Ugh. People, please read past the first paragraph. The email is what inspired the rant, but the subject matter is: WotC's policies regarding PDFs and the GSL mean I cannot support them as a customer. What do you think is going to expand the hobby faster? 3rd party support, open gaming and PDFs? Or junk email?
No Dice <Nerd Rage>
- Thread starter Chrono22
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Cor_Malek
First Post
Um... So what you really mean is: "disregard 2/3 of my post and focus totally on last 4 lines"? Readers tend to focus heavily on first 66% of the text, you'd be surprised.
One of the problems here is that until the second sentence, this part would work perfectly with the bigger part of your post. Rest looked like a simple "PS" in form of flippin' a bird in Wizards direction/spitting on the side.
As to restrictive third party licenses: my favourite RPG publisher (Paizo) and one of my favourite gaming systems (Pathfinder) that they made rely very heavily on Wizards OGL, and I really couldn't be thankful enough for it.
And their influence on shop-owners? Mate, RPG sellers had it easy, trust me. Ever saw how gastronomy or shops work from the inside? When you get a "free fridge", you can't put products of other companies there. If you Sell products of X you might get higher prices until you switch.
Not to mention, that I'm being told that were the shop-owner to disregard this policy, and not run encounters - there won't be any gazebos sent after him. What will happen is that he'll no longer be official, sanctioned if you will, WotC distributor. For Garys sake, mate! Have you ever heard of any other kind of shop, where you'd get company backing, even only for marketing - and still be able to sell products of other companies?
As to pdf's - well I agree, in a tautologous kind of way
I buy pdf's if that's the one and only way to obtain a product for me (shipping costs can be higher than the products cost), so if there are no - I agree, that makes things tricky 
Doug McCrae
Legend
The latter.
Cor_Malek
First Post
Strange, I thought that all those companies invested in sending out massive amounts of spam because they're lawful evil. Are you suggesting it's a a tried and confirmed business tool that allows you to make money even if you don't actually make anything, and works wonders for people who do? Next thing, you're gonna tell me that lawn-signs make bigger impact on political campaigns than the arguments on foreign policy.
Chrono22 - don't get me wrong, it sounds great, in an innocent kind of way, but it's not how world works. I agree, with a big fan-base, it's actually better to allow all the participants to chip in. Think of it that way: how many open OS users and contributors started out on windows/mac? What WotC is doing is really great for our hobby as they introduce people to tabletop games, and take them out of the basement, quite literally.
Maggan
Writer for CY_BORG, Forbidden Lands and Dragonbane
3rd party support is great, but people new to the hobby tend to go to the source first. After all, they will need the basic rules supplied by WotC to even have a reason to want 3rd party support. Still, there is a license, albeit more restrictive than the OGL, and there are 3rd party products out there.
Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Partnerships
PDFs are great, but I don't think WotC making PDFs available for sale is something that is crucial to entice people to pick up the hobby. It is, I believe, a form of publishing that is more likely to be of interest to customers who are already gamers. Still, if you are new to D&D and want to try it out, and want a PDF to do so, WotC are supplying such an option with Keep on the Shadowfell, plus a free demo of the character builder.
Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Try DnD
Which leaves us with "junk email". While this also seems to have the drawback of reaching out to people who are already gamers, I think that, as with 3rd party support and free entry PDF material, WotC should try it to see if it can make a difference. At the moment, they need to reach out as much as they can about D&D Encounters, and give it exposure. And email can be an effective way of doing so.
Only 3rd party support won't help WotC. Only free entry PDFs won't help WotC. Only email advertising won't help WotC.
But a combination of these, and the D&D Encounter inititive and others, will help WotC.
IMO.
/Maggan
Maggan
Writer for CY_BORG, Forbidden Lands and Dragonbane
I would hazard that the reason we are not seeing a widespread and explosive negative reaction to the products released by WotC is that most customers are pretty happy with what's on offer.
My group went from wowing never to play 3e again (after a heated debate that had some of us open to continuing, and some opposed to the idea), t playing 4e every week for something like a year now. So it's a good game for our group, and I have a hard time seeing that we are unique in that respect.
/Maggan
Man this thread is petty and ridiculous. I would kill to have a shop in the town I live running encounters so I could DM it for some new people, encourage people into the hobby and such. Everyone has to start with something and for me that was 2E AD&D. If there is a free way to just come and play DnD to get into the hobby I would love to participate in it by running games for new players.
Sadly that isn't the case here and we don't have a store to run DnD encounters or anything else I am afraid.
At the same time, I could use some herbal pills of unknown origin from countries without proper FDA health and safety standards.
Sadly that isn't the case here and we don't have a store to run DnD encounters or anything else I am afraid.
At the same time, I could use some herbal pills of unknown origin from countries without proper FDA health and safety standards.
Mark CMG
Creative Mountain Games
My own group plays multiple systems, always has, and nowadays (last couple years) that includes 4E, 3.5/d20 plus variants, 1E, and many non-D&D systems. This week we're giving Prince Valiant (1989) a shot. However the divide in the gaming community is pretty huge, bigger than I have seen before and I've been around a while. I wouldn't describe the negative reaction as explosive but rather deep-seated and that is probably worse. Explosive is reactionary and volatile, potentially prone to change, but something heavily ingrained is much more intractable. However, I also see a good number of people trying the weekly Encounters at the FLGSs in the area. We will see what the Essentials revisions do to the currrent fanbase but I suspect the usual thinning as we get further and further along from the original release though bolstered by some new blood because of the marketing push, but ultimately a net dwindling. We seem to be on the waning side of a more narrow bell curve than usual which is not a good place to be two years into an edition. Regardless what you call it, maybe Essentials will have a drawing effect or cause a resurgence like 3.5E seemed to do. We'll know better by year's end and the rest, as they say, is speculation. Our group will be playing through ToH4E soon and then trying some other things while our 4E DM evaluates Essentials. He's a DDI guy and if he decides to buy in to the Essentials line then I suspect we'll give some of it a try in 2011. We have several DMs in the group who are trusted to run good games no matter the game system.
Having free casual gamedays designed to make it easy for new gamers to start playing D&D, and trying to spread the word about such events, is going to do immensely more to expand the hobby than PDFs.
PDFs and 3rd Party Support? Those are largely conveniences for existing gamers. They can help expand the party, sure, but not nearly on the same scale as an open campaign to get more people playing the game. I also feel those were bad calls by WotC and would like to see them make effort to fix them - but tying your entire hatred of the company to such trivial concerns, to the extent that you unleash nerd rage over learning they are running free games for those who are interested in it...
..that sort of attitude does more to hurt the hobby than every lost PDF sale and absent 3rd Party Product ever could.
TarionzCousin
Second Most Angelic Devil Ever
Let's see:
- Unwanted email received
- Encouraged to respond
- Attempt to respond --> Not functional
- Frustration at recent policy decisions exasperating current problem
Different people respond differently to the same stimuli. You were already upset at WotC's choices before you got this unwanted email. So when other posters say "I wouldn't be upset if this happened to me..." it isn't really relevant.
Try not to let it bug you this much:
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