Not Reading Ryan Dancy

[SteveC]

You are presuming a mild update, and I don't think many would argue with you if that were the case. 3.5 changed just enough, though, that it made many 3.0 products a hassle to update. Adventures written with the 3.0 mentality's tactics, suddenly became silly (the changes in haste and harm spells greatly affected the FR Spider Queen adventure, for example).

For a greater update, I think the amount of hostility is proportional to the amount of products one has purchased in the current system. If you only have a handful of 3.5 books, then, sure, why would you care if there's an update? Your financial investment in the system is minor. But if you have, say, hundreds of 3.5 compatible products (especially adventures), you are much less likely to want an update that may affect the usefulness of the products you have.

(And certainly, one doesn't have to update, but if you are a DM who wants to continue to play 3.5 because you've purchased 100 books for the system, and then 4E comes out, which your 4 players, who buy maybe 4 books/year like even better, then all the investment in 3.5 either becomes a waste or a headache to convert.)

Yes, I'm thinking more of a minor set of updates encorporating errata and product updates into the Core. In the long run, this will actually save some space, as many of these rules are included in every WotC product. How many times do I need to see those swift/immediate action rules?

A full-on new edition, to my mind, should occur only ever eight to ten years. A revised rulebook that doesn't invalidate the current splats can come every two years or so as far as I am concerned. I won't necessarily buy each and every one mind you (a new DMG would have to include some significant changes for me to want it, for example), but I think this is really just part of doing business at this point.

 

[Storm Raven]

Why would you assume the freelancers would be top-notch guys?

Because if WotC didn't have to pay for a large staff, then they could afford to pay freelance writers and designers enough money to make it worth their while to take on projects for them.

I've seen several companies complain about the ability of freelancers to complete projects on time and turn in quality work. As I understand it, normally even if a book is written by a freelancer it's then turned over to an in-house design staff to make sure it's complete.

Several companies in the gaming industry also pay very poorly, pay late, don't work well with their freelance help, and generally don't do what it takes to attract the best talent.

 

[Fifth Element]

I know I could probably sell my Dark Sun collection for $100 or $200...but it cost far more than that to get it in the first place....hence it's not an investment.

Not to pick nits, but this depends on how you define "investment". From a business perspective, an "investment" is not something that necessarily increases in value (or is expected to increase in value) over time. When a business invests in a machine (and "invest" is the proper term), it does not expect to sell it in 10 years at a profit. An investment in this sense is something that makes you money, or provides some benefit, over a long period of time.

So an RPG collection is an investment - sure you may "lose money" if you resell it, but between the time you bought it and the time you sold it, you *used* it, and had fun with it. And that has value. Value that's hard to attach a number to, but value nonetheless.

 

[Fifth Element]

I'd rather see WotC aim to make money by selling 1 product to 5 million people rather than by selling 50 products each to 100,000 people (and my idea of "1 product" does not include either a monthly subscription fee or a need to continually buy new "booster packs" of minis/cards/whatever...).

Then stop complaining and get yourself appointed to Hasbro's Board of Directors already! Just write them a nice letter explaining what they're doing wrong, and I'm sure they'll be keen to hear all of your ideas.

 

[RyanD]

3.5 changed just enough, though, that it made many 3.0 products a hassle to update.

I honestly don't think WotC's R&D group believed the changes in 3.5 were as big as they actually were. Part of the problem with R&D is and was that they for the most part are not into min/maxing PCs. (They spend most of their days working on monsters and NPCs, after all).

While running Living City, I worked with a team of about 10 people who were, in my opinion, as good at their "job" (finding and fixing problems with 3.0 as they related to PC powers) as the team I worked with in R&D. We found so many issues that the Living City errata and change document grew to be about 30 pages long; and that included stuff that was just notated as "not permitted" because we never could find good ways to fix it.

We saw a lot of that stuff incorporated into 3.5. I'm not saying the R&D team lifted our work verbatim (and they certainly could have, since by license it was all owned by WotC anyway) but even if they did the same kind of work in parallel and found the same problems and the same kinds of solutions, much of what we did to Living City to make the game work better was incorporated into 3.5.

However, we had the advantage with Living City of seeing how our changes directly impacted the play pattern. When we changed various spells, we saw the reactions of the players as they switched tactics. That in turn became reflected in the adventure design guidelines that we were using to create content for those PCs. (And in 3.0 Living City we didn't change the durations of the buffs, but we discussed it, and knew what kind of problems doing so would likely cause). With 3.5, I believe that WotC made a lot of changes to make the game better, but didn't have the ability/interest to see how those changes would radically alter the way the game was being played. I think that if they had understood how far-reaching those "minor" changes were, they may not have made them.

Mechanically, 3.0 and 3.5 are virtually identical games, with the exception of a few things on the margin. But component-wise, the 3.5 spells and some of the 3.5 extraordinary and supernatural abilities make the play experience so different that adventure material written for one is almost certainly compromised when used with the other. That was, I think, an unintended consequence.

Ryan

 

[T. Foster]

Then stop complaining and get yourself appointed to Hasbro's Board of Directors already! Just write them a nice letter explaining what they're doing wrong, and I'm sure they'll be keen to hear all of your ideas.

Ooh, snarky! I'm not claiming to have all the answers, I'm just stating my preference.

 

[Lanefan]

What I'd like to see is a "4th Edition" which hybridizes MMORPG play and tabletop play, with an RPGA moderation facility, that uses on-line tools to create characters and scenarios, and focuses on bringing the best elements of the tabletop and the digital environments together under the most powerful brand in fantasy adventure gaming. If you ever see a notice that WotC has hired me back to run RPGs, that's the direction I'll be looking to move.

What would it take to talk you out of incorporating MMORPGs into the main game? I do *not* want to see the day come when an internet-connected computer becomes an essential tool required to play a tabletop game!

Lanefan

 

[happyelf]

What I'd like to see is a "4th Edition" which hybridizes MMORPG play and tabletop play, with an RPGA moderation facility, that uses on-line tools to create characters and scenarios, and focuses on bringing the best elements of the tabletop and the digital environments together under the most powerful brand in fantasy adventure gaming.

I've heard nothing but bad things about the RPGA and i'm familiar enough with MMORPG's to be highly dubious about such a combination. If anything we'd end up with the worst of the two, not the best, because such an inclusive system would drift towards the lowest common denominator. And of course, if you made this a feature, people would be unable to ignore it, assuming you want this service-based approach to be viable.

There are a lot of different play-styles out there, and many of them don't play well together. You may consider such issues marginal, but they'd be the kiss of death when trying to create a comunity that was unified in a meaningful way.

I can see a lot of appeal for some minor online resources. I think integrated web-based tools for things like character creation and so on would be great. And I can see a lot of potential for a functional matching system. I can also imagine other resources, like pages for various settings and locations(such as a city or nation), with an option to add articles where people could talk about their usage of or alterations to the area, and various voting and search features. There is a lot of potential.

But if you try and bring everyone into one tent, it's just going to be a really big, really crappy tent, that a large number of people will not touch with a ten foot tent-pole. And just to clarify, i'm not talking the kind of pole you hold a tent up with, i'm talking about a pole purchased by tentventurers specifically for the cautious poking of potentially dangerous tents. Even such courageous heroes would not risk their pole on such a tent.

Anybody who thinks i'm exagerating need only look around the net a bit for bad gamer stories, or read some of the news articles that arise from the WOW sensation. MMO's and RPG's get played by a lot of wierd, sometimes unpleasant people. Creating a unified comunity would bring more people from the latter category into contact with other players, and frankly they do enough damage as it is.

The worst participants on our hobby already cost us huge numbers of new players, drive people out of the LGS, kill gaming clubs, and worse. Trying to sell a comunity to these people is a bad idea. Still, it would be funny to read.

Oh, and D&D isn't the most powerful brand in fantasy adventure gaming, that's "Warcraft", as in "world of", as in "you can't beat it at it's own game, don't even try".

 

[helium3]

What would it take to talk you out of incorporating MMORPGs into the main game? I do *not* want to see the day come when an internet-connected computer becomes an essential tool required to play a tabletop game!

Lanefan

First things first, he'd actually have to work for the company that's going to eventually be releasing a new version of the main game.

Secondly, you'd have to promise to buy enough extra copies of the game to make up for the new players of the game that WOTC would lose by NOT building in some sort of MMO tie-in.

An MMO tie-in, if done well, would be a huge opportunity for WOTC to vastly increase the number of people that actually play the game. And, as much as grognards would hate it, that would probably be good for the hobbie in the long run.

 

[Mark CMG]

RyanD - As long as you are sharing so much of your knowledge and insight, what was it that happened with GAMA? What was the extent and result of your involvment? What sort of shape is GAMA in now? Do you have any connection with Games Quarterly that is now so vigorously competing with GAMA to be the primary national convention for game manufacturers (Games Expo 2007)?