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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ghostwind" data-source="post: 1296649" data-attributes="member: 3060">Now that everyone is through apologizing right and left and we are all back on topic, it's time to make people unhappy again by pointing fingers. Given the material I see and read, there is no single publisher that deserves the 'worst' award because everyone has problems here and there with every release. No one can get it absolutely 100% right to perfection. From design to writing to editing to layout to printer gaffes, something always crops up. But that is the nature of publishing. Having said that, there are a few publishers that do seem to have stumbled more than others in the conversion from 3.0 to 3.5, specifically AEG (their latest release Guilds is for 3.0), Mongoose (City of the Drow uses 3.0 stat blocks), Fast Forward (still haven't made that 3.5 skill conversion yet), and Larry Elmore's company (Woman of the Woods was entirely 3.0 but released at Gen Con at the same time as 3.5). To be fair, nearly every publisher still has an occassional conversion error crop up because an editor missed it or such. Nine times out of ten, it is usually confined to a skill, feat or mathematics error due to changes in skill points. Someone mentioned earlier about worst publishers being those with bad, improper, or completely mucked Open Game Content designations. I certainly sympathize/agree with them but I also recognize that Joe Gamer doesn't give a whit about what's open for use and what's not. As a designer, OGC does matter to me, and publishers who go out of their way to be vague, be overly protective, or just plain don't understand the requirements of the license, don't rank as highly as those who do. The worst offenders that I have seen in this regard are Fast Forward and Malhavoc. Both have declared common words or generic phrases such as "Dragon Bay", "Amber Sea", "Mirror of Vanity", and "Helm of Flame" to be product identity in one form or another. Other publishers like Sword & Sorcery, Goodman Games, Mongoose (to a certain extent), and Fast Forward (The Book of All Spells declares spell names to be PI even though they are using the Open Game Content of other publishers, effectively trying to close something that is already OCG) go the route of only allowing the actual game mechanics to be Open Content and protect the names of the spells, monsters, feats, skills, etc.  One of the facets of the OGL is the elimination of the need for re-inventing the wheel with every release. If more publishers were more willing to be as clear and open with their designations (i.e. getting it right and making it easy to understand) as Atlas Games, Bad Axe Games, Bastion Press, Fantasy Flight, and Green Ronin are, it is possible you could see a lesser proliferation of feats, skills, etc. and even a tighter cohesiveness between the works of different publishers. But then again, when you consider the ego of the average gamer/designer who likes to build the better mousetrap, nothing would likely change regardless. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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