Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 eindrachen Sep 03, 2004 5:49:30	In the past month or two, there’s been strange goings-on in the RPG industry. AEG is moving it’s famous (or, for some of us, notorious) Legend of the Five Rings setting back to it’s original d10 system. Warhammer Fantasy RPG, a game that those who played it will remember well for it’s amazing system of using jobs and professions as a means of advancement (similar to the d20 system’s Prestige Classes), is getting new life. GURPS is about to go into its fourth edition. White Wolf rolls on ahead with its revamped setting and rules for the “World of Darkness”. Some speculation abounds that d20, as a whole, is losing it as a game system. The starry-eyed detractors of d20, who have long railed against it for slights real or imagined (and who come up with gaming company conspiracy theories crazy enough to make an Oliver Stone film with), seem jubilant that the gaming industry slump might hurt the d20 system. But others, like me, see the truth: this is a cycle. Things change, and they move in patterns. Things were like this just prior to TSR’s collapse. White Wolf, Steve Jackson Games, everyone was feeling the brutal sting of apathy amongst the gaming masses. I remember nobody, neither myself nor my gaming peers, being excited about anything. We just stopped caring about a new release, and started realizing that “old” was in no way equated with “not fun”. 2nd edition AD&D was just as fun as that new-fangled game based on a card game, Legend of the Five Rings RPG, then in it’s first edition. We used GURPS supplements for ideas and house-rules, but never liked the system due to its complexity. We also loved and adored the old Marvel RPG, the one that used that wonderful percentile/rank system, and played it on a very regular basis (and arguing endlessly, of course, the stats for heroes new and old). We really didn’t hate the d20 system. To us, TSR had long forgotten what made a good game, and we were simply tired that they never supported any lines except Forgotten Realms, Planescape, and Ravenloft. We missed Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Spelljammer, and Mystara; the brief revisits to those lines only deepened our anger that they were given cursory treatment, without the benefit of further development. When d20 came out, and we got our first clue about the OGL, it seemed like the Almighty had spoken directly to these inheritors of TSR’s legacy. What else could inspire them to allow anyone and everyone a crack at making stuff for their setting, even publishing it, so that they could bring their most treasured settings out of the dust, and give them something new to shout about? The early arguments against d20 were pretty weak, at first; some even went so far as to say it would be hard to learn yet another new game system. This, in the face of the fact that THAC0 was, in the circles I moved in, considered the most ridiculous way to run combat. No, d20 was smooth as silk to learn. Yes, there were issues here and there, but this is hardly surprising. Nothing new is ever, in any way, flawless, and I challenge anyone out there to prove otherwise. Errors have been and are made; things don’t work good in practice so much as theory; situations the designers can’t fathom come up. These things happen. And to be honest, the OGL itself was like the Second Coming. How could any company willingly let others take shots at making stuff for their system, without so much as a scrap of payment for using the core system? I even remember people thinking that it was a ploy to finally destroy D&D forever, by making it unprofitable. Yeah. It was real unprofitable, alright. Except to dozens and dozens of companies, from the powerhouses of WotC and White Wolf, to the little guys like Green Ronin and AEG (whose obvious success might be directly attributed to their d20 efforts). Suddenly, gaming companies who wanted to survive either had to jump on the d20 bandwagon, or begin a real effort to show why their games were any decent. White Wolf was exceptionally smart: they buried the old WoD (which folks were getting tired of, as the “Gothic-Punk” fad had mostly died out), began development of their own d20 stuff (including what is arguably their most brilliant move: getting Ravenloft), pushed Exalted on it’s own merits, and began tooling a new WoD that would be more acceptable to the new gaming scene. Other companies thought they’d ride d20 to the top. Of these, AEG is the most prominent example I can point out, because they probably have had some of the best success by switching one of the most popular new RPG lines (L5R) from it’s own system to d20. Even then, they kept the supplements for the books “dual-stat”, meaning they could ideally go towards either system. But anyone could see that d20 was their new addiction, the intellectual drug of choice. And not just AEG. Everyone, from the companies to the creative gamers on the web with an idea and the OGL, was high on d20. With d20 Modern, the new Star Wars d20 game, Unearthed Arcana, and other similar works, people finally realized that d20 wasn’t some fixated set of unalterable rules. It had almost become as generic a game system as GURPs or Fuzion, without actually being called “generic”. But I saw the signs then that things were about to fall apart. The rules of human nature says that any fad, which d20 surely has been for a long time, will fade. Now, before a million of you jump my case for calling d20 a fad, let me explain my view. I think d20 is a rock-solid system, something I am happy to pay lots of disposable income for. I’m not even angry about v3.5; yes, it’s more money, but I honestly feel it is truly a better system (even though I’m upset at the rising cost, but that’s not just WotC; everyone is jacking up the cost of gaming stuff these days). I think d20 has staying power. On the same note, too many of you out there have treated d20 as the new, elite standard of gaming. Which is false; d20 has value, but that value is, like the value of anything, totally subjective. If you don’t have real, concrete reasons to like d20 – the rules, the settings/lines, the quality of the products – then you aren’t really in love with the system, just the idea that dozens of your buddies are (or seem to be). Once the “newness” of d20 wears off, you’ll abandon it, just like so many abandoned White Wolf’s WoD en masse when it lost it’s unique charm. Even I’m guilty of such things; I was all about WoD once, until I realized that the games weren’t really fun to me. I don’t hold it against anyone or anything, I just don’t like them very much. So, when I saw that too many were into the “fad” of d20, rather than it’s actual merits, I shook my head, because I knew that many of you would lose interest, even turn on it, when it lost it’s initial charm. You’d act like it was WotC’s fault for you spending hundreds of dollars on something you didn’t want to play anymore, regardless of how much fun it was for a while. And you’d start secretly wishing that WotC would fail, somehow, because it’d only justify your hurt feelings, like some dire kharma coming back to smite the Evil Empire of WotC. Would you like to know why such people are going to be disappointed that that will never actually happen? It’s because WotC, and the people in charge of D&D, are smarter than we may think. The OGL is what will keep them going. Yes, WotC has made some flawed work recently. But by and large, their product is pretty solid. The errata and FAQs are easily available, and normally quick in getting out. And they are pretty focused on their product: most is either generic, or the in-house lines like Forgotten Realms and Eberron. Even I can forgive some slip-ups in the company, because I’d be terrified of trying to run something like a gaming company. I have no desire to ride that horse, thank you. But with OGL, the responsibility for better quality falls not on just WotC, but on every single company that participated in making stuff for d20. That’s right. And believe you me, those other guys are definitely taking their medicine. AEG wrote supplements for the d20 L5R game that were heralded by long-time players of that line (people who had played back in the first edition of the d10 game, no less) as the worst supplements and rules they had seen in any game ever. Recently, AEG decided that next year, L5R is going back to being solely a d10 game, in it’s third edition. This is no accident. The sloppy quality of these supplements is easily attributed to what I call the “Fire And Forget” method of game design. Simply put, the designers crank out supplements as fast as they can, and spring them on the market. They advertise this as being beneficial, because you aren’t having to wait for the next supplement, but the product is later found to be sloppy, buggy, and simply not worth the price of the paper they were printed on. In the past, this exact same mentality is what destroyed TSR. I remember with some bitterness the constant stream of supplements, most of which were by and large worthless. They were so fixated on constantly generating income that quality was laid aside in favor of quantity (as I discussed in a previous article). What was the result? The customer totally lost interest and loyalty in the company. This is also not an isolated incident. For a while, Steve Jackson Games was uninteresting to many gamers I know, because investing in it was an exercise in futility. The constant reprintings, the endless supplements, and the rising costs meant that most of us simply chose not to invest in a company that was more interested in scooping up money than in giving us some return on our purchase. Why pay for something that is outdated not merely next year, but next month? WotC has, mainly, avoided that pitfall. They produce things more or less in a spaced fashion. They haven’t choked us with new stuff; we get a few books every few months (I’d rough-guess about 1-2 books a month). They try to cover a wide variety of useful books, which some of us may or may not be interested in (i.e. I don’t see myself buying the Races series, because many of my games don’t get that detailed with each race; on the other hand, the Complete class series is very attractive to me). While WotC makes as many writing mistakes as anyone can, they aren’t ramming crappy stuff down our throats, force-feeding us with poor quality. The sense one gets is that they are quite content to be the “core book” guys, with a few settings and lines, and that they simply lost track of things lately. In contrast, the sense one gets from AEG is that they refuse to admit their mistakes in the past, and that by switching to a new system, these mistakes will disappear. If this is true, it is the most selfish and irresponsible business decision I have ever seen since the Enron scandal. Poor writing skills, lack of stringent editing standards, and an unwillingness to address customer issues are not, in any way, erased by changing the rules used for a given line of games. Only time can tell if my concerns will come to pass, or if I’m simply worrying over nothing. As for the rest of the gaming world, the d20 explosion has come and gone, and now is the time for the cream to rise up. Yes, we’ve dealt with crappy stuff to date, but now we know who is the best, and who should never write another gaming supplement again. We know what we want and expect from the d20 system, and we are demanding that, in the face of rising publishing costs, that the quality of the written work itself be exceptional. Every bit of this is good for the market. If WotC improves quality, they will stabilize fully, and continue to experience a comfortable pace at which it’s people can make a decent living. White Wolf is going to be my pick for the fastest riser; they have diversified their product enough that they can afford to dabble in both the new WoD games and the old Exalted stuff. If they begin to revamp their live-action games (hopefully improving the rule system a bit), they’ll probably be rolling in some good cash-flow. However, I think quality likely will suffer, and they eventually have to scale back, or risk losing customer confidence in their games. AEG… well, my feelings on them are pretty easy to see. I don’t see any good coming of their recent stuff. They have some d20 product that’s continuing on, but it’s fairly specialized stuff that may not have the biggest customer base. And if they take L5R, and possibly 7th Sea, back to their older systems, without addressing the most fundamental issues of quality-control and good customer relations, I don’t see much good coming of it all. I would go so far as to predict more than a few pink slips, even for their bigger names in the company. GURPs will sag a bit, then buoy up again, as it always has. Fuzion seems to be rising up, though; there is apparently new Cyberpunk 2020 material on the horizon, which might even spark new interest in their other games (I especially think Mekton Z, if it gets any new stuff, could come back up in status; it was a very good game with solid rules, especially vehicle creation). Whatever happens, the current slump is not the doom of any company, not even (I’d say especially) WotC. This has all happened before, and right now isn’t when companies fail. Maybe around Christmas, competition for my money will get tough. And yes, WotC will have to work hard for it. I didn’t jump on the AEG bandwagon for L5R, instinctively knowing that it wouldn’t stay alive. Lo and behold, it didn’t. I’m not exactly singing the praises of WotC, but I’m still interested in their product, and I’m confident that they’ll come around on things very soon. Making d20 stuff is like surfing, in the end. If you can keep your balance with the market, you succeed. If you lose it, you fall off. We’ll see, in the next few months, who ends up standing on the beach, and who ends up drowning.
#2 Beleriphon Sep 20, 2004 0:09:02	That was a dang good article, and I whole heartedly agree with those sentiments.