Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5582190" data-attributes="member: 82106">Eh, there could be a lot of reasons why WotC seems to be good at rather 'flat' adventures. Large organization with a set management hierarchy perhaps? Do you think Paizo's developers all have titles like all the WotC devs seem to have? Everyone over there is "Head of R&D" or "Product Line Brand Manager" or "Grand Pooba" or whatever. I don't expect much gets done without lots of meetings and approvals and etc. It tends to mean things are going to be design by committee, little risk will be taken, limited project ownership, etc. I really doubt that's conducive to a lot of highly creative work or a lot of work with a very individual style. There's absolutely nothing about 4e that genuinely inhibits good adventure design. Courts of the Shadow Fey for instance is a VERY nice module (one of Wolfgang Bauer's patronage projects). I'd venture to say it is the best 4e module out there, hands down. You just can't bottle creativity. Mearls and all the people over there at WotC DO have it. I just don't think they're in a very good position to exercise it freely. Beyond that I think they've become stuck in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. They turn out some mediocre modules, management looks at the sales figures, puts even less resources into module design and tries to 'manage the process' even more tightly, killing it further.Beyond that EVERYONE in the whole community was used to 3.5/d20 OGL work. The GSL doesn't stop you from doing modules at all, but all the devs spent a year being confused about what 4e licensing was going to be, and meanwhile instead of mastering the system they all went back to 3.5, which they're all infinitely familiar with. WotC is going to find out that competing against all the freelance people who can crank out pretty much anything, slap it into a PDF and call it good hurts. Some of it will be good. If WotC was smart they'd figure out a way to get their 3PP mindshare back. Mindshare is the most imp\ortant thing you can have. The other thing is I think ironically the thing that 4e can do best is epic level play, which CAN actually be made to work quite well and which is practically hopeless in a 3.5 based system (at least doing a level 20 PF module is never going to work very well). Yet they've basically ignored that. There's a way to get some awesome into 4e modules, but the corporate culture around the game is just not likely to get there.</blockquote>

Verification