Ryan Dancey - D&D in a Death Spiral

[prosfilaes]

Third party publishers have no ability to add anything to the SRD.

Everything published as Open Content by a 3rd party publisher was (and still is) Open Content.

But let's be honest; looking at Sword & Sorcery's Creature Collection, the descriptions of the creatures aren't open content, making the creatures hard to reuse, and the names(!) aren't open content. (Not, mind you, just stuff that might reasonably be proprietary, like Carnival King, Jack of Tears or Slarecian--the example given in the license text of a non-open content name is Undead Ooze.) So there's absolutely no way to refer to a creature from the Creature Collection without renaming it and copying it into your text. And part of the joy of the SRD is that everyone knows what a red dragon is; if you had to call it a flaming drake in your product, it would defeat part of the value of using the SRD.

Sword & Sorcery could have tried to make the Creature Collection into a standard reference work of monsters. What they made was something unusable by other publishers. And S&S was comparatively fair; I've seen a number of books that seem to go out of their way to make it difficult to reuse anything.

 

[mattcolville]

Hang on a second. WOTC provides the opportunity for companies to share ideas through different products. WOTC provides the base rule set for companies to use in order to set some sort of standard on what will be shared.

But WOTC is to blame for companies not sharing?

Advocates of the Open Source movement often blame a lack of "true openness" when their pet project fails. If only they'd been more open, more fully open, more openly open open open, then it would have been a hit.

I think the Third Party Market was essentially an illusion created by the absence of real e-tools, such as we have now.

If you sum over the history of D&D3, you'll see that WotC was constantly putting out more product, more rules, more options, than any group of players could possibly exhaust in a lifetime of play. And their designers are among the best in the industry.

In other words, I don't think there was a market for innovation. I think there was a market for ease of use, and since there WAS no ease of use, since a S&S product or a Green Ronin product was just as easy to use as a WotC product, it created a false equivalence between the products.

If D&D3 had the same robust e-support D&D4 has, I think that what we think of as the third party market would never have evolved. Not because it wouldn't be compatible with the e-tools, but because customers would conclude "why buy another company's product? I don't have time to use all the crap I've already got!"

 

[prosfilaes]

I think the Third Party Market was essentially an illusion created by the absence of real e-tools, such as we have now.

If you sum over the history of D&D3, you'll see that WotC was constantly putting out more product, more rules, more options, than any group of players could possibly exhaust in a lifetime of play. And their designers are among the best in the industry.

[...]

If D&D3 had the same robust e-support D&D4 has, I think that what we think of as the third party market would never have evolved. Not because it wouldn't be compatible with the e-tools, but because customers would conclude "why buy another company's product? I don't have time to use all the crap I've already got!"

Yes, I think that DDI would have hurt Mongoose's Quintessential series and any similar series. But the Scarred Lands sold to people who weren't happy with the settings WotC was putting out, and that has nothing to do with DDI. I can think of some series that competed directly with what WotC was doing, but there were a lot of series that weren't. TSR/WotC has always been the big dog in roleplaying, and no one has ever had time to use all the crap they put out, but that hasn't stopped the roleplaying industry from having a number of companies.

 

[AllisterH]

Personally..if DDI was around for 3.x (WITH the added support of WOTC actually issuing errata), I'd say any of the following type of books would never got off the ground...

Monster books and player option/crunch books.

Settings and adventures..for sure, those would still flourish IMO but anything else?

 

[Cergorach]

If you sum over the history of D&D3, you'll see that WotC was constantly putting out more product, more rules, more options, than any group of players could possibly exhaust in a lifetime of play. And their designers are among the best in the industry.

I would like to point out that WotC produced around 185cm of official RPG books (not novels) for D&D 3(.5)E between 2000-2008. WotC produced around 85cm of books between 2008-2010 for 4E. So if the current tempo holds, we'll have around 340cm of books by 2016 (the same eight year run the previous version of D&D had). That's ~84% more books then 3(.5)E. But WotC tends to panic when their line does not as well as they had hoped, so we either see significantly more or significantly less (as in no books).

As I mentioned somewhere else, this will probably be the last year I'll be buying 4E books/boxed sets. My bookshelves are getting full (again) and I think there are more worthy RPG products to populate my shelfs (the same already goes for WFRP 3E). I've been buying D&D RPG books for over twenty years, so it is a hard addiction to kick ;-)

 

[Scribble]

Yes, I think that DDI would have hurt Mongoose's Quintessential series and any similar series. But the Scarred Lands sold to people who weren't happy with the settings WotC was putting out, and that has nothing to do with DDI. I can think of some series that competed directly with what WotC was doing, but there were a lot of series that weren't. TSR/WotC has always been the big dog in roleplaying, and no one has ever had time to use all the crap they put out, but that hasn't stopped the roleplaying industry from having a number of companies.

Speaking as a Scarred Lands fan- I bought Scarred Lands because I liked the setting, not because I was unhappy with anything WoTC was putting out.

Actually, originally I just wanted a map to steal for a home brew campaign, so I bought the gazetteer. I then fell in love with the setting.

 

[Raven Crowking]

But let's be honest; looking at Sword & Sorcery's Creature Collection, the descriptions of the creatures aren't open content, making the creatures hard to reuse, and the names(!) aren't open content. (Not, mind you, just stuff that might reasonably be proprietary, like Carnival King, Jack of Tears or Slarecian--the example given in the license text of a non-open content name is Undead Ooze.)

This bothered me too. It is definitely true that, in the earliest days, few publishers realized how making a bunch of stuff OGC could cause others to reference back to their books, and thus increase their sales.

Advocates of the Open Source movement often blame a lack of "true openness" when their pet project fails. If only they'd been more open, more fully open, more openly open open open, then it would have been a hit.

I haven't seen any of that, although I am sure it has happened. OTOH, depending upon what you mean by "a hit", I have seen a lot of hits, too. Retro clones, Mutants & Masterminds, Pathfinder, stuff from Necromancer Games, Bastion Press, Green Ronin.....Ptolus, Arcana Unearthed/Evolved.....even the WLD seems to have sold through its print run (I have one!).

I think the Third Party Market was essentially an illusion created by the absence of real e-tools, such as we have now.

<snip>

In other words, I don't think there was a market for innovation. I think there was a market for ease of use, and since there WAS no ease of use, since a S&S product or a Green Ronin product was just as easy to use as a WotC product, it created a false equivalence between the products.

And yet, strangely, the 3pp seem to have a larger market share now, when the ease of use is there, because they provide innovation in different directions.

For me, the 3pp market was always about innovation, and how various niches were filled. Frost & Fur beats Frostburn; Dungeonscape beats the WotC book, which I own, but whose name escapes me. Wildscape likewise. Where both a Tome of Horrors and an official WotC version of a monster exist, the ToH version is almost always truer to the source material.

I buy 3pp for innovation. I buy 3pp based also upon their OGC, so that I can reuse that innovation in other products.

I may be unique in that way, but I somehow doubt it.


RC

 

[ggroy]

Settings and adventures..for sure, those would still flourish IMO but anything else?

Not every module-heavy publisher flourished during the d20 era (2000 -> 2008).

Some of the module-heavy publishers stopped producing new modules or exited the d20 3PP market during the middle of the d20 era, such as:

- Monkey God
- Alderac
- Fantasy Flight
- Fiery Dragon
- Troll Lord

Nevertheless a few remained in the d20 module market to the very end, such as:

- Goodman
- Necromancer

 

[AllisterH]

I would like to point out that WotC produced around 185cm of official RPG books (not novels) for D&D 3(.5)E between 2000-2008. WotC produced around 85cm of books between 2008-2010 for 4E. So if the current tempo holds, we'll have around 340cm of books by 2016 (the same eight year run the previous version of D&D had). That's ~84% more books then 3(.5)E. But WotC tends to panic when their line does not as well as they had hoped, so we either see significantly more or significantly less (as in no books).

Er, I'm not sure thickness is a fair way to look at it...Weren't most of the 3.0 books SOFTCOVERS which would naturally be less thick than their 3.5 and 4e counterparts.

I'm pretty sure I've seen Echohawk post his table showing that WOTC is basically on the same track as they have always been since they acquired TSR. Basically, 1 book per month.

 

[prosfilaes]

This bothered me too. It is definitely true that, in the earliest days, few publishers realized how making a bunch of stuff OGC could cause others to reference back to their books, and thus increase their sales.

Earliest days? I see no huge pattern in what I've looked at; there's certainly still publishers with pretty narrow OGC clauses. The main change I see is that Paizo got into the third party business with very generous OGC policies.