Why don't you buy non-WoTC stuff?

[JohnBrown]

THG Hal,

Speaking for myself – someone who has bought only a moderate amount of non-WoTC d20 items—the reason for this is simple, especially when it comes to campaign settings. I own hundreds of dollars worth of Greyhawk campaign world material. I am not about to go out and spend hundreds of dollars more on yet another setting, even if it is 100 times better. I think the same could be said for most people, whether they are using Greyhawk, FR, Planescape, or what have you. Converting may be a pain, but it is a lot cheaper, and if I am taking the time to convert it, I can fix the stuff I didn’t like while I am at it.

As Kugar posted earlier, I think third-party d20 companies would be better served with by asking, “Don't ask how you lost my money, instead ask how you can add to my game.” More than a few times, I have picked up the odd d20 product and after skimming through it felt that it was more a vanity project than a usable game supplement.

The following is a list of things I could live happily live without seeing any more of (please keep in mind these are just my opinions, yours may vary )

1. “Generic” Prestige Classes: To quote the p. 27 of the DMG, prestige classes “set characters in the milieu and put them in the context of the world.” They, by their nature, should be extremely world specific. Its one thing for a Kalamar source book to include them, but I don’t need to see yet another shaman or necromancer. Please, it just makes my head hurt I don’t need pages of classes I am never going to use. As DonAdam said earlier many of the published PrC, can be accomplished through role-playing and good feat selection. This true of WoTC and non-WotC stuff, but for some reason it is just more irritating to me in third-party products. I am not sure why, and it is probably unfair, but it doesn’t change my opinion. The prestige class madness just has to stop.

2. New spells that are just variations of old spells: To be perfectly honest, I could live without seeing any new spells, period. In this thread alone, we have uncovered a duplicate spell completely by accident (Bull’s Grace vs. Ray of Palsy). Imagine what we could find if we really looked for them.

3. New monsters: Let’s see…There is the MM, MoP, ELH, DotD, MM II, FRCS, CC, CC II, ToH, just to name a few. That’s enough for me, thanks. 1000+ monsters are more than I will ever use. Yet another type of elf, orc, demon, or what have you, starts to get just a tad repetitious. No matter how cool or original it is, it is not going to be cool or original enough for me to justify spending money on it.

4. “New” equipment: I wasn’t all that thrilled with thunderstones and tanglefoot bags. Variations on them will leave me just as cold. I don’t need to see yet another version of tiger claws, spiked gauntlets, or samurai swords either. It has already been done. Move on. Your new version isn’t going to be better than versions already out there.


Many of you many very much like these things. If you do, more power to you. You have plenty of d20 stuff to choose from. Some of this seems to stem from the fact that many d20 publishers, at least early on, didn’t understand the “first to market” principle. Yes, this latest version of the Shaman class is better than the ones that came before it, but is it so much better that enough people will care? First to market doesn’t mean it will succeed, but it sure doesn’t hurt.

If you want to get my gaming dollar, publish something like this:

A book of generic villages, with maps. Village sizes ranging from say 10 to 300 people. And when I say generic I mean generic. Don’t name the villages, possibly leave some buildings undescribed. Have a few, by rivers, a few in the hills, a few in the mountains, and a few along a lake or sea shore. Include a few plot hooks, and presto, a product that has some real value to me.

If you really want to empty my wallet. Include the formatted text on a CD-ROM in a .doc or .rtf format (or make me send away for it, I don’t care). That way, I can easily change and of the descriptions that I don’t like, or were left purposefully undefined, and print out my version. Do a couple of cities this way and you will have one very happy customer.

I have money to spend. I would like to spend it on d20 products. I just need them to add value to my game.

 

[Nightfall]

As an aside, I am a psychopathic, ravening ogre when it comes to this stuff. I refuse to include non-Core Rulebook things in products I develop without reprinting the relevant material (when feasible) or including a reference (when dealing with major things such as prestige classes and the like).

We're getting better. I promise.

You're an ogre?! I thought you were a druid Joseph!



As for Wyvven, well you're welcome to your opinion, but I believe you are quite wrong. Believe I own a good bit of Wotc Stuff. I hate half of it, and almost slap myself when I think of all the money I COULD have saved getting OTHER products that were better.

 

[Ranes]

Hal,

By now this thread must be confirming the suspicion you already had, that there are almsot as many answers to your question as there are posters to this thread.

I am not prejudiced against non WotC product, far from it but John Brown hit the nail on the head, for me. I want to buy material that contains good ideas, stuff I can use. I don't need more monsters, rules, classes, settings (unless you've got something really - and I mean really captivating for me). What I can use are good adventures that creatively employ the rules I own or good material that helps me make my own adventures. John's book of villages sounded interesting, for example. Another thing, which I came across in another thread yesterday was an idea for a book of strategies for different monsters and NPCs, that show a DM how to make an encounter a challenge without designing it in such a way that it simply negates any tricks players may have up their sleeves.

But you do have another problem, which is how to market your product. There are few publications that target your market and mass marketing strategies are simply too expensive to deploy. The Internet is great for us but we on the net are the converts. Even then, I emailed a couple of old friends the other day, all 3E players and long time roleplayers and directed them to EN World. They all had net access but had never heard of it or thought of using the net to supplement their rpg needs.

So, if you want to sell more of your latest books maybe you need evangelists, people in every country in which your products are sold who go around all the LGS in their region and sell your stuff not only to the people buying the stock but to the people who buy it from them. Imagine a combination of salesman and DM. He arranges a game to be run in a store on a Saturday afternoon. It will use core books and one of your products. Between four and eight people play. You win some converts if it's done well. The store owner wins too, of course. But those converts will tell their friends and some of them will buy and use your stuff. Word of mouth is the best endorsement a product can have. This doesn't need to be too expensive. If your evangelists are fans who live in the area of their LGS and who go through a selection process through your website and offered a bundle of goodies for doing a good job, it could prove very cost effective. In some cases, the store owners or their staff may be the evangelists you need.

Or maybe the whole idea is hogwash. Sorry, it's late. Just trying to help.

 

[Upper_Krust]

Simon says using UK's login:

I mostly don't buy WoTC stuff anymore, beyond the Core Rules the little I've bought has been disappointing. I find third-party scenarios and sourcebooks much more flavourful and interesting - while I don't like mindlessly horrific stuff, I do like it a bit darker than WotC's general candyfloss world, I'm 29 not 9 after all. I think D&D3e is a great rules set, but WoTC's publishing-content policy is not one that appeals to me. Luckily thanks to R Dancey & the OGL there's lots of stuff out there that _does_ appeal. Things I've bought and liked recently include 'Lost City of Gaxmoor' from Troll Lord Games, although it takes a lot of work to make it ready to play, Greenland Saga & Black Flag: Pirates of the Caribbean from Avalanche Press - I'll run GS soon, not sure when I'll get to use BF though - and the Slayer's Guide to Amazons from Mongoose. Things I plan to buy soon include Mongoose's Quintessential Fighter (a player has it, it looks nice although it needs major revision to restore game balance), and WoTC's Call of Cthulu d20, which Craig (Upper_Krust) brought over from Belfast to show me, it looks great and the bleak writing style is fantastic, rarely a wrong note. Things I would have bought if they looked any good include WoTC's Deities & Demigods, and the ELH (still in 2 minds over that, may get it eventually).

-S'mon.

 

[rounser]

WoTC's Call of Cthulu d20, which Craig (Upper_Krust) brought over from Belfast to show me,

But you're posting as Upper_Krust...?

 

[hong]

If you run the Adventure Path modules in sequence as a campaign, the campaign will be linear, and players can just follow the train tracks from one dungeon or town to the next. That's the scale of railroading I meant.

That's a pretty silly definition of railroading, then. Nothing forces the DM to run the adventures in sequence.

With DM elbow grease this can change, or you can put the illusion of choice in there if you're wily, but otherwise the "what adventure will happen next" or "where will we explore next" aspects of the Adventure Path campaign are railroaded.

Given the way in which D&D is designed, I'm not sure what alternative there is. Do you want there perhaps to be lots of adventure path modules at each level range, or something? Because it simply isn't going to be feasible to go straight from the Sunless Citadel to Deep Horizon, for example. I'm not going to shell out bucks for a dozen modules designed for (say) 4th-6th level PCs when the group is only going to play a couple.

Just so what I'm referring to doesn't seem "pie in the sky", I can think of one such module that exists with much less railroad than the norm, even if it is a bit bare bones with regards to being fleshed out....Ruins of Adventure (the PnP module version of the original Pool of Radiance). The PCs can choose between several city blocks to clear out next, whether to play detective to corrupt council members in New Phlan, or whether to go a-wandering in the wilderness and run into the detailed lairs, communities and dungeons out there. As a campaign module, it has a lot more depth of player choice than the current "3E state of the art". In fact, it could do with a conversion...

Har har. Here is the plot for PoR:

kill monsters in zone A, B or C
kill monsters in zone B, C or D
kill monsters in zone C, D or E
kill the foozle in zone F

The extent of player choice basically comes down to which monsters to kill this week. It's "should we take the left passage or the right passage?" writ large.

 

[rounser]

That's a pretty silly definition of railroading, then. Nothing forces the DM to run the adventures in sequence.

As I said, add elbow grease and anything is possible. What you're suggesting is no different from gluing Dungeon Magazine adventures together into a campaign - it can be done with some effort, but I'll touch on why big, published campaign modules don't support such a structure in a moment.

Given the way in which D&D is designed, I'm not sure what alternative there is. Do you want there perhaps to be lots of adventure path modules at each level range, or something? Because it simply isn't going to be feasible to go straight from the Sunless Citadel to Deep Horizon, for example. I'm not going to shell out bucks for a dozen modules designed for (say) 4th-6th level PCs when the group is only going to play a couple.

No, that's not what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting that if you are going to release one big campaign module, it's lazy design to railroad the structure as A to B to C to D. But that's what we're used to, and that's the standard...it therefore goes unquestioned. As Dancey once said on DND-L, it's too time consuming for even WotC designers to do it any other way (so when they do, they wrap it up in a megadungeon which conveniently restricts player options to little more meaningful than corridor choice)....an implicit assumption of our hobby is to expect DMs to do it when even designers who work full time can't even manage it, because there's so much work involved...or do lots of fudging. Those DMs who have more time to spend on adventure design than full time game designers probably aren't buying modules. Those DMs who prefer to fudge probably aren't buying modules. Those DMs who do use modules find that many of them won't fit their campaign, or are poorly written - and the big ones which are worth the effort to adapt your campaign to (because they're so big they effectively are the campaign) are endless dungeon crawl slugfests. No wonder modules don't sell.

Har har. Here is the plot for PoR:

kill monsters in zone A, B or C
kill monsters in zone B, C or D
kill monsters in zone C, D or E
kill the foozle in zone F

The extent of player choice basically comes down to which monsters to kill this week.

I know - Ruins of Adventure is pathetic compared to what is possible...and yet it offers a darn sight more player choice than your average module of that size. RttToEE doesn't offer nearly that much choice of where to adventure next, what to do next, for instance - beyond the choice of

RttToEE Spoilers....again....










"Rastor or Nulb" at the start, and "Shall we (a) kill everything, (b) disguise ourselves or (c) diplomacy the factions against each other" once the PCs are in there...and options b and c don't even seem to have occured to many parties...perhaps because they know they're already on the train tracks? I'm not holding RoA up as a paragon of what I'm describing, because it isn't - it's just a demonstration of a tip of the iceberg of what it is possible and severely lacking in the published campaign modules we're seeing.

It's "should we take the left passage or the right passage?" writ large.

I can see what you're driving at here, but as a counterpoint, when it comes to player choice, the scale and impact of that choice and number of options available matters significantly. Meaningful choices and player control writ larger than "left or right" is the point, not the failing of what I am saying. "If we hadn't gone to the Graveyard, our cleric wouldn't have wound up dead" matters more in terms of a sense of retrospective campaign storytelling and a feeling of players having control over their PCs' destinies than "If we hadn't taken the left corridor, our cleric wouldn't have wound up dead"....and if there are less walls to railroad the players' options, so much the better.

RoA PCs can say, "I don't feel like clearing another city block for a while, let's go explore the wilderness for a bit" and it's detailed, and there are plots and dungeons and a bit of roleplaying out there too. At any one time they have a choice of three or four blocks to clear, or annoying Caldorna or striking out into the wilderness to save the barbarians. That's a lot more of a feeling of being in control of your PC's destiny than take the sodding left or right corridor.

 

[lord irial]

I actually buy less WotC stuff, now that I have the core books, splat books, psionics and the MotP. That's all I need from WotC, IMO.

Most of my game purchases now and for the foreseeable future are Kalamar and Traveller d20 related, though I also plan on picking up Nyambe and am on the lookout for a good, complete, modern-day superhero game.

Fiery Dragon has also impressed me with their work, most specifically Of Sound Mind and their various counter collections, but I'll be picking and choosing modules rather than any sourcebooks/settings. I may look at some of the S&S treatments of the old Judge's Guild stuff, but based on JG nostalgia rather than S&S's brand.

 

[Synicism]

And so on includes all the books I did buy and liked....PHB, DMG, MM, the 8 adventure path modules, the 5 "splat" books, Living Greyhawk Gazeteer (or Journal, the thick one), and Dungeon Magazine. All great books/mags/mods with useful or fun content.

I've noticed an inconsitency in your logic.

Your original statement was: "WotC puts out better stuff."

It now seems to be: "all the WotC stuff I have purchased has been good."

This may well be true, but they are not one and the same. Just because you haven't purchased a bad WotC book doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. And it also indicates that you do exercise some discretion in deciding what to buy, which is an admirable trait among gamers. My own shelves are full of things I would rather not have bought. Heh. Go fig.

Just because you have no use for a book (like Spyrcraft) doesn't discount it's existence as a good (excellent) book from a non-WotC publisher.

Granted, it can be harder to identify good books from 3rd parties, but if you flip through a book before buying it, then where it came from shouldn't matter.

 

[Bragg Battleaxe]

I wouldn't judge the quality of today's d20 publishers against the stuff that came out two years ago. Most of them didn't know what they were doing back then.

My LGS still has like 8 copies of The Horror Beneath. Does anyone remember that one? Jeez, was anyone unfortunate enough to have BOUGHT it? Makes me shudder just thinking about it.