4 hours ago
Angry Robot BooksWotC screws the pooch again..
I just happened to catch a tweet from Wolfgang Baur (monkeyking) announcing WotC is pulling all sales of PDF’s from RPGnow (effective NOW) and Paizo effective midnight. Speculation is it is either in line with this press release related to a lawsuit they filed today or they are planning to bring all pdf sales in house. Either way it is incredibly short sighted on their part. If it is related to the lawsuit, this snippet seems more appropriate to THEIR actions in pulling legitimate sales and not those of the pirates they are chasing.
“Violations of our copyrights and piracy of our products hurt not only Wizards of the Coast’s financial health but also the health of whole gaming community including retailers and players,” said Greg Leeds, President of Wizards of the Coast. “We have brought these suits to stop the illegal activities of these defendants, and to deter future unauthorized and unlawful file-sharing.”
If it is their intention to bring all pdf sales inhouse, expect two things. An increase of anywhere from 50 to 100% price increase. A horribly broken system for downloading the files that limits sales to the point they beomce non existant.
Either reason WotC has for doing this is sure to cause all those pdf’s to become even more available via torrent than they were before, because it will be the ONLY efficient way to get them, and if you have downloaded anything via torrent you know how sarchastic that statement was.
I personally just grabbed a couple of Planescape products I was missing from Paizo while I still could. Oh well. WotC/Hasbro really does just not know how to make a smart call. If only they would choke their sales to the point Paizo can just buy the whole thing, lock stock and barrell, we might actually game to be proud of again.
The Sandbox
Photo of Jesse Williams and Lois Markle in The Sandbox © Jaisen Crockett/Art Meets Commerce.
In todays computer games, one of the popular genres is the Sandbox. The hallmark of this type of game is nonlinear gameplay and it can be incredibly fun. In my opinion, these games got their popular start in home RPG games like Dungeons and Dragons. DnD campaigns in and of them selves are not by nature sandbox affairs, but with the right setup and agreement of the players and DM they can go this route. I’ve recently found an excellent series of posts describing an example of this type of game. It reminded me of a similar game our group played in back at the height of playing. John ran the campaign and the players were myself, Mike, Rick, Dave, his brothers, with a couple of other folks making small cameo appearances if I remember correctly. The details are fuzzy, but the fun we had was not.
The closest thing to a group experience like this in computers today is the MMORPG, but these fall short to varrying degrees because they are not true sandbox enviroments. Things you do in the world have no lasting impact. There are often world changing events but they only provide a passing illusion of impact. They are really just a hugely shared linear experience as they are often tied to game updates shared by all worlds tied to expansions. They are quite fun, but fleeting.
Sandbox games offer the player a sense of real impact, but in the case of the crop we have now, nothing is shared. Oblivion, Fallout, Grand Theft Auto, etc all offer rich worlds to explore but you do it solo. Maybe someday someoen will figure out how to offer the experience of a sandbox with room for more than one.
Pathfinder 13 review .. sort of.
Paizo Publishing is a small company that publishes DnD adventures, a sort of journal/adventure anthology (called Pathfinder) and soon to release a revised ruleset for DnD 3.5 to keep that ball rolling in the wake of the debacle that was the 4th ed release and blunder with the new GSL. Wizards really screwed the pooch and what seems to be a good game with 4th ed. (Never mind they forgot to do any real play testing apparently) But enough of the recent history lesson.
The intention of this post, and hopefully 5 more in the future is to review the latest adventure path Paizo is publishing Second Darkness. Paizo started doing adventure paths back when they were publishing Dragon Magazine for Wizards until that plug was pulled to put Dungeon and Dragon magazines online. This is the 3rd 6 installment adventure path under the Pathfinder moniker, and I think they did 3 longer ones in Dungeon. You would think they would have it down by now, however this first installment, while based on a good idea fails on several points that make necessary for any DM to do some serious mods to keep it from completely feeling like a railroad to the players.
MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD
The adventure (Shadow in the Sky) hinges on HUGE assumptions, that leave the DM screwed if the players do not allow themselves to be pushed and prodded in the right direction. Assumption: The players are going to all want to hang out in a gambling house, get involved when bandits/thugs show up and then take a job offered to them to continue working in the club. After they take or a coerced/convinced to follow along, the subsequent scenes assume your players are slightly shady and willing to be conviently gullable. To top that off, there is a giant mysterious cloud hovering over the city the adventure starts in, everyone in town is talking about it and the adventure as a whole essentially ignores it.
Most players I have DM’d for in the past have always assumed when a huge weird thing is presented to them they are going to becurious and funnel their attention toward that. The minute you try to move them away from that, they will feel the prod and lose interest in the sessions. The rest of the booklet is dedicated to support material. This is up to the expected Paizo standards. However this review is only concerned with the actuall adventure.
Overall this path has potential, the first adventure falls far short unfortunately.
Arrogance and Ignorance II
I was going to follow up with details on my previous post, start picking apart the “new ideas” and Orwellian new speak of 4th ed. Then I realized I was being arrogant in thinking folks had not already realized this. Suffice it to say WoTC bungled badly on many levels with 4E. I truly hope a hero rises in their ranks to pull them out of the bog (the DC of which scales Oblivion like) as time moves forward.
Arrogance and Ignorance
Wizards of the Coast suffers these terribly when it comes to marketing DnD now. This was beginning to show itself way back at GenCon for the release of 3rd Edition. I took part in a marketing research panel with about 10 other people and 3 market research folks who had been briefed on what the product was but did not really seem to have any real knowldge of what they were working with. Their intended spin they wanted to try out on us was geared toward ten year olds for the most part. We gave our input, told them what we thought was lame (most of it) and what we thought might work.
About 6 months later to their credit the marketing was 50/50 our input and their input. However, things have been downhill since then. The dregs are now washing back with 4th Edition. However what really seems to be the problem now is that WoTC seems to think they can throw any piece of shit out there and it will stick. I am sure of of this is tied into budget and profits, they are a company after all. However Gleemax closing down in September should be of suprise to no one. They named it after an inside joke. Made it look fairly lame. It was nearly impossible to navigate. They called on folks to post to “blogs” that were nothing more than locked threads on a message board. They dropped it out on the net in a very early alpha state of development and it never got past an early beta state.
WoTC’s web efforts have never been stellar. Navigation logic and user interface are pretty much always an after thought. The new DnD insider site is not great, but it seems almost to be something. However they hyped it way too much not to have more meat on the table when they rolled it out. That was a HUGE missed oportunity they will never get back.
Now we get to the Arrogance portion of the rant. The new edition touts all of these thing sthey have brought to the table, improving the game from past editions. Marginalizing things from old editions telling you how bad they were and in reality much of the “new” stuff is just old tried and true with a spiffy new name tossed on it. “Points of Light” being the most blatant example.
Unfortunately I was interupted in this train of thought, so we’ll pause this rant and return later for part two. I’ll do a wrap up and link to some other similar thoughts at my favorite blogs.