WotC James Wyatt is on the Dungeons & Dragons Team Again

[Ruin Explorer]

Yeah, I meant that with a bit of hyperbole, as "one of the sad things" (by which I meant "unfortunate mistakes"). You do an excellent job of pointing out some of the others, all absolutely true.

I think it was an overreaction to Paizo making adventures that were more popular than WotC's were. Unfortunately, it caused the effect that it was trying to prevent. The 3e SRD made it possible for competitors to out perform them with their own IP - so they toasted it, and forced their once-ally, now-competitor to go into the business of out performing them with their own IP. It was very foolish.

In the very least, if they were going to push so hard to digital, they should have had the digital tools ready to do it. They pushed, but they never really delivered.

Quite re: digital, like either get it right or chill out guys!

And yeah re: being outcompeted, I think that was part of it but it's like, if you, the designers of the game, can't compete on adventure quality, why damage the game itself by creating a situation where you don't get these high-quality adventures?

And 4E was a goddamn disaster adventure-wise, early on at least. It was so bad it kicked me back from sometimes running pre-gen stuff to full-on writing my own entire campaign. WotC's own ones were particularly appalling. I mean, yeah maybe they were hit by this "push out the door", but goddamn the problems with the first few are severe and constant. Keep on the Shadowfell and the follow-ups I mean - "half-baked" is generous. Boring, confusing, nonsensical. Sure a DM can fix them, but guess what? I can also "fix" an empty sheet of paper, and end up with something better than a "fixed" version of those first few.

So they clearly couldn't compete on quality, for whatever reason.

5E is a different story, it seems like WotC have put in a real and ongoing effort to make high-quality and desirable adventures for it themselves. Many of them are far from perfect, but the same was true of Paizo's stuff (though I dunno if Paizo was ever as frankly naughty as Dragon Heist in terms of failing to deliver), and there have been some real hits, and 3PP stuff has been good too.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

...because of pretty dark behind-the-scenes reasons.

I mean, that was bad, but for that even happen, even to be possible, you need to have a really bad "all eggs in one basket" situation. A properly operating development studio, however small, should have "win the lottery" provisions (i.e. the positive spin on "hit by a bus") whereby if an employee is suddenly removed, they can keep going. I know this is something some* devs struggle with, but it's down the management/leadership to make sure it happens.

So this was classic Hasbro/WotC's "terrible digital decisions" which dominated their digital stuff of all non-MtG kinds (and even MtG a bit) from about 2002 to 2015 or so.

Even before that, too, they behind schedule and some of their plans were, frankly, outright unrealistic for 2008-2010. This was when the modern era of tablets and mobiles was only just emerging, and the landscape was very fluid. Which lead to some other bad decisions like "Let's use Silverlight for the DDI tools!". Yeah, because we want to support a novel standard which is already looking shake-y and only works on certain operating systems - not IIRC, Apple's OSes, which dominated the early smartphone and tablet market, and were also big in the laptop market.

* = There is a particular and somewhat common kind of person found in IT, networking, and software dev, who eithers considers themselves indispensable or wants to make sure they are, so either avoids or outright refuses to engage with this kind of planning/preparation, especially as it makes them easier to get rid of for performance/behaviour reasons (often the same people have reason to fear this... just sayin'), but management needs to be able to say "I don't care if you don't want to, you are required to." rather than being bro-club and saying "Yeah whatever duuude, you do you, high-five!".

(Complete aside: the most shocking thing in my goddamn life was when I came into a serious work environment - initially IT - and found out I was actually more professional/reliable/sensible than is common, not "way less" on all three as I had assumed from school/uni.)

 

[Dausuul]

Yeah that was particularly sad. I don't think I'll ever understand what they thought they were pulling with effectively getting rid of the SRD/OGL. What did they think was going to happen by bringing in a vastly more restrictive approach? The SRD was insane, basically just a list of words and some formatting, with no actual rules material (completely unlike 3E and 5E).

Things like the OGL cut against the grain for any corporation. The instinctive response is always going to be, We spent all this money creating IP and now you want us to give it away for nothing? The long-term benefits of building a community around your IP are hard to quantify, and it's easy to come off as impractical and utopian when trying to pitch executives on it.

So I don't think we should be surprised that 4E didn't embrace the OGL. If anything, we should be surprised (pleasantly!) that both 3E and 5E did embrace it. (I suspect in 5E's case it was making a virtue of necessity, promoting third-party content to compensate for the drastically reduced D&D team that emerged from the 4E era.)

 

[FitzTheRuke]

And 4E was a goddamn disaster adventure-wise, early on at least. It was so bad it kicked me back from sometimes running pre-gen stuff to full-on writing my own entire campaign. WotC's own ones were particularly appalling. I mean, yeah maybe they were hit by this "push out the door", but goddamn the problems with the first few are severe and constant. Keep on the Shadowfell and the follow-ups I mean - "half-baked" is generous. Boring, confusing, nonsensical. Sure a DM can fix them, but guess what? I can also "fix" an empty sheet of paper, and end up with something better than a "fixed" version of those first few.

So they clearly couldn't compete on quality, for whatever reason.

Oh yeah, that's true. Paizo was always better, even in 3e, at writing adventures. I ran, I think, all of the 4e adventures, but I very quickly go to the point where I would read the synopsis and use that as my plot, keep a few set-pieces that I liked (or at least didn't hate) and I made the rest of it up. I probably would have been just as well off running my own thing, but my players expected written adventures. I don't think they ever knew how little I actually used.

5E is a different story, it seems like WotC have put in a real and ongoing effort to make high-quality and desirable adventures for it themselves. Many of them are far from perfect, but the same was true of Paizo's stuff (though I dunno if Paizo was ever as frankly naughty as Dragon Heist in terms of failing to deliver), and there have been some real hits, and 3PP stuff has been good too.

I've run nearly all of the 5e adventures too. Most of them are quite good, or at least easier to do the same thing that I did with the 4e ones. I'm pretty sure I used a similar method (to how I ran 4e adventures) when I ran Out of the Abyss, for example. (At least once they got out and had to get pulled back in).

While not perfect, I think nearly all of the 5e adventures are better than any of the 4e ones (except maybe Guardmore Abbey - which brings us back on topic! James Wyatt wrote what was hands down the best 4e adventure!)

 

[Aldarc]

While not perfect, I think nearly all of the 5e adventures are better than any of the 4e ones (except maybe Guardmore Abbey - which brings us back on topic! James Wyatt wrote what was hands down the best 4e adventure!)

Also highly recommended is Reavers of Harkenwold (by Richard Baker and Chris Perkins), which was part of the DM's Kit (Essentials line).

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Also highly recommended is Reavers of Harkenwold (by Richard Baker and Chris Perkins), which was part of the DM's Kit (Essentials line).

Yes, I remember that one. It was quite good.

 

[tetrasodium]

Even before that, too, they behind schedule and some of their plans were, frankly, outright unrealistic for 2008-2010. This was when the modern era of tablets and mobiles was only just emerging, and the landscape was very fluid. Which lead to some other bad decisions like "Let's use Silverlight for the DDI tools!". Yeah, because we want to support a novel standard which is already looking shake-y and only works on certain operating systems - not IIRC, Apple's OSes, which dominated the early smartphone and tablet market, and were also big in the laptop market.

* = There is a particular and somewhat common kind of person found in IT, networking, and software dev, who eithers considers themselves indispensable or wants to make sure they are, so either avoids or outright refuses to engage with this kind of planning/preparation, especially as it makes them easier to get rid of for performance/behaviour reasons (often the same people have reason to fear this... just sayin'), but management needs to be able to say "I don't care if you don't want to, you are required to." rather than being bro-club and saying "Yeah whatever duuude, you do you, high-five!".

(Complete aside: the most shocking thing in my goddamn life was when I came into a serious work environment - initially IT - and found out I was actually more professional/reliable/sensible than is common, not "way less" on all three as I had assumed from school/uni.)

Even with technology just very recently becoming available today it can be difficult. Want to run a local VTT for in person play? Arkenforge & maybe sorta foundry(?) can do that to done degree or another, but you need a decent laptop gm side & likely a tvbox which nobody really makes if you don't include one off weekend projects like mine & maybe custom orders that are probably more expensive than mine even after I bought parts+some power tools I needed to build it. Want to move an online focused vtt to in person play & everyone will need a decent enough laptop+internet access wherever you wind up playing unless you have the patience to watch Alce Bob Chuck & Dave struggle to manage a character on a phone the size of a deck of playing cards rather than 2-3 pages of A4 (8.5x11 paper). so on & so forth.

Things like the OGL cut against the grain for any corporation. The instinctive response is always going to be, We spent all this money creating IP and now you want us to give it away for nothing? The long-term benefits of building a community around your IP are hard to quantify, and it's easy to come off as impractical and utopian when trying to pitch executives on it.

So I don't think we should be surprised that 4E didn't embrace the OGL. If anything, we should be surprised (pleasantly!) that both 3E and 5E did embrace it. (I suspect in 5E's case it was making a virtue of necessity, promoting third-party content to compensate for the drastically reduced D&D team that emerged from the 4E era.)

Not really

Spoiler: evidence to the contrary will probably surprise you

• Microsoft is a major contributor to the Chromium project with the highest percentage of all non-Google contributors coming from Microsoft (35.2%). The company has contributed 29.4% of all non-Google commits to the source code in 2020
• Microsoft—yes, Microsoft—is the fifth largest code contributor to Linux 3.0.
• Microsoft contributes code to Apache interoperability effort

 

[Dausuul]

Not really

Spoiler: evidence to the contrary will probably surprise you

• Microsoft is a major contributor to the Chromium project with the highest percentage of all non-Google contributors coming from Microsoft (35.2%). The company has contributed 29.4% of all non-Google commits to the source code in 2020
• Microsoft—yes, Microsoft—is the fifth largest code contributor to Linux 3.0.
• Microsoft contributes code to Apache interoperability effort

I didn't say "No corporation ever does this." That would be obviously wrong since we are talking right here about Wizards of the Coast, a corporation, doing it not once but twice.

I did say that it cuts against the grain, and it does. I'm well aware that the tech giants contribute substantially to open-source tools and platforms. They have figured out the benefits to them of doing so. But there are lots and lots of smaller tech companies that keep everything proprietary.

And once you get outside the tech industry, how often do you see corporations letting IP out of their hot little hands? Movie studios? TV studios? Book publishers releasing works for hire* that they own?

*Book publishers are a special case because in most cases, the IP belongs to the author, who grants the publisher the right to print and sell it for a limited time. "Work for hire" is when the publisher hires somebody to write a book and owns the result lock, stock, and barrel. The D&D rulebooks are work for hire, and so are most D&D novels. However, the Drizzt books belong to R.A. Salvatore.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

@Parmandur I knew you were the villain.

It was Parmandur all along.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

wotc has something big cooking if they are moving more designer in to place, if not 6e then it will be something else.

Hasbro wants more D&D. Staffing up is the way that gets done, even if they lean heavily on freelancers, since someone needs to work with said freelancers.