Post/Author/DateTime	Post
asdfff 04-23-07, 01:14 AM	I joined the forums just to ask this question. On the heels of Dragon + Dungeon's death warrant, a lot of the new posts are referring to various switches to an online model, or past surveys wotc gave about online stuff. :confused: Can someone tell me the source of all this "online" chatter, and perhaps your opinion about we should look forward to/be scared about? :confused: For instance, that D&D "4e" will be online, D&D-minis based server battles, or with server-stored characters, monsters, and server-client-runnable adventures, or barely-veiled invectives about charging a monthly fee for said server storage. I've also heard, smeared out over three threads, that the Dragon/Dungeon kill and the SW RPG preview articles are just the very beginning of the impending 4e media blitz and rollout.
Solaris 04-23-07, 01:51 AM	There is no 4e. It's not even being planned.
asdfff 04-23-07, 01:58 AM	4e or not, whichever is just fine as well. That aside, why all the whispering about nebulous online offerings and model-switching?
OneVaapadMutha 04-23-07, 08:49 AM	4e or not, whichever is just fine as well. That aside, why all the whispering about nebulous online offerings and model-switching? Because, to me anyway, it smells too much like what we saw occur with TSR in its death throes on the Web and UseNet a few years back. Don't misunderstand me; TSR and WotC are not the same company, and the WotC approach to fan-generated content is far more friendly toward the customer base than TSR was in the days of the Lawful Evil outsider Rob Repp and his mistakenly-maligned successor, Sean Reynolds. But the parallels exist. To wit: In the mid to late 1990s, TSR actively quashed fan-generated material online by screaming copyright infringement left and right, not only with regard to characters and settings but also to raw game mechanics, to a point where your material could be pulled because you wrote so much as an Armor Class stat for a goblin squad. The only motivation for such actions - regardless of what the talking heads were told to tell us back then - was that supplements created by average joes and accessible online were becoming more useful and more popular than anything the official product line churned out in print. It was an aggressive, alienating way of protecting their bottom line and a sign that the company was resistant to the inevitable change that occurred with the proliferation of internet access. Even worse was the fact that designers working on separate product lines were at each other's throats constantly and playing fans against each other like cards. A classic example is the debate that raged over whether Lord Soth was in the Domain of Dread or still on Krynn, canonically speaking. An anonymous poster on alt.fan.dragonlance acquired and posted a Q&A transcript with Margaret Weis from DragonCon and was subsequently threatened with litigation by Steve Miller, who was then in charge of Ravenloft, if the poster would not edit out objectionable portions regarding Soth's whereabouts that might harm Ravenloft's image and/or marketability. (Miller is also the designer that ruined Dragonlance with the SAGA card system that so many Star Wars RPG fans were afraid of switching to when the new d20 SWRPG was given a similar name - proving that conditioned fear responses take a long time to fade away.) Now, WotC's OGL policy has eradicated those issues - a point that made me very, very happy when they acquired the IP from TSR. But there seems to be a similar motivation underlying the dissolution of the magazines: they were making a product that delivered better-quality adventures and supplements at a far lower price. As Monte Cook said (according to a quote in another thread anyway), the consumers were presumably getting too good a value for their buck from the magazines in the eyes of bean counters. So the issue seems to be more or less the same: a cheaper product was generating more interest than the shiny, glossy, overpriced modules, and the company interprets that as cutting into their sales. The obvious course of action is to refuse to renew the licensing for the product and offer an in-house alternative, which is potentially great for sales... but bad for the gamers, because there's now a monopoly on official content and no real responsibility to maintain the standards set by Paizo. (To WotC's credit, they at least haven't attempted to shut down dissenters beyond banning organized boycotts, which is perfectly within ther rights to do; these are their servers, after all. TSR treated its online customer base far, far worse, and we as fans can definitely be thankful for that distinction.) I personally am not as reticent as others to see what WotC will do in lieu of the magazines; it is possible that the result could be quite good. But I do sympathize with the desire for a printed magazine rather than overpriced subscription-only online content with DRM coding out the wazoo and tiny PDF font that my aging eyes can't read very well. I also don't want to see a new format that keeps all its content generation in-house rather than actively seeking fan submissions, because this is how up-and-coming game designers learn their trade - through submitting material, taking the criticism of those submissions into account, and then refining their ideas into something worthy of publication. In short, if the tradition that Dungeon and Dragon founded is upheld by WotC in its new endeavor, I think it will be a great success. If it is used only to plug product lines and offer cut-rate content from overworked in-house writers as opposed to offering quality content from outside writers that can be plugged into nearly any campaign setting, official or otherwise, then it should fail by all rights. Time will tell on that front, but one thing is sure: companies pay attention to the bottom line. If it's a sub-par product, no one will buy it, and a lot of time and effort will have been wasted on something that doesn't turn a profit. At that point, you have to trust the free market to do what it does best: weed out undesirable products simply by virtue of them not selling well. You know, like SAGA did. :P