Is WoTC even relevant to you anymore?

[Desdichado]

Yeah, sure. Although I don't buy much of their stuff anymore, I still use tons of their stuff that I have bought.

Although yeah; if they quit making new product tomorrow, I probably would just shrug and carry on without much drama.

 

[bytor4232]

If I had the money I would buy a book a month from WOTC, so yea, they are relevant to me. As it is, I have to pick and choose what I purchase, and what I let slip by. Plus recently I've been into painting miniatures, so most of what little money I have to spend on the hobby has been in minis, paints, brushes, and other stuff related to minis.

DirecTV Plus DVR and HBO are harsh mistresses. Just sayin.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I definitely keep an eye on WotC and don't view their products any worse than I do good third-party publishers' stuff. I'm close to crunched-out, though, so I'm getting to be a harder sell, especially as I'm not using dark elves, aberrations, demons or devils heavily in my campaign (the last four fluff monster books from them).

 

[TerraDave]

It depends on how good a job they do on 4th ed.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Anyone else in the same boat?

Yes.

The last WotC I bought is Dungeonscape. The last WotC module I bought was Tomb of the Barrow King. I wasn't impressed with the minis-centric, wargamist railroad module.

Almost everything that I find worthwhile these days (i.e., where the writers clearly thought that the over-35, long-time player/DM was part of the target demographic, and where expanding ideas was as important as expanding stat blocks) has been 3rd Party.

RC

 

[Donovan Morningfire]

Outside of Star Wars RPG and minis, not really. I just don't have any interest in buying D&D books because none of their newer stuff really strikes a chord. Last books I bought for my personal usage were PHB2 and Bo9S, and before that was EtCR (mostly to mine for adventure nuggets for other systems). Did by Magic Item Compendium a short while ago, but that was a birthday gift for a friend.

 

[vongarr]

They are very relevant. Whatever they're cooking up right now is probably going to be good, they just have too much talent for it not to be.

 

[Crothian]

Extremely relevant. I just bought 3 WotC books last week. I run Eberron using the D&D rules and aside from some modules we haven't used a non Wizards RPG book.

 

[Glyfair]

After writing the below commmentary, I realized I generalize the comments as applying to all D&D/d20/OGL products. I realized that adventures are a different story, and rather than edit large sections of the post, I putting this caveat in the opening.

----

I still buy WotC books. In fact, right now almost all of my D&D/d20 purchases are WotC. Part of that is because of Eberron. The setting was made for me. That's not all of it though.

In another thread I was commenting about how I thought that Magic of Faerun was the best WotC product produced for 3.0. I went over the 3.0 non-adventure products in my head and I realized that aren't that many 3.0 products I consider top of the line (the core books aside). 3.5 has many products I feel are top quality and often innovative.

Third party D&D/d20/OGL products, on the other hand, are finding far much less use. In the 3.0 days the d20 market was a mishmash. Most products didn't work well with other companies products, and occasionally not with other products from the same company. Quality was all over the place, there was some drek, some great products, and a huge mass of products with good ideas but poor execution.

Today the quality is higher as far as printed products go (the PDF market still resembles the early years of d20). However, the products are more specialized. They are typically designed to work with a specific campaign world or else are "replacements." If they are campaign world specific, they require a lot of work and waste a lot of space if you don't play in that campaign world. A lot of Monster books are the most usable in this category, but typically have from 1/4 to 1/2 the content beings so camapgin feel specific that I won't use them.

The "replacements" are another matter. More and more products seem to be focused at replacing parts of the D&D system. Don't like the D&D magic system? Here is a system to replace it. Don't like the psionics system? Here is something to replace it. Few products (outside of adventures) seem to be designed to work with D&D.

I really don't want to replace the D&D system. If I don't feel like using the D&D class system I don't look for a point buy system to replace it. If I want a point buy system I'll play Fantasy Hero. If I want a less tactical game I'll play Heroquest rather than find an alternate D&D system that's less tactical.

 

[Korgoth]

No. I'm still into D&D, but not 3.x.