WotC Replies: Statements by WotC employees regarding Dragon/Dungeon going online
- Thread starter Doug McCrae
- Start date
ShinHakkaider said:
My purchases today:
- Dungeon 146
- DCC #6 Temple of the Dragon Cult
- DCC #31 The Transmuter's Last Touch
- NOT Expedition to the Demonweb Pits
- NOT Complete Scoundrel
My review of the three items I bought: "Whatever happened to my rock and roll". All three are a bit too complicated for me, instead of "straight ahead" old school D&D.
DCC adventure about an army-wounded dragon and his adventuring party friends in a formerly-dwarven trap-strewn lair? Priceless! Dungeons AND Dragons AND the toughest monster of all -- the enemy party -- woo-hoo! Bash in the door and roll initiative!
But when his friends have HALF DRAGON special powers? Eh, whatever. Too many useless new rules, and you lost me fluff wise. The letters "DNA" don't belong in a DCC, and half dragons are just silly. It's like mitochlorines, or whatever Lucas called 'em. Just messes up the setting for me, going from medieval fantasy to "crunch fest rules-diddling fantasy".
As for the 5th to last Dungeon? Well, there's not much there. The editorial articles are OK (the most interesting idea is the bandit leader who is an exiled prince, but it's an idea I've heard before, as a card in the old City of Greyhawk boxed set), the secondary adventure is all about transformations/templates (yawn, a crunch-based adventure), but the main adventure seems to be an extended meditation on torture, piercings, tatoos, dirty paintings, and whorehouses. Some sort of cross between Vile Darkness and Erotic Fantasy. WHATever. It's not that it's badly written or uninteresting. It's just that D&D geeks getting their groove on thinking about "shaved" and pierced harpies? Ugh, definitely not something I want to do with any gaming group I've been in!
Kheti sa-Menik said:
SCENE: WOTC cubicles, Friday afternoon
WOTC employee 1: Wow, people on the boards are REALLY pissed that we axed Dungeon and Dragon.
WOTC employee 2: Yeah, marketing made me write up some spin about how we liked the old mags, how we're gamers, not suits.
WOTC employee 1: The suits made you say we're not suits.
WOTC employee 2: Yeah. I feel kinda dirty. Let's get outta this dump early. It's sunny in Seattle for once.
WOTC employee 1: Good idea. I need a beer or a few after this week. See ya Monday.
I agree with most of the non-extreme statments expressed here and I am going to miss the magazines. I own a successful game store and am working of a game design project we are going to publish in the near future. Over the years my staff in the store and on the project have come to understand key game design values, and I just felt like putting my two cents in based on our work in both the retail store and game design studio.
Wizards track record with products other than D&D and Magic is poor. They tend to try to be trend setters and push the gaming industry in ways it doesn't want to go. They have a fairly large library of dead rpgs, ccgs and wargame attempts to support this. Though Magic's yearly development cycle is impressive and D&D products have gotten better over the years, most of Wizards new products fail. Think Dreamblade, Star Sistaz, Vampire, Mechwarrior, Netrunner, Everway, Duelmasters, Chainmail, Star Wars CCG. Most of these games had potential and alot of money put into making them, but they often lack key design elements and are dead before they even reach their target markets. Year after year Wizards pumps this kind of product out and they eventually all fail. Wizards has great staff, it just something in the final assembly of the products misses the mark. If I were to make a educated guess, I would say it is the creative directors on each of those products who either do not understand their target market or how the final game should play.
Both the parent company hasbro and Wotc themselves do not utilize the internet well. Their websites are akward. They often fail to use the web as a medium well. This concerns me about the Digitial Initative and the future of Dungeon and Dragon magazines.
Likewise, Wizards is seeing the success of WOW and reacting to the MMOs (including putting taunt and aggro, hearthstones, socketed items, and other WOW features in D&D) instead of adapting D&D for the future of the web. There is a key difference in these two actions:
WOTC is reacting when they are try to bring D&D to the internet and make it compete with a MMO in its own medium. A MMO and a RPG are two different products and treating them like they are the same will fail. You can learn or be inspired by a business model of one for the other, but just trying to market to your customers and tap into their revenues in a similar manner is not thinking the consequences through all the way.
What WOTC needs to do is adapt D&D by removing its barriers to entry for new players and DMs. Strengthen what makes D&D unqiue and why people play it. Recapture the essence of what made D&D exciting in the first place and share that with a new generation. Likewise, draw solid, positive mainstream attention to the D&D brand instead of the negative attention of a couple of terrible movies, a really terrible MMO and the cheesy (but lovable) cartoon from the early 80's. The various video games that have done well mostly don't count because they are under the Forgotten Realms brand and the non-D&D players had little idea of the connection between those games and D&D. So far, D&D has not made a good household name for it self with the non-hobby gamers. This has to change.
Roleplaying games offer something computer games (and MMOs) never can do well. They offer a shared adventure in the imagination driven by character development and storytelling. MMOs are all about the fights, persistant peer recognition and the various grinds. Roleplaying games can skip boring travel, trash mobs, weekly guild raids to Molten Core for the Nth time this year. They can move from scene to scene, they can delve in to social and political conflicts, they can evoke emotional reactions, immerse players and create drama, tension, fear and other moods. They can allow players to use their imagination and do anything they can think of, as opposed to what the programers were limited by time and budget to be done in the game. This is what roleplaying games should be figuring out how to support and sell, and then use the internet to support that in an intutive manner (kinda like what ENworld does naturally, and basically for free).
D&D should not try to be WOW. It should try to be a better D&D with its barriers to entry removed for new players, DMs and veteran players alike. In our product studies, we found out of all the games in the hobby, platform and PC markets, World of Warcraft had zero barriers to entry for their users, other than basic computer skills until you reached end game content and could no longer play casually. D&D (and other RPGs) would be fairing better if they looked at their own barriers to entry and removed them without hurting gameplay. Then redevelop the games to capture and communicate why their fun to the target audiance, and give the target audience a free demo of that experience. That is what WOTC needs to be doing, instead of making goblin sims games (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=goblinz/welcome) for their Digitial Initiative.
I wish D&D and Dragon and Dungeon well. They are responsible for most of the gaming industry's existance and have some great talent working on them. It just seems to me it hard to find creative directors that have the business skills and the game industry knowledge to do it right and bring it all together. Hopefully this isn't one of those cases.
Nate Jones
Borderlands Games
www.borderlandsgames.com
Wizards track record with products other than D&D and Magic is poor. They tend to try to be trend setters and push the gaming industry in ways it doesn't want to go. They have a fairly large library of dead rpgs, ccgs and wargame attempts to support this. Though Magic's yearly development cycle is impressive and D&D products have gotten better over the years, most of Wizards new products fail. Think Dreamblade, Star Sistaz, Vampire, Mechwarrior, Netrunner, Everway, Duelmasters, Chainmail, Star Wars CCG. Most of these games had potential and alot of money put into making them, but they often lack key design elements and are dead before they even reach their target markets. Year after year Wizards pumps this kind of product out and they eventually all fail. Wizards has great staff, it just something in the final assembly of the products misses the mark. If I were to make a educated guess, I would say it is the creative directors on each of those products who either do not understand their target market or how the final game should play.
Both the parent company hasbro and Wotc themselves do not utilize the internet well. Their websites are akward. They often fail to use the web as a medium well. This concerns me about the Digitial Initative and the future of Dungeon and Dragon magazines.
Likewise, Wizards is seeing the success of WOW and reacting to the MMOs (including putting taunt and aggro, hearthstones, socketed items, and other WOW features in D&D) instead of adapting D&D for the future of the web. There is a key difference in these two actions:
WOTC is reacting when they are try to bring D&D to the internet and make it compete with a MMO in its own medium. A MMO and a RPG are two different products and treating them like they are the same will fail. You can learn or be inspired by a business model of one for the other, but just trying to market to your customers and tap into their revenues in a similar manner is not thinking the consequences through all the way.
What WOTC needs to do is adapt D&D by removing its barriers to entry for new players and DMs. Strengthen what makes D&D unqiue and why people play it. Recapture the essence of what made D&D exciting in the first place and share that with a new generation. Likewise, draw solid, positive mainstream attention to the D&D brand instead of the negative attention of a couple of terrible movies, a really terrible MMO and the cheesy (but lovable) cartoon from the early 80's. The various video games that have done well mostly don't count because they are under the Forgotten Realms brand and the non-D&D players had little idea of the connection between those games and D&D. So far, D&D has not made a good household name for it self with the non-hobby gamers. This has to change.
Roleplaying games offer something computer games (and MMOs) never can do well. They offer a shared adventure in the imagination driven by character development and storytelling. MMOs are all about the fights, persistant peer recognition and the various grinds. Roleplaying games can skip boring travel, trash mobs, weekly guild raids to Molten Core for the Nth time this year. They can move from scene to scene, they can delve in to social and political conflicts, they can evoke emotional reactions, immerse players and create drama, tension, fear and other moods. They can allow players to use their imagination and do anything they can think of, as opposed to what the programers were limited by time and budget to be done in the game. This is what roleplaying games should be figuring out how to support and sell, and then use the internet to support that in an intutive manner (kinda like what ENworld does naturally, and basically for free).
D&D should not try to be WOW. It should try to be a better D&D with its barriers to entry removed for new players, DMs and veteran players alike. In our product studies, we found out of all the games in the hobby, platform and PC markets, World of Warcraft had zero barriers to entry for their users, other than basic computer skills until you reached end game content and could no longer play casually. D&D (and other RPGs) would be fairing better if they looked at their own barriers to entry and removed them without hurting gameplay. Then redevelop the games to capture and communicate why their fun to the target audiance, and give the target audience a free demo of that experience. That is what WOTC needs to be doing, instead of making goblin sims games (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=goblinz/welcome) for their Digitial Initiative.
I wish D&D and Dragon and Dungeon well. They are responsible for most of the gaming industry's existance and have some great talent working on them. It just seems to me it hard to find creative directors that have the business skills and the game industry knowledge to do it right and bring it all together. Hopefully this isn't one of those cases.
Nate Jones
Borderlands Games
www.borderlandsgames.com
Michael Dean
Explorer
Ankh-Morpork Guard said:
Come on, man, you're reading my post waaay too literally. No, I don't really believe that the magazine going away is truly equivalent to a human person dying; that would be silly. But Dragon was more than just a magazine to a lot of people; it represented being part of a community of like-minded people who truly enjoyed something amazing. It was a part of my childhood that has been associated with some great memories. Part of getting older means you realize that nothing is permanent, but that doesn't mean you have to coldly move on without any feelings at all for its passing. Just because YOU don't feel that way about it shouldn't entitle you to be condescending to others that do.
Maggan
Writer for CY_BORG, Forbidden Lands and Dragonbane
Michael Dean said:
You make the mistake of thinking that people who are not using huge exaggerations for describing their feelings don't have any feelings on the matter.
It is entirely possible to feel that this move is a bad move, and that it'd have been better if Dragon and Dungeon stayed, without expressing that as "omg, it's like someone I loved died!" or any of the other more ... let's say colourful things that's been posted on EN World.
/M
Michael Dean
Explorer
Maggan said:
Would it have been better if I had said, "There was this time I made a sandwich. Not just a sandwich, but a GREAT sandwich. I'm talking Dagwood-style, with 3 kinds of meat made from animals that were hand-fed the sweetest hay and corn from fields where the soil was so soft you sank up to your ankles walking in it; and swiss, mozzarella, provolone, and smoky applewood cheddar cheeses; vine-ripened tomatoes, and the freshest iceberg lettuce that was grown and nurtured by light spring rains in the warm sun over the San Joaquin Valley in Central California and harvested by virgins at dusk, all on lightly toasted sourdough bread made in a small french bakery in San Francisco by a man named Emile, who had fled Paris just before the German Occupation by walking over the Pyrenees Mountains led by a lonely Basque goat-herder, and made his way to America in a cargo container ship dodging German U-Boats. I hand-crafted a perfect chipotle mayonaisse to go with it, from a recipe given to me by a wandering Spanish bard, who swore me to secrecy when he gave it to me just before he died defending the honor of a woman, which I've since lost in a gambling debt incurred when I tried desperately to raise money to save the Kirtland Warbler from extinction.
The most perfect sandwich in the history of sandwiches; so perfect, that if only I could duplicate it again in all its glory I could've put Subway and Quiznos, and all other sandwich-making pretenders out of business and I would have been rich beyond my wildest dreams. Then the phone rang in the other room and I went to answer it. And when I got back, the dog was licking his chops as he wolfed down the last of my sandwich. Dragon going out of print feels kind of like how I felt at that moment."
Would that get the hyperbole police off my case?
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