Publishers' opinions on v3.5

[BVB]

I may have missed it here; I'm not a daily regular visitor. Sorry if so.

But I'd really like to read a well-organized collection of responses and opinions from second- and third-party d20 publishers about the upcoming revisions from WotC. It's got to be miffing some of these guys to know that their products schedule is going to be filled with "old" material in a few weeks and that there's nothing they can do about it.

 

[MEG Hal]

I may have missed it here; I'm not a daily regular visitor. Sorry if so.

But I'd really like to read a well-organized collection of responses and opinions from second- and third-party d20 publishers about the upcoming revisions from WotC. It's got to be miffing some of these guys to know that their products schedule is going to be filled with "old" material in a few weeks and that there's nothing they can do about it.

We have 5 books coming out in July/August and only one did not get "revised". That one really did not need to, we may do a 1 page errata for it but that is about it, we have had copies of 3.5 for a few months all told.

 

[jmucchiello]

I deal in crunch and the revision complicates my publishing. My books are full of rules discussions and variants so I will need to revise both of them once I see the new revision. Even some of my two pagers only make sense in the context of 3.0. I also feel the changes have come too soon but that's only because I didn't jump on the 3.0 bandwagon until a bunch of 2nd ed games had finished a year and a half into 3.0's release.

I am releasing Character Customization in a week (or two) and it will be a 3.0 release and I'm nervous about slow sales. I've spent a lot of time on it (even before 3.5 was announced) and I hope there are enough people waiting for 3.5 to settle before jumping from 3.0. I had also thought about PODing Character Customization but that no longer makes sense. But again, I don't know the full scope of the changes and can only speculate as to what the changes will mean to me.

 

[BVB]

THAT'S the sort of response I was hoping for.
It almost seems that WotC on one hand has touted the vitality of an open source game system and support of third parties, but on the other hand is screwing them over with a release like this without prepping those companies in advance.

 

[der_kluge]

All the publishers have advanced copies of the 3.5 ruleset.

 

[jaerdaph]

THAT'S the sort of response I was hoping for.
It almost seems that WotC on one hand has touted the vitality of an open source game system and support of third parties, but on the other hand is screwing them over with a release like this without prepping those companies in advance.

Hardly. All the major established third party publishers have had access to the 3.5 revisions for some time (no offense to Joe M. and Throwing Dice intended).

 

[Voadam]

All the publishers have advanced copies of the 3.5 ruleset.

All the established print d20 publishers and any pdf publishers whose staff includes a member of WotC who worked on the 3.5 revisions had the opportunity to recieve an advance copy of 3.5 under an NDA.

So most PDF publishers have not seen it yet.

 

[jaerdaph]

So most PDF publishers have not seen it yet.

Which is a shame, really, because there are a lot of really great PDF products out there. Here's to hoping the PDF publishing industry really takes off in the next few years so that by the time D&D 4.0 rolls around, it will be a non-issue and WotC grants e-publishers early access as well.

 

[Pramas]

I like the revised books. I generally agree with the changes that were made and I think they make the game stronger. Once people have the new rules, I think any concerns about older material being useless will fade away. You can use any GR book to date with just a little tweaking. Gamers love to tinker anyway, so I don't think it'll be a big issue.

One nice thing from the publisher's perspective is that a bunch of stuff that was formerly off limits will make its way into the SRD. Many feats and spells that were in the class books are now in the core books, which means we'll finally get access to that material.

I am looking forward to getting the actual books. Designing off reams of photocopies is a pain.

 

[Vigilance]

All the established print d20 publishers and any pdf publishers whose staff includes a member of WotC who worked on the 3.5 revisions had the opportunity to recieve an advance copy of 3.5 under an NDA.

So most PDF publishers have not seen it yet.

Well, I work for a PDF and Print publisher (RPGObjects), and none of us have ever been fired by WOTC (though I wish WOTC would hire me for a day, and then fire me because then I'd have cache) and I got 3.5 months ago like everyone else.

*Most* products won't be affected overmuch. The rules are really close- it really is a revision, not a new edition.

Since I havent seen the character customizer I cant say how much it will be affected unfortunately.

Now to answer the question about my thoughts:

I really liked all the changes that I noticed. In some ways its all academic to me, because every published work in my resume has been modern, scifi, or supers, so I sort of went through this angst already when Modern came out, it affected me much more than 3.5 will

That said, I really think they made the game better, but no existing product I can think of will be made obsolete by the new rules either.

Chuck