My conscience stopped me from submitting.

[Jerrid Al-Kundo]

So no, you have not merely said that your campaign is more valuable to you at the table than as a published work. You've stated, at least twice in this thread, that if WotC touched the idea, it would be turned either luke-warm or ripped apart (I forget the phrase you used in the other case).

Well, just so you know, my "importance" is an old-hat for an old fued that, per angramainyu's request, is no longer part of this thread.

However, I will address this, being as you state this it doesn't matter nor that you care about this topic to the point that it's your first post here, and we're communicating honestly here and all...

See, if you did a little more digging (which you didn't, but being new here and all that), you'd find the reason for this:

1. WotC, and other d20 Publishers, either aim for mass-market appeal or a specific niche. WotC is undeniably aimed at the general. They admit this publicly and often as part of their standard business.

2. My setting is set up exactly as I, my Players and a few others like it to be. It wouldn't fit the mass market.

Now, after stating this a few times, what part have you (or others) yet to understand? Let me put it in simple terms:

WotC: Prints generically for mass-market.
Aedon: Written for a small group of people ages 25 and over with specific tastes (some of which WotC has directly stated they won't touch due to their connection to Hasbro and the "niche factor").

Consequently, Number 1 is another reason for not submitting: What are the odds of them accepting something they'd have to edit to no end when they'll likely get lots of stuff that's rather close (or perhaps even exactly) what they do want?

In addition, part of the guidelines released by PR Manager Don Williams included:

In scope and flavor, your proposed fantasy setting should be similar to our existing settings, particularly Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance.

Rather clear, eh?

That is, you are claiming to be a better artist and have better discretion than what WotC would demonstrate in producing the same work.

Absolutely not. WotC would practice amazing amounts of discretion. But, as stated above, that discretion would be geared for the mass-market.

Now, I'm not saying you are _wrong_ in that. But call a spade a spade, that is what you have claimed. If you are called on it, defend it.

And I've not shown any lack of ability regarding just that.

So, yes, to my setting, I am extremely important, for I am it's source. And this setting is important to me, for it is the focus of my imagination and creativity.

But this is far from a claim to "importance" as many people imply it to be.

Of course, that's the method of ignorance: When you have nothing to attack, you make it up.

Speaking of which...

put me in the category of folks who get a chuckle about people not wanting to "sell out" their setting. really folks, the kind of money being offered is obscene. as someone said earlier, WotC is not gonna send jack-booted thugs to your house if you are playing in violation of your own submitted world.

Now, I just went through every page of this thread and some of the others related to it; The only mention of "sell out", "sold out" and any other such term is in the posts made by those posting negatively about people that didn't submit.

Except, of course, for DragonDroid's "...for your soul?" thread.

So, please, deal with the facts of the discussion and stop making things up.

It's belittled this conversation far too often.

Ds Da Man:

Best of luck to you!

 

[MulhorandSage]

One other useful function of this open call/contest is that these questions might force a DM to reevaluate his or her home campaign setting, find places where it's weak, and push him to improve it. Taking a step back to examine the fundamental underpinings of your home campaign should be useful even to people who think they know 95% of how to write or design for the current market. Reflection is strength.

I look forward to seeing people post their entries after the first round (when I'm knocked out, I intend to do so). I suspect that 90% of the submissions will boil down to: "Forgotten Realms with lower magic" or "gaming in this [somewhat unexplored] milleu", neither of which will likely interest me very much, but I do hope there'll be some gems in the remaining 10% that'll be inspiring.

Scott Bennie

 

[Ds Da Man]

Why thank you Jerrad, but luck isn't really necessary, only arrogance!

 

[BeholderBurger]

awooga awooga ....abandon ship

Just thought id step in here and explain why after some thought and lots of scribbling me and my friends eventually decided to screw wizards and go it alone.

Those people who criticise the self-important` for not wanting to sell their ideas out due to a delusion that they might be able to market it themselves need to also take a reality check.

Yes, i agree the chances of setting up your own company and marketing your setting maybe remote but the chances of winning this competition are also remote. If both ways are remote then you may as well take the route which at least guarentees some creative ownership and freedom.

I only noticed the competition four days before I would have to send the page off but me and several friends sat down and wrangled with the ideas we had been developing for our own new campaign setting, which I believe to be unique and potentially excellent and yet retain the essential flavours of FR and DL. The more we attempted to fit our ideas into the proposal template the more we considered what the consequences of possibly handing over a goldmine of ideas to WOTC would be.
The group includes 2 writers,a professional fantasy artist and a professional designer and several other playtesters (idea springboards).

We have definitely come to the conclusion ,beyond any doubt, that we would be better taking the long haul and setting up a 3rd party company that produces excellent quality material using what people liked about D&D in the past as a guide to mould our Campaign setting. I am constantly surprised at the amount of crap 3rd part stuff that sells in droves (im guilty of purchasing a lot of this myself) and am utterly convinced that with the right setting, design, artwork and determination that anyone can sell their own setting and related material.

As far as I am concerned people mainly buy setting products as a springboard for their own ideas and ,lets face it, if the settings out there were so good, people would immerse themselves totally in them rather than make their own.


Just my opinion.....Anyone interested in more details or playtesting in our setting is welcome to E-Mail for more details.

Tezhoughton@hotmail.com

 

[mmadsen]

Re: awooga awooga ....abandon ship

Yes, i agree the chances of setting up your own company and marketing your setting maybe remote but the chances of winning this competition are also remote. If both ways are remote then you may as well take the route which at least guarentees some creative ownership and freedom.

The "route which at least guarantees some creative ownership and freedom" is not free though. In fact, it can become quite a money pit.

Entering the contest -- pardon, call for submissions -- means you spend an afternoon with a buddy or two, grilling burgers and drinking Pepsi while you crank out a page of cool ideas. It may not have a high probability of a big payoff, but it certainly doesn't cost you much.

Then there's the fact that a new campaign world is worth much more to a large corporation -- a corporation with the resources to crank out supplements, novels, books of art, and plenty of advertising -- than to a few hobbyists who can't capitalize on it.

 

[BeholderBurger]

No one said it would be free or even cheap but I think that if you went into it thinking you are gonna make a load of money that would be sad anyway.

Plus anyone starting a small business expects to pay out there own money for a while before seeing any such return.

Having a business spirit is a good way of making your material more presentable abd concise anyway,

We can thank wizards for one thing though. All those people who have had to take a look at their homebrews and wonder are they really as good as they should be.

 

[Mouseferatu]

Those people who criticise the self-important` for not wanting to sell their ideas out due to a delusion that they might be able to market it themselves need to also take a reality check.

For the record, I don't think anyone was saying you'd never be able to market your own setting. I know I wasn't saying that. What we (or at least I) were saying is that you pretty much couldn't do so and expect a return equal to the potential $120K, that's all.

If you'd rather do it alone, and you're prepared to make less, hey, more power to you. I have some ideas I may consider self-publishing myself one day. It was only those who felt the WotC deal was a poor one financially that I said were mistaken.

 

[orion winterfire]

One other useful function of this open call/contest is that these questions might force a DM to reevaluate his or her home campaign setting, find places where it's weak, and push him to improve it. Taking a step back to examine the fundamental underpinings of your home campaign should be useful even to people who think they know 95% of how to write or design for the current market. Reflection is strength.

I look forward to seeing people post their entries after the first round (when I'm knocked out, I intend to do so). I suspect that 90% of the submissions will boil down to: "Forgotten Realms with lower magic" or "gaming in this [somewhat unexplored] milleu", neither of which will likely interest me very much, but I do hope there'll be some gems in the remaining 10% that'll be inspiring.

Scott Bennie

I don't know about all that. I, for one, did take a look at my campaign (as I did submit it). However, the template that WotC asked submission to conform to doesn't even touch the "soul" of a campaign world. As I worked on my submission, I was frustrated that it seemed to skip over all the important parts of a world (history, mythology, culture, races).

Who the heroes are, who they fight, how they do it, and the "nature of magic." With the possible exception of the last one, these really don't make a world unique, at least IMO.

I, too, look forward to seeing some of the proposals that didn't make it, though I doubt I would find very many of them interesting at all without more info that the template allowed.

And just to weigh in on the main topic at hand . . . As far as I'm concerned, anyone who makes a choice to do (or not to do) something is perfectly free to do so (assuming it doesn't infringe on the rights of others), for whatever their own reasons, and have a right to do so without being ridiculed.
I can certainly relate to the feelings of those who chose not to submit. In fact, I myself had to think about it for a while. There is something about other people writing books or RPG material for MY world that repels me. I know my world and what makes it tick, and a 100-page setting bible could never communicate the world's essence.

I did decide to enter it, however, as 1) I believe that it is a world that is marketable, and one that other gamers would enjoy, and 2) I need the money to desparately not to give it a go.

I must admit that if my world becomes one of the "accepted," I'll have a very hard time letting it go.

Sure, my home campaigns could go on unchanged . . . but my kingdoms and characters and conflicts would be out there with the masses, as well, being developed and changed by people who don't have any attachment to it at all.

Of course, sacrifices must be made when one is publishing for money. I'm not "in the industry," but I can say that I wouldn't expect a novelist to changes his/her themes or the basis of his/her world to suit any one particular publisher (though some things just aren't marketable).
The same goes for RPG worlds and supplements. Sure, if you freelance full-time you're going to have to make some sacrifices along the way. But if someone chooses not to make those sacrifices . . . so be it.

And we're not even talking about a full-time job here. We're talking about a "preferred writer" treatment. $120K is a great deal of money for 100 pages of material. That does not, in any way, shape, or form, mean that somebody has to be insane to pass it up. Especially considering the price of giving up the core of idea away to strangers to develop and sell.

Anyway, I've gone on for far, far too long. I hadn't intended to write a damn essay.

In summary . . . To each, his or her own, and it's no one's place to say otherwise.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Some people can not submit for the right reasons. They decided they didn't want to bother waging it all on something that might be lost (even if it was an infinitesimal chance). They'd rather keep it, nurture it, and make it available to the public in their own way. They're not loosing anything by *not* submitting, and if they didn't want to bother, no big whoop.

But there's a bit of subtext to something like this. It's saying (perhaps indirectly, perhaps not) that, given the same conditions, anybody would do the same thing as you.

Nobody wants to be called greedy. Nobody wants to be accused of not loving their settings. Even if it was just indirectly, even if it's not on purpose. By saying "I loved my setting too much to submit it," you say that everyone who did submit their setting didn't love it as much as you, or gave in to greed, even if you're not doing it intentionally. Most people (including myself) may take this as an attack.

Given similar circumstances to Jerrid (a decent job, a successful life, a campaign setting that may have to be tweaked quite a bit to fit outside the bounds of his own circle of players, only one setting in my head) I may have opted for the same path. To me, it just wouldn't have been worth it, if the chance for a win came around. Why bother submitting if I had no intention of following through with it? Why bother when I'm happy with what I have and don't want anything more?

It's the first reason I've heard that I haven't taken offense at.

I'm sure everyone has their own unique circumstances for not submitting, but by saying it's for love of the setting or for that you don't care about the cash is implying "Hey, you're greedy and you don't care about your setting!" even if you don't want it to.

So just say "I didn't care enough to do it" and we can all sleep soundly at night. "I didn't want to." "Nah, I didn't want to win." There's a million and one ways to say "Nope, didn't want to." without looking like you're getting up on some high horse and dismissing everyone's morals and love.

Frankly, the reason I *did* submit was because no way in the nine layers am I going to get that friggin' attatched to a campaign setting. I can pull one outta my booty without too much trouble (heck, that's why I don't buy FR or DL or GH stuff!).

Your circumstances not the same? Fine. But try to make the stubtle distinction between you basically not being attracted by the contest and you being too good to enter the contest. Cuz you may be saying one thing, but it sounds like something quite different.

And for those of you still saying that WotC is evil and that anyone who loves their setting as much as you love yours wouldn't have submitted, it's insulting. Actually get off the high horse.

 

[JohnBrown]

After reading all of this for the last couple of days, I decided to put my opinions in on this as well

First, those of you who didn’t submit your ideas because you just couldn’t bring yourself to do it or you didn’t want to give up control, I say more power to you. I think you are nuts, of course, but hey, they are your ideas…sell them; don’t sell them…no sweat off my brow.

To those of you trying to convert the above…give up, it is clear that to most of the people that fall into the category above this subject is akin to religion and their children, you won’t convince them that they were wrong, so why bother.

And lastly, someone above mentioned that they thought WoTC was asking the wrong, or at least not enough, questions about the worlds being submitted (history, mythology, culture, races, etc. being neglected). While you are more than entitled to that opinion, and I have no desire to get into an argument about it, I will say that I see things differently.

The kinds of things that WoTC as were exactly the kinds of things I would care about if I was going to play in and/or buy a new campaign. While things like the world’s mythology are certainly important, a cool set of gods or races wouldn’t make me want to play in that world. The over-all theme of the place, who the hero’s are, who the villains are, etc., at least to me, are much more important.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject…. feel free to continue the arguing.

John