Glyfair said:
One thing I have noticed is that a lot of stores seem to have some problems getting experienced gamemasters for RPGs.
There is a lot of truth to this coming first and foremost from me with my GM hat on vs. me with my freelancer hat on.
When I started running/playing 3.0 version it was fun, interesting and there wasn't a lot of material 3rd party or otherwise available except the core rule books and a couple monster/spell books from the Scarred Lands S&S studios. Games seemed pretty fast paced and easy to run.
Most of the people I played with weren't super interested in "Sword and Fist" when it hit the shelves as 1 look at those showed a huge gap in quality between the 3 core rulebooks and other WOTC produced products of its ilk that have been "re-imagined" over the last 2 years into an ever expanding series of hard backs.
The Faerun books were super high quality and impressive and those I knew who were the FR fans were starry eyed about this Renniassance for their favorite game world. Living Greyhawk seemed to be a "supported" and "Cool" idea to keep Greyhawk alive. Old timers were crawling out of the woodwork to write, re-write, or create new product.
3.5 came along and kicked all of those folks in the junk and I think collectively PO'ed most of the "old school" market against WOTC forever. I mention this with emphasis. Prior to 3.5's announcement and rush to print TONS of oldschool fans, writers, and creative thinkers were fully on-board with all things 3.0 and very very pleased with all things OGL and D20 in nature.
Since that time tons and tons more splatbooks came out (From WOTC) and each one added an additional level of complexity to RUNNING the game vs. being a player. 3.5 has been a boon to the player market. WOTC is doing an awesome job of getting players what they want. Players can customize their characters 8 ways till Sunday.
A few problems here that are percieved to reflect poorly on WOTC.
Most of the purely "character" players buy few books.
D&D has always been a game where the GM is expected to purchase the lions share of the game products. Now it can and should be argued that more "Players" buy books than ever before thanks to the splat book bonanza of the last few years, they typically only buy the books that pertain to their character class becoming an ultra bad-arsed party of 1. For the GM, they have to decide to "allow it" and thus keep a player in their group or deny it and risk losing a player for whatever reason. If they allow it, they likely have to buy it, study it, and know it as well as the player, lest the player begin a cycle of rules abuse that is detrimental to running a game and making sure everyone else is having a good time. Like or not and deny the fact or not but thats how the die rolls. Another book means just one more thing that the GMs have to keep track of and that much more time invested in the setup for a weekly/monthly gaming event. Good for WOTC in the short term, bad in the long term as people get turned off from GMing 3.5 D&D and move on to other games that they as game masters feel that they have more control over.
WOTCs Books Are the Only True Canon of D&D RPGs
Many folks believe this to be so, always have and always will. Ask people who ONLY play RPGA sanctioned events. There are plenty of them. I'm not knocking it, people gaming is good for gaming.
Such gamers and purists want their materials to be "Canon" because whether I or anyone else like it or not the "Canon" forms a common language for gamers from across the globe to use in reference to their own games. For that reason alone WOTC is important to D&D and games/gaming in general.
How is this a problem? It limits the creative freedom of the GM to "whats in the books". And of course you HAVE to have the next book to get the next seed of canonical jargon and stay a step ahead of your (few) players that actually bother to buy books beyond the PHB. To be fair, a lot of people prefer to be on the same page with everyone else in the gaming world vs. the murmering in the darkness.
Note The schism even in WOTC products from the demon lords attested to in Book of Vile Darkness vs. the Lords of the Abyss book that came out a while back. Vast difference in power there. The PCs keep getting more and more powerful but the monsters and villians keep getting lamer. That inconsistancy puts another not so pretty spotlight on WOTC's tenure at the helm of D&D. Case in point. A buddy of mine purchased the book on Hells, "cheap" from amazon, cracked it open, groaned at the amount of reprint material, groaned again at the weakness of his favorite devils compared to BoVD and promptly traded the book away within days of purchase. The change in power is a significant change in Canon unheard of "in the day."
Rules Bloat Makes the DMs life Miserable and Slows Down the Pace of the Game.
As a professed oldschool gamer who happens to have written a heavy ton of 3.5 material I find it OBNOXIOUS to have to have 5 books open to run an encounter. NOT because I am a bad or disorganized DM. Checking a spell effect from Spell compendium, and another from PHB, re-looking at those hideous Turn Rules, another for an obscure and HARD TO FIND rule from the DMG or with a book flipped open to a monster from MM and another to a monster in MM 2, a page stickied from epic level handbook a desk top computer with the Hyptertext SRD for another rule and another with the adventure on it is a pain in my backside.
You know... hell with all that. I miss the old days of having the module or notebook with the adventure, the DMG and a PHB. All told under 400 pages of material. Looking around the table to see 6 players with 3 books open apiece on top of it all is the icing on the cake (Going ALL WOTC that would be PHB, PHB2 and whatever their character class's splat book is and maybe a spell compendium or two PER PLAYER).
The trouble with 3.5 and its overall skew on how it reflects on WOTC can be summarized in the above two paragraphs. It's too much page flipping. It's too big of a learning curve to recruit new GMs into the game.
Hopefully this 4ed stuff will be better but I'm going to go on a limb and say that I highly doubt it. If anything it will be more crunchy, more rulesy and end up even more book heavy. It won't start out that way. It will start out elite, beautful and elegant. New Monte Cook's will be made from the re-launch. They will ride a wave of fame and grandure only dreamed of and folks will line up for miles around the WOTC booth to get their DMGs signed. It will be an awesome spectacle.
Of course within 4-6 months of the last core rules book release... the NEW WAVE of splat books will hit the shelves like "Axe and Foot" and "Ultimate Arcanophile", repackaging and reselling the same old content again. Those books may or may not take on but things will go about a year. Materials and eratta will be heavily supported in the online model.
The online model will claim greater "registered users" than Dragon or Dungeon ever had because the price for a yearly subscription will be "about right". It will be fatally flawed with technological hurdles, differing interpretations, cold online detatchment and a seeming lack of direction that will be highly criticized on alternative message boards/web outlets.
There will be some cool adventures released and a bunch of really lame ones. Then one day the press releases will come. There will be "creative differences". There will be some "reshuffling" at the "top". Hopefully the next generation of design geniuses already have a plan for where they want to be working 2 years post 4ed's launch. 4.5 should be ready to go to presses by then.
By 2011 the "Stars Will Be Right Again".
Case
