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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 9361709" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dungeon/Polyhedron Issue 98/157: May 2003part 4/8What's all this then?: Another year, another big shakeup. The polyhedron editorial explains what this means again from another perspective. Sure it’s scary, suddenly having to step up the amount of material you’re producing, but it also means they can cover current events in a more timely fashion (although they’ll still be several steps behind the internet forums) provide more variety of D20 material, and still deliver a full-sized minigame every other month. The Living Greyhawk stuff is returning to its proper home, they’ll be covering the RPGA in general more again and they even have room for a new comic. What’s not to like? Well, that depends if any of it is good. A wide variety of rubbish is still rubbish, as I found all too often in the Polyhedron UK’s. Many a formerly good thing has been ruined by stepping up the schedule to the point where they can’t come up with enough good ideas and get repetitive, or get sloppy on the editing. But I’ll keep on going anyway and hope that the last year and a bit of Polyhedron will have plenty of good bits mixed in, even it doesn’t please enough people to last forever.Bolt & Quiver take a personality test. The results are completely unsurprising. The Game Mechanics: Most of First Watch is missing, but they are still doing interviews of D20 companies. This definitely turns out to be a case where they’re trying to put a positive spin on a tough situation, as their interviewees are The Game Mechanics, a new company made up entirely of WotC’s most recent round of layoffs. Rather than go back on the tedious roundabout of job applications and interviews they decided to pool their skills and remaining cash and whip up some .pdfs to get back in the game. After all, they’ve still got all the skills they honed over years of working at TSR, then WotC. What they produce should still be good. True, but the same can be said of Monte Cook and Chris Pramas’s companies and they have several years headstart on you. Another illustration of both the good and bad parts of the OGL and D20 boom. Every time WotC drops developers who’ve done enough that they have recognisable names in their own right, they’re basically creating more competition for themselves. In a few years Paizo itself will be in that position when they end the Dragon and Dungeon licences and have to produce their own material, sometimes even beating WotC in sales. So this is really a demonstration of worker solidarity against the bean-counters. Just because people get fired, doesn’t mean they stop being friends and supporting each other on a personal level. Looking ahead, the company lasts until 2006, and even after that the individual writers still have gaming credits with other companies so while they might not have made as much money as they’d liked, it was enough to keep going and even when the company fails, a bit of networking and you soon come back as a freelancer or join a new one. RPG writer might not be the safest of careers, but it isn’t at the bottom of the pile either.</blockquote>

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