WotC Unpopular Opinion: WotC is the Bethesda of RPG Companies

[doctorbadwolf]

I mean, that's a scathing condemnation of the whole DM-Empowerment/Rulings-not-Rules design philosophy, but if that's how you feel...

How?

 

[Immoralkickass]

Unpopular opinion? More like wrong opinion. You can't compare WotC to the trash that is Bethesda.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't even think disagree is the right term: the analogy isn't terribly coherent or meaningful?

Nintendo might be a better analogy. The Wii U and Switch even provide a nice parallelism to 4E & 5E, respectively.

 

[Mistwell]

Nah, you were being insulting.

How?

 

[Gladius Legis]

If WOTC was really Bethesda, it would be releasing fixes to a broken game that the vast majority of the community was asking for, then charging everyone $100 a year for them.

Say what you will about WOTC, but they've never done that. And barring a company as unscrupulous as Bethesda (or EA) buying them, I doubt they ever would.

 

[Harzel]

As a mea culpa how about this: I think WotC is embracing the ever more common tendency of electronic game developers of deciding to release work in an imperfect or "good enough" state because they are confident that a portion of their user base will "patch" it for them.

Ok, when you put it that way, I disagree. To me, it appears that in general WotC believe they are putting out a product that provides a good experience out of the box. As others have mentioned, that explicitly includes the notion that DMs will supply part of the rule set for the game via rulings to cover situations that are deliberately left uncovered by the written rules. It does not seem to me that at the conceptual level that can be counted as a flaw, since the written rules can't cover every situation.

That said, there definitely are things about many WotC products that I see as deficiencies. Although there are some other categories of issues, most of these are instances in which the authors seem to have been unable to express their intent clearly. This leads to situations in which I really don't care a lot how something works, I don't have any interest in tweaking, fixing, or modding it, but I have to put in effort to deciding how it works anyway. I find that I resent that.

The WotC D&D leads seem to be fine designers. Sure they occasionally produce things that could be better designed, but that happens to everyone. I just wish that they were, or had hired, some top-notch writers.

 

[Xenonnonex]

But my point still stands: WorC is happy to push out stuff that isn't necessarily perfect because they know the is an existing community out there that will "perfect" it for them.

Yes. I am sure their continued playtesting cycles, the scrapping of material that does not resonate with the public and is not well designed. Yes. I am completely sure that is their wanting to continuously push out material.

 

[gyor]

Yes. I am sure their continued playtesting cycles, the scrapping of material that does not resonate with the public and is not well designed. Yes. I am completely sure that is their wanting to continuously push out material.

I still say that they need to start playtesting lore, the mechanics are good, it's the lore they are starting to mess up at times.

 

[Beleriphon]

I still say that they need to start playtesting lore, the mechanics are good, it's the lore they are starting to mess up at times.

I suspect that is mostly a function of preference (ie. your preference vs the author's preference), or insufficient editorial oversight, or too much back material to ever effectively integrate.

In a lot of ways WotC is more like Marvel or DC Comics lore wise. Sure, they don't have monthly, or bi-weekly, issues for books running in some case for 80 years (there are over 1000 issues of Action Comics and Detective comics each, not counting the Nu52 years), which produces a more material than even the best editorial teams can keep track of. WotC has a great team, but they aren't churning out 1000+ pages per month as a continuous sensible story line (and DC and Marvel still don't do a great job sometimes).

In a lot of ways the D&D "story" is easier to follow, and by all accounts there is a master document that explains stuff and lays out how things work so that different parts form a cohesive feel for the writing. I'm not sure there was ever any document prior to 4E or 5E that acted in a similar way.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I would dare to say in the future the playtesting will be harder with the videogame adaptations, and more when there is some PvP mode.