NOMINATE: Best RPG company.

[Aberzanzorax]

Who do you think is the best RPG company, and why?


Nominate your favorites, and don't be afraid to be honest...your favorite might be someone else's least favorite. That's ok.

 

[Chainsaw]

Gygax TSR, because everything else is a footnote.

 

[Stormonu]

Oh, a hard one - ther's so many good ones.

I'd have to go with Paizo, they're amking the products that interest me at the moment.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

For me? Open Design, by quite a margin (though others are held in great esteem).


OD is small enough to be very responsive to customer input, and their very design is focused on meeting very specific customer input. On the other hand, I've been a patron of several projects and have variable input on them. On a couple I've had no input, and they turned out as wonderfully as I'd have hoped had I attempted to guide them toward my own desires every step of the way.


I like that they have a fairly large, and incredibly invested group of individuals brainstorming, but that they also have a single (or a few?) editor polishing off the final product into something that, in my opinion, has been top notch every single time.



For those reasons alone, I'd put them at the top of my list, but I want to add another...

...Kobold Quarterly.



I mean, JEEZ! This magazine has become the "spiritual successor" to Dragon Magazine for many, and on top of being a quality publication, it's edition neutral.

Wait.

It's NOT edition neutral. It is not systemless. It is BOTH 3rd and 4th edition, with possibilites for other gaming systems as well.


When I (and I have asked this recently) ask "what is Dungeons and Dragons" .... well, KQ and OD might just be an acceptable edition neutral answer.





But, I've raved enough....and this is not an OD or KQ commercial.

Please, someone else rave about your own favorite gaming company!

 

[scourger]

All in all, I would have to say Wizards of the Coast. I went out there 5 years ago when I was in the Seattle area. It seemed like a great place to work. Very fun & creative atmosphere. The building has on-site child care, a cafe and a gym. I went to lunch with a couple of the guys. I got in on an afternoon game of D&D in a conference room named "Wayne Manor" (they all have cool names!) and got to eat some birthday cake. They had free minis being distributed to employees and a room set aside for computer gaming. Of course, there is plenty of D&D to be had and other fun activities. See:

http://www.wizards.com/Company/Careers.aspx

They have a library of past published games. Imagine that for "research." And, I am enjoying the heck out of Gamma World right now, so I would love to be around those developers and working toward making more fun in that vein.

For content, my fave is Pinnacle Entertainment Group as I love Savage Worlds. But, I don't think they really have a brick & mortar site--at least not a big corporate location. So it would be hard place to work as I think it is mostly in the cloud. And, the opportunity to develop Savaged games is with self-publishing. But, I do have ideas for that system, too.

Paizo will always have a special place in my gaming heart for its time with Dungeon, minigames like Skull & Bones and the very cool Omega World d20.

There was a time when I really liked Mongoose, especially for Judge Dredd d20. I still check their site periodically to see what they are up to.

Lately, I've been looking at Palladium Publishing too. Rifts remains a very cool game setting to me, and I would like to run it again. I've even brought back the idea of my buddy restarting his Systems Failure game.

Alas, it is hard to pick a favorite.

 

[Thunderfoot]

I going to go off the board and say FASA. In a time when TSR ruled the waves of the hobby seas only FASA and Games Workshop even stood a chance (yes, I know ICE survived and is doing fine, but really Rolemaster was more an oddity than a system - I know I'm going to take heat for that one.)

FASA stood up and made games that were innovative, fun and in some cases about some of the hardest memes in fantasy and science fiction. Star Trek the RPG - really, what the did with it was amazing regardless of what the Okuda's say (I think they messed up the ST universe). It's a shame this is what ultimately killed the company.

Battletech, MechWarrior, and all of their different offshoots - all stellar hits and well written and produced. Still played by countless "mech-heads" today.

Shadowrun - the single most complicated first edition game since FATAL, except that you could actually play Shadowrun. Cyberpunk taken to the extreme and it still around in what, it's fourth edition. It's a crying shame this company went under due to someone's "intellectual property ego". They had been given latitude to play around and write the rules and so they did - very well. Then, they had it stripped away and have been ridiculed for their mockery of a franchise. A dirty, low-down crying shame I tells ya.

FASA - may your name always be said with pride.

 

[brewdus]

Paizo. They make great products for the Pathfinder line, and have awesome contact with their customer base!

 

[Bluenose]

Existing. I'd say Chaosium. Consider the list of games they've been responsible for; Call of Cthulhu, Runequest, Pendragon, Basic Role Play, The Laundry RPG. No doubt more I haven't remembered.

Dead. Digest Group Publications. Made probably the best material ever for Traveller, better even than the work GDW did. I don't think I remember a single bad product, either.

 

[nedjer]

http://www.wizards.com/Company/Careers.aspx

/QUOTE]

Clicked on that for a laugh - not sure I'd make it to work on time what with the canoe, the Atlantic and a broken paddle - but others should check it out, as there's a peachy Assistant Brand Manager for D&D up there by the look of things.

 

[jaerdaph]

It's hard to pick a best so I'm going to nominate all the publishers who participated in the Relief Effort Bundles (Haiti, Pakistan and New Zealand) at RPGNow/Drivethru/OBS over the last year.

I'm also going to single out Adamant Entertainment for several reasons: the move to "app" pricing on PDF RPGs and their charity work above and beyond the RPGNow relief efforts - from donating the proceeds of their e-Reader (Nook, Kindle) versions of ICONS Superpowered Roleplaying to the Gulf oil spill clean up efforts to donating the proceeds from their latest ICONS adventure, The Aotearoa Gambit, to the relief effort in New Zealand.