D&D 3E/3.5 WotC Rejecting 3.5 Writers?

[takasi]

I was chatting with Nick Logue last night and he said he received a sad email from WotC saying they could no longer use his work. He said it was related to the GSL and his employment at Paizo.

EDIT: Nick Logue has cleared this up in this post. The situation is different from the one described here. --HENRY

Has anyone else received anything like this?

I'm wondering if WotC is requiring anyone who publishes with them to sign an agreement that they won't develop for 3.5 OGL, including any freelance work. It would seem to be a good move at helping to kill the OGL; it seems like their biggest competition has always been former employees. If everyone who publishes material through DDI cannot publish material for OGL, how would that impact the hobby?

 

[Cadfan]

I don't know anything about Nick Logue in particular. But I wouldn't be surprised by this. I personally wouldn't want to employ a competitor in a capacity that required me to put his name on his work and publish that to my customers. Not if I had a decent alternative. Why would I? Doing so just strengthens his brand name at the expense of mine.

 

[keterys]

That doesn't bode well...

 

[Haffrung Helleyes]

Well

If WoTC is going to start blacklisting all of my favorite adventure writers, then the choice to stay with Pathfinder becomes an easy one.

Ken

 

[Shemeska]

Not cool at all.

And on my own bitter note, at least he got an email from them. A half dozen DDI Dragon/Dungeon queries from me and nothing but silence from WotC, even on a completed short piece they asked to see that was left over from the Paizo era slush pile. No reply to followup emails and PMs asking for an update either. Not cool.

 

[dmccoy1693]

On the same topic on the Paizo forums, I posted

Well before I jumped to conclusions about it having to do with the OGL, I'd first ask Paizo if they have agreements on their staff members writing Wizards products. I mean a good number of Paizo employees have written wizards better work and I would not be surprised at all if Wizards and Paizo had an agreement about it having to go through certain legally appropriate channels.

I'd prefer to give Wizards the benefit of the doubt on something like this. This just seems unnecessarily petty on their part if it did have something to do with the OGL.

Mike McArtor of Paizo responded:

Paizo doesn't restrict its employees from writing for other companies, as long as that writing is done on a freelance basis and isn't done on company time or with company resources. Which is totally fair, really.

I've heard that WotC no longer lets its employees do freelance for other companies without getting permission from a manager first. Which totally makes sense for WotC, really.

Link.

And I was actually trying to be nice and fair to wizards.

 

[DaveMage]

I was chatting with Nick Logue last night and he said he received a sad email from WotC saying they could no longer use his work. He said it was related to the GSL and his employment at Paizo.

WotC wouldn't be that petty....would they?

 

[JohnRTroy]

That's incredibly sad to hear.

One thing that I've mentioned is that a way the OGL hurt WoTC is that in actively encouraged some of the bigger names to do their own thing rather than stay with WoTC. Now, I love it because I doubt Wizards would have ever published Ptolus (and allow Monte to own it), and it worked well both from a creator standpoint and a customer standpoint. But this did, in effect, enable Wizards to have more competition using their core product.

I suspect this is an example of them correcting this. Hopefully it's not true. It's a bad PR move for them and I think it would hurt them in the long run.

 

[kenmarable]

I don't know anything about Nick Logue in particular. But I wouldn't be surprised by this. I personally wouldn't want to employ a competitor in a capacity that required me to put his name on his work and publish that to my customers. Not if I had a decent alternative. Why would I? Doing so just strengthens his brand name at the expense of mine.

HOWEVER...

a) It's a small industry, and at least among freelancers it's common knowledge that you shouldn't annoy anyone, because everyone talks to everyone else (of course, maybe as the 800 lb gorilla, WotC doesn't care who they annoy, which brings us to b)

b) It's an industry largely run by and selling to "fanboys" (to use the cliche), and the community has gotten worked up into a tizzy over even less.

Oh, and c) They did it for years while they worked on the 4e ruleset. Just how many members of the Paizo staff had their names on WotC books over the last few years, not to mention nearly every freelancer who worked for them probably worked for other competitors. If they think it changes now with Pathfinder RPG and 4e being an edition war, then it's one that they themselves will create.

Maybe I'm too nice to run a multi-million dollar business, but given the size of the industry and the kinds of passions that can fly around, I would really avoid doing this.

That being said, I could understand not wanting to work with him on 4e work since he was just hired as an employee of another company that hasn't been given permission to see the new rules - but that would be a temporary thing (until Paizo can finally see the rules) and only for 4e work, not 3.5 (of course, I doubt they are buying much if any 3.5 work at this point). To me, that seems reasonable.

If they are saying "you support 3.5, so you can never work for us again", well, then I personally think that's stupidity and pettiness trying to masquerade as good business sense. However, I have no idea what WotC actually said or even what they intended to say (because with how heated things are right now, their intended message doesn't always match the interpreted one).

 

[takasi]

On the same topic on the Paizo forums, I posted

Right, Mike mentions the rumor of employees. Nick is a freelancer, however.

Mike then responded:

I don't know. I refuse to engage in speculation, since I work under an NDA. I will only relay facts.

Of Paizo's employees, only Jason has received any freelance work from WotC since Elder Evils wrapped up 16 months ago, and Jason's freelance was for a Dungeon Tiles product.