D&D 4E Monte Cook on licensing (and 4E in general?)

[cr0m]

Re: pdf sales and Monte Cook, there's mounting evidence that pdfs, whether sold or given away for free, spur hard-copy purchases of books. I blogged about it here:
How to Get Rich as an Author: Pirate Yourself.

Tor Books (sf publisher) recently started making free pdfs of their backlist available on their website, because they found that if readers had a chance to "taste test", they were likely to buy a hard copy. And once they found an author they liked, they usually bought more from that same author. Random House just started giving away sample chapters of their front list. Pdfs are mainstream.

Same thing is happening to Paulo Coehlo--he actually provides links to torrents of his pirated books, because they spur book sales. Until electronic books are as convenient as books, I don't see why this wouldn't hold true for rpgs.

The great news for unpublished authors: if you manage to pull off a pdf that has some traction, you can go to Wotc or your favorite other rpg publisher and plunk down a big spreadsheet of stats on downloads or sales and say, "look, bub, I've got 10,000 downloads of my Book of Gnomish Might, and 2,000 people subscribe to my fake company's blog, 18/00 Inc. They worship me like a god*."

Those numbers have clout.

Also, I'm psyched someone else read the 1,000 true fans article. I blogged about that, too.

* "Seriously, they do what I say. You want Mearls 'disappeared'? I can make it happen. I can make it happen by lunch."

 

[SSquirrel]

Only at the bottom of page one but I think a lot of things are being read into this that aren't actually being said. I don't get that he is against 4E at all, just that (as a publisher) he can't do anything 4E right now and it isn't a priority for him. BoXM was a pdf he put together b/c his fans on his boards begged for his house rules. Then they complained the fighter types got no love, hence BoXM 2 is being edited now.

He has said that Ptolus won't be reprinted for the simple matter that it is a huge book, a lot of details, very expensive to get produced. I think it would be easier to just get a good idea for what level bad guys pair up well from 3E vs 4E opponents and leave them unconverted vs your 4E players. A pdf containing all the NPCs in the Ptolus book w/page references so you could cross reference them would be interesting but it doesn't sound like very interesting work.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

On a different note- why on earth would they want to upgrade to 3.5e NOW? 3.5e is essentially dead in the water. Paizo is going to release Pathfinder, which is barely 3.5e compatible as far as I can tell, but 3.5e itself is not long for this world. I can see transitioning to Pathfinder, True20 or 4e, since all of those systems will have support going forward. But upgrading to 3.5e once it's mere months away from being tossed out with the sewage? Doesn't compute. You'll get cheap books, sure, but you're insuring no support moving forward and even less of a voice in influencing the modern path of RPGs.

You said it yourself- lots of cheap books. Add a very shallow learning curve and its an easy sell.

And my point isnt that the OGL games will whup on 4Ed. Its that the existence of well-written and supported OGL games in addition to the existence of a very popular game called 3.5 are just another reason not to try 4Ed. The market is flooded with good options.

Furthermore, the buying public is more aware of those choices than ever before- those substitutes are available in mainstream bookstores like Barnes & Noble or Borders, and online at the Amazonsuperultramegawebstore (Bow to them!). Heck, a search for "role playing game" on B&N didn't even turn up D&D as the first choice.

Is "D&D" still the name the mundanes use as the generic term for the hobby? Sure. But anyone who has ever purchased a game supplement knows there is more than one out there- including those non-players who buy supps as gifts.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Who's the Pepsi to WotC's New Coke?

Its probably either White Wolf because of WoD & Exalted or Games Workshop's Warhammer.

 

[SSquirrel]

I agree that forum polls don't mean too much, but they have to mean something. Let me correct myself: The Poll shows that 61% of ENWorld members and visitors that entereded that thread and decided to vote don't care for open gaming.

No, really, ENWorld polls mean jack. There is no option to enforce a single vote for a single userid and require you to be signed in. So all you have to do is signin and vote, then signout and vote some more. Freely stuffed ballot boxes are no evidence of anything. The Best of 3E polls will show this quite well. Morrus seemed a lil snippy when I called the poll system useless.

I will agree with this wholeheartedly. My group has at it's core eight players, and sometimes twelve, and I am the only one who visits here. Heck, half of them at our last session wondered what me and a couple of others were talking about when we were discussing 4e. They hadn't even heard that 4e is coming out. Most of the guys, except for 1, that I game with basically buy the ph and leave it up to the gm to buy the other books if needed. Sites like this and all of the information about third parties, gsl, supplements, etc. don't even cross their mind.

I think it's pretty obvious that those of us who hit ENWorld daily (multiple times even), post often, are role playing addicts I've been gaming for so long I don't understand people who are just fringe players, who come to the game, make a character and have fun but don't really get interested in the game system. But I'm a geek and quite happy so hey

"Good Enough" is good enough. If you're happy, why bother delving further? I don't need a nitro-burning tricked out custom race car if all I do is go get groceries every day -- the basic station wagon works fine.

I have 2 kids now and we own a PT Cruiser. I'm wishing we had the spare funds to buy a minivan right now. Heck, I see a minivan as a pretty awesome thing and I miss my old Focus station wagon. I rarely lust sports cars anyway, I have too much crap to cart around in my life as a packrat gamer

 

[jeffh]

The coke analogy makes no sense. Coke II would succeed if costumers liked its taste more than they liked the original taste.

That's not true. It consistently beat both Pepsi and what is now called Coke Classic in blind taste tests. That's why it was released in the first place. It still failed, because people objected to not being able to get Coke Classic anymore.

The real lesson there is that even if 4E is faster and more fun and addresses a lot of common complaints about 3E and makes julienne fries as well, it's still possible for it to fail if enough people feel attached enough to its predecessor to be alienated by its very existence. I'm not saying that's likely, but the possibility ought not to be dismissed out of hand.

 

[jeffh]

And probably the one thing WOTC/Hasbro doesn't want is another Creature Collection, swoping in and getting sales while also delivering a bad product, but merely taking an advantage of a delayed release of the MM.

I don't know of anyone, and neither do you, who didn't buy the MM just because the CC was available.

In fact, WotC, or at least Ryan Dancey, touted the CC at the time as a triumph for the OGL movement. Its poor reputation now is mostly hindsight in action; most of the initial reviews were positive, and its flaws only became obvious to people after there was a fair amount of other stuff to compare it to.

 

[Monte At Home]

I think that post actually illustrates why WOTC/Hasbro hasn't made licensing a priority - the top selling PDF of Monte Cook, probably the top selling 3rd party author, only sold 20,000 copies.

That is great for him, obviously, but for a company the size of Hasbo, it's probably not even worth the effort from their point of view.

Well, to put another data point out there, Book of Eldritch Might, which is our best selling pdf, is not our best selling product. That would be Arcana Unearthed, which had sales figures in the realm of WotC's d20 Modern, from what I've been told. And if you add in Arcana Evolved...

But your general point, that WotC's rpg sales are much larger than anyone else's, is absolutely correct. As I've said many, many times, companies like Malhavoc are/were never competitors with WotC. But at the same time, that doesn't mean the OGL didn't help WotC.(Nothing is ever as black and white as the Internet would like it to be.) But even if you sell an order of magnitude fewer books, if your size and cost are an order of magnitude less (or, more likely, far, far less than that), it's not a bad way to make a living.

Oh, and I think 4E is going to be very successful, regardless of any open license or not. 3E would have been successful without the OGL. But I do think it helped.

I don't think there's much else for me to contribute to this discussion. Thanks for reading my blog.

 

[vagabundo]

Oh, and I think 4E is going to be very successful, regardless of any open license or not. 3E would have been successful without the OGL. But I do think it helped.

I don't think there's much else for me to contribute to this discussion. Thanks for reading my blog.

I think you are right that the OGL helped with 3e in ways that are difficult to measure.

It feels a little like the 3e OGL community of companies is falling apart. I hope a new batch of companies can spring up around the 4e licence.

 

[kenmarable]

He may be happy with it, but perhaps he is missing out on 4E? As mentioned before, BoEM had a lot of 4e-like things. Maybe a system built from scratch with these ideas would be better?

I won't speak for him, but only for myself and say that backwards compatibility is a big deal for me. I have lots of books I've barely used and want to keep using them. Going fully with 4e makes that more difficult (not impossible, but difficult and I don't have time for or interest in difficulty while preparing my games).

Also, from the previews and design discussion I've seen so far (since that's all I have to go on), I really like the mindset they had when trying to solve some of the problems, but I don't really like a lot of the solutions.* So far what I like about 4e is outweighed by what I don't like about it. With 3.5, my likes still far outweigh my dislikes. So I'm house ruling my 3.5 games with a lot of 4e style rules, but it's that "3.5 with some 4e style rules", not "4e in disguise". At this moment, it looks much easier to get the game I want by applying some 4e to 3.5 rather than trying to apply some 3.5 to 4e. But that's just me, and I'm not trying to convert others, just explain why some 4e style material might be nice, but a lot of us still want to stick with 3.5 regardless.


* That's "don't like" as in "I don't like mint ice cream" sort of personal preference, not "I don't like getting kicked in the crotch" or "I don't like Jar Jar Binks because he's lame" which are far closer to being universal facts.