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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Najo" data-source="post: 3884106" data-attributes="member: 9959">I have owned my own game store for over 13 years now, and I have been involved in the business for over 18 years. We pay attention to the industry and understand what it takes to be a great game store. To stay on top of the hobby games industry - magic, warhammer, D&D alone is alot of work, plus the numerous games from niche publishers, let alone training for staff, plus then you got to wade through all of the 3rd party publishers?Most game stores are ran by hobbyists who don't take the time to learn how to really run a business. This is their down fall. But even more reason to make seperating product easier. How is this any different than the computer and video game industry (other than dollars) where you have logos such as intel inside, microsoft official approved software and countless other marks of quality control? How does that retailer check out the product before they buy it? What helps guide the retailer to good choices when you have a number of small in house products with no track history saying take a chance on me? You are basically saying that the retailer should order everything and then reqad through it, then order more based upon their discovery. Why not give the retailer a tool to make this easier. How about retailers who can't afford to make mistakes like that or ones without the product knowledge to judge. At least a mark of these guys took the extra steps to make sure their product is better helps a bit.They have been building these resources from the beginning. You can follow the commentary of the people who have worked on 3.0 and 3.5. These documents exist under NDAs and they are impossible to get to. Those documents speed up design and development. It keeps designers from rehashing the obvious or having to be mindful of common design considerations.Of course the document would change and update. Game design is as much about the mathematics and balance as it is an art, whether you see that or not. Many games have been artistically beautiful both visually and mechanically, but were broken as hell. Once a game is broken and play not balanced properly, the players typically drop the game and it dies. You can go through countless dead hobby games and their reason for dying first and foremost is poor game design and broken rules. If they are letting people play in their sandbox, then they already have opened this door. WOTC already is trying this model out. In fact, they stand to make more money. The current state of the industry is OGL, D20 and official WOTC products. OGL = everything from Mongoose to Piazo. D20 is GGR, GMG, and a handful of others plus Piazo would fit here content wise. If they get rid of the d20 logo, we are back to everything in one bucket like before. The very glut all of you have complained about when 3.0 started that hurt the D20 logo will happen again. Oh, and no offense intended, but Tenkar is making those numbers up. My previous post has more accurate industry numbers, and for 2006 at that. Piazo has experienced designers who worked on Dragon and Dungeon. They had access to the design docs from 3.5 I would bet. Mike Mearls was the understudy of Monte Cook, again Monte has access at least to everything from 3.0 and he is such a good game designer and contected that he could get 3.5 docs or at least retroactively build them. Mike then would benefit from that. Mike didn't come out of a vacuum you know.</blockquote>

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