related to that location that I might want to throw in. An inn might have a fight, and a link to rumors to overhear - ideally targeted at the area (that might pull in info from a column like the Eberron news dispatches). Bring things that are useful at that moment in the game right to my finger tips. And hopefully those things spark creativity for instant use in the game.

The service should have vast (and fast) search capabilities. I should be able to mark things as favorites, and tie them to 'buckets'. Maybe one campaign uses this article, and another this other one, so I create groups, and tag things as relevant for one of more (or all groups), so that when I go to those buckets, it only brings up the content I've put there. It might suggest new stuff that's similar as well.

Also, hurry up on the timeline. The longer this takes to become available, the more I lose interest, get distracted by other hobbies, and will find my gaming fix via other products. Not a dig. I'm just saying.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Beg pardon? People have been screaming bloody murder, comparing WotC's actions to assault and even rape, and it's inappropriate of me to have finally lost patience and object? I don't think so.

"People"? Ari, in fairness man - there were not too many comparing it to rape. But it sure makes it easy to dismiss the other 99 out of 100 posts by pointing at a few over the top analogies.

The were more than a few over the top posts on WotC's forums - and on RPG.net, and the murdered analogy came out on Paizo's forums a few times as well.

And yes - a few over the top analogies here too on ENworld.

But for the most part - there were hundreds of not-too-over-the-top-posts from some pretty angry people. And that attitude was present everywhere on the net where RPGs are discussed. This time, it wasn't particularly confined to a given discussions forum's "board culture". It was literally across the board.

And its for that reason that I do think that Morrus over-reacted when he was told that there were game designers from WotC who would not post here to discuss it. As if there were some fans besmirching the ENWorld brand - as distinct from any other forum.

The moderation and implied threats came off as heavy-handed to me. *shrug* Not saying the people who posted in the manners that they did were being terribly reasonable (they were not) but lifetime bans seemed a little twitchy, capricious and arbitrary to me. There it is.

It wasn't much different anywhere else. Par for the course.

So sure Ari - there are a lot of designers at WotC who would have had nothing to do with this given a chance and would like to say so - but they can't. For example, I have a hard time seeing Chris Perkins willingly kill off Dungeon if it had been up to him. So I'm willing to assume that it wasn't up to him.

********

Anyways...I don't feel as if there were many reasons given in the QA for doing what they did. Instead, there was a whole lot of hype about DI that was short on specifics. I think WotC just doesn't care to explain it with specifics right now. And that's ok I guess - as, tbh, I'm not much in the mood for listening right now either.

Perhaps in the fall I will be open to hearing about it. It's not like I am uninterested in digital gaming. Far, far from it.

But right now? Nah. This whole DI thing has been linked in my mind to the death of print magazines I've read since The Strategic Review. That's pretty much enough to ensure that I will react hostilely to DI as a twitch reaction for a very long time indeed.

Which, when you think about it, is pretty silly - given that I literally do not think you will find anyone on ENWorld more KEEN on integrating more digital gaming into their pnp games than me. And I mean that, I really do. I'm ordinarily the #1 fan of this crap.

And that's just bizarre. Because despite the fact I'm a huge propopnent of digital gaming, I can't shake the feeling I'm not WotC's target customer.

Seeing as I have a few thousand D&D minis and 48 WotC hardcovers on my shelf, I have a hard time understanding why that would ever be so. (Answer: I guess it's because of the several hundred magazines also sitting on that shelf).

If I wasn't the customer they wanted - why do they have so much of my money? If there's a better customer out there than me - well - damnit - there can't be many of them. This whole question of who is their target customer is a big one for me, and nothing much in that interview answered that question for me at all.

I'm not too sure much of what I hear WotC say in the short to medium run ever will answer that question. It will take someone like a Ryan Dancey, explaining this decision many years later in hindsight that will probably be necessary to put all of this in context.

Anyways - enough of this crap. I think I'll go back to talking about 3.5 gaming. It is, after all, why we are here.

 

[Vocenoctum]

I can't help but feel really disappointed in what I've just read. I was hoping I'd see Wizards coming clean, revealing details, and so forth. Honestly, I was hoping that we could get some straight talk, i.e.:

1) Tell us the details.
or
2) Admit Wizards doesn't have a sufficient plan for what it's doing.

Wizards in general has stuff plotted out months in advance, so I'd be surprised if there wasn't content already planned. What isn't finalized are some of the things people most want to know. (price, etc)

I assume there will be better announcements down the line, but they do mention (as some of us figured) that the timing of the announcement was more to Paizo's need than their own. A month is a long time, and a lot of these issues could be decided within that time.

I think it'd be worse to give details that are later reversed.

Sounds like the DI is behind schedule, nebulous, and could easily turn out to be a total disaster. And for this, they cancelled my favorite magazines? This is just dumb. If the DI isn't up to snuff, all this anger they've created is going to get rekindled when they try to release it. I am so bummed that I put as much money as I did into Wizards products in the last 2 years. I feel like a sucker.

The odds of them rereleasing the magazines is not good, given they wanted to kill them off years ago. Perhaps they should have expanded on how Dragon failed their needs, but I think a lot of the flak in this thread is more due to expectations, WotC seemed to answer a good amount of stuff, but not everything. Perhaps more will be forthcoming if they think it's needed.

 

[caudor]

Thanks for putting this together Morrus

And thank you Scott, Chris, and Bill for answering

I have just two requests:

The number one thing I'd like to see in the DI: tools that will make the game easier to prepare and play. A character creation tool (with access to sources we pay for) would be number one on my list. With the number of source books published already, it would make it much easier to put characters together without flipping through 10 or more source books.

Number two would be a method, maybe a virtual tabletop, that would allow us to play with distant friends online.

Cover these two and I'll be extremely happy...and so will my group.

If for some reason a character generator cannot be done online via the DI, please consider working with a third party to provide one (like was previously worked out with CMP).

Thanks again for stopping by to answer questions; your time and efforts are greatly appreciated by this gamer

 

[bento]

I think the DI still sounds promising. I can understand Bill, Chris and Scott not wanting to show their hands because I'm sure there's still a lot of discussion going on with exactly how things will be delivered.

As for the interview, when you don't have a lot to say, you tend to stick with short simple messages. I think this was what they delivered - sad about the print magazines going away, it was in the plans for a while with both parties, and they are working to try something new that we'll have to wait for.

I can wait on DI because there are always other companies coming out with new stuff all the time to keep me spending my money.

 

[Matthan]

I want to chime in and leave my hopes for WOTC's upcoming digital offering. For whatever it's worth, I'm not the core audience. I haven't spent money on rpgs in more than a year and that's including the magazines. I cannot find a group and I've always been a little intimidated by the amount of rules mastery that I feel that I would need to DM. In spite of that, I love the idea of rpgs and continue to seek out a group online or otherwise.

So my wishlist revolves around a program (virtual tabletop or otherwise) that makes it easier to play the game. I don't want to have to look up the rules for turning or figure out which book a spell is in. I want an interface that will do that for us either by hotlinking abilities in an online character sheet so that when you scroll over a character ability it displays the corresponding rule text or even better making the computer do the heavy lifting of calculating the dimensions and mechanics of the action or ability. My main goal in playing or DMing is to be able to have a good time with my friends. I want a program that will make that easier to achieve.

While I'm wishing about that program, here's a few more requests:

• An advanced toolset or option set to allow experienced DMs to tweak/add rules or at the very least to override and redesign the current scene to account for something that is not built in the rules
• I would love for there to be online adventure modules that came with maps and art that synced with the program (say battlemaps for specific areas, portraits for certain npcs, and special art for monsters for the battlemaps)
• I would like for there to be a robust campaign journal feature for both players and dms. If I'm involved in two campaigns, I want to be able to access the program and click on the campaign that I'm interested in and see who the players are and (as a DM) check their character sheets and (as a player) look over my own. I want it to remember my health and status and little things like that. The more it can reasonably do, the better.
• I do want what a lot of people have been talking about: a robust character designing program that also stores your character online. I would love for that to be combined with an equally robust portrait designing program that allows you to tweak and customize your character's appearance and gear. I understand that they may be a pipe dream, but if it makes it any easier, I would be satisfied if it was just a 2-D paper doll effect as long as it had a lot of options.
• I want it to support VOIP and video through webcams so that I can mimic the tabletop as much as possible.
• I also want it to be usable for offline games as well. Say a DM could run it off his labtop to help manage his responsibilities.

I'm not worried about the other content. WOTC has a long history of making some amazing and inspiring work that really sparks creativity. I want to see that continued online, but I have no reason to doubt that. My big question mark is whether or not I would have the opportunity or need to use that content and without the program above, I don't find it likely.

 

[Zaruthustran]

I don't think anyone is asking for anything close to a full and accurate feature list. What we are asking for is some kind of sample content, but none has been shown. If they've been working on this for a year, they cannot possibly still be in the scoping stages. If they are, then they are WAY behind schedule, considering that there are just 4 months left until the print mags are gone! I'd say that gives them until October 1 before another metaphorical mob armed with pitchforks and torches comes pounding at their door.

Well, they do have sample content. Pick up an issue of Dragon and Dungeon. That kind of content will be part of the DI. They've even said they'll use many of the same freelancers; the content will even sound the same.

So the Dragon and Dungeon portions of the DI will have the same kind of content, written by the same people, except you can access it anywhere in the world through a browser.

It's way too early to talk about pricing and delivery. That kind of thing is very hairy, and involves lawyers (lots of IP issues, there), banks (they handle the credit card transactions), retailers and distributors (for any non-credit card solution), micropayment experts (if they go the Xbox Live "points" route), and so on.

Plus, frankly, they're likely still researching the scope and pricing--and ENWorld is providing some good data on what people want and how much they want to pay.

In other words: they're still collecting data. From us. Wouldn't you rather they do that, instead of saying something like "Here's the plan. It's set in stone. Don't bother commenting. Resistance is futile."

-z

PS: Totally agree that they need to move swiftly, and finalize plans ASAP. Definitely before October. Ideally before Gencon and PAX.

 

[Vocenoctum]

And its for that reason that I do think that Morrus over-reacted when he was told that there were game designers from WotC who would not post here to discuss it. As if there were some fans besmirching the ENWorld brand - as distinct from any other forum.

I don't think that's accurate, simply because I don't think there were official responses anywhere else either. But, the threads grew too quick and too heated for much good to come from an official response on Page 32, so there's that. In addition, though sporadic, there were WotC folks posting here or there, they just couldn't really say anything.

The moderation and implied threats came off as heavy-handed to me. *shrug* Not saying the people who posted in the manners that they did were being terribly reasonable (they were not) but lifetime bans seemed a little twitchy, capricious and arbitrary to me. There it is.

I don't think moderation went far enough, even after all the "no warnings" stuff posted, I still saw lots of warnings about personal attacks, even in this very thread...

If those warnings are needed, then I don't see how it's "heavy-handed".

So sure Ari - there are a lot of designers at WotC who would have had nothing to do with this given a chance and would like to say so - but they can't. For example, I have a hard time seeing Chris Perkins willingly kill off Dungeon if it had been up to him. So I'm willing to assume that it wasn't up to him.

To the contrary, I would not be surprised if many of the folks that decided Dragon & Dungeon had to die, were fans of the magazines and wished they'd last forever. They just decided it made more business sense to end them.

Anyways...I don't feel as if there were many reasons given in the QA for doing what they did. Instead, there was a whole lot of hype about DI that was short on specifics. I think WotC just doesn't care to explain it with specifics right now. And that's ok I guess - as, tbh, I'm not much in the mood for listening right now either.

They don't say why, it's true. I assume the reason is "profit", in the end. The specifics are up for debate.

The way they talk about the lack of magazines not affecting future announcements though, it's obvious that to them, the magazines were no longer a significant inroad to the D&D audience.