MichaelSomething said:
Okay, let me ask you one more question about your vision; do you acutally want to make it real? Sure, we can go back and forth for the next 20 pages talking about whether it would work or not but that won't make it happen. If you seriously think this will work, let's do it. Let's make it happen. I'll even help you do it.
I personally lack the proper tools. I don't have the capital to design the interface, I don't have the industry pull needed to get good designers and a big user base. Aside from that, at the moment, the investment in 4e or Pathfinder or whathaveyou by the average consumer is big, at least from what I can see -- people have made their decision for the next few years. I could maybe see something launched with a fan-use database in mind, but every wiki needs a community to be successful, and that's something that WotC could bring over, but not something I can individually spontaneously generate (without spending a lot of money on advertising and what-have-you, at least).
Umbran said:
Respectfully, you don't generally get high level production values out of community-driven projects, or at least not consistently over time. The skills required are not trivial to acquire, and therefore the people who possess them tend to use them for things that make more serious money.
Best example I can think of is community-driven software. You get some really fine design and execution. But the documentation? Typically stinks. But good documentation is required to consider it "high production value".
Generally, no, but it is entirely possible. Wikipedia is better than the Encyclopedia Brittanica overall, despite the user-generated content on it. Big "freemium" online games have high ENOUGH production values.
With a solid company standing at the helm, overseeing printing and art and other overhead, we could get fairly high production values, at the very least for the website itself. The community might be giving up those high-class leather-bound editions, and they might get less art, and softcover books more often, more black-and-white, possibly cheaper paper, etc. But in exchange, you would gain a customized rule set for exactly the kind of game you want to run, no matter what it is, mostly for free, or printed on the cheap. And the option to go deluxe could probably still exist, it would just be more costly.
I think that the tabletop RPG industry does not need to tie itself to the publishing industry so intimately, and as it looses these ties, it can more embrace customized game elements. The Monster Builder, for instance, produces high-quality monsters whose marginal cost is essentially nil. The wiki for that showcases those monsters in all their glory for anyone to use. If a rating system were in place, and a designer could look at the highest-rated monsters, I think you'd have the beginnings of what this kind of system would be about.
