Party Crasher of the 3rd Kind @ RPG MUSINGS

Party Crasher of the 3rd Kind

It’s weird hearing those you communicate with or even game with online hint about what they’re working on. I skipped all of 3.x edition, and the latter half of 2nd, so when I got back into the 4e branded saddle, I had missed out on open licenses, splat books, and 3rd party publishing. For the longest time, in fact, when someone would utter the phrase ‘secret project’ I just assumed it was code for ‘Something in Dungeon or Dragon’, because that was the only way one could get paid for their work, I thought. Alien concepts like self-published books or a Quartered Kobold (not drawn) seem out of place to me.

But for most of you, it isn’t. More and more folks seem to be doing something in the 4e 3rd party space. Some are even arguing that it’s in WotC’s best interest to assist in this untapped area. I seem to be in this weird state where I have no interest in buying 3rd party products, and having to defend why. I’ve rewritten this post 2 or 3 times now, and no matter the edits, I can’t help if I sound like a complete and arrogant jerk. In the end, rather then just say why I don’t have any interest in 3rd party (And 1st party) products, I thought it better to explain what initiatives by both WotC and 3rd party devs would get me to buy.

1) Allow Me To Buy Only The Parts I Want…

A lot of the sandbox modules, like Open Design’s Lost City, claim to have maps, locations, NPCs, artifacts, items, and factions as part of the package. That’s a lot of meat for $20.00 or so. Yet, it’s not in the world my players and I have set up and built. I understand that I could not use everything as is, that I can add in bits of your world into mine. And to be honest, that is how I would use it if I purchased it. The world of my PCs and I isn’t some sanctified absolute that would be corrupted by outside influences. But it seems if I’m going to spend money on your work, and I’m forced to buy everything or nothing, to be a worthwhile purchase I’d have to use a majority of what’s there.

Using Lost City as an example, if there were some way to purchase portions of your product, the portions I wanted or needed, for a fraction of the over all cost, I believe I would be more apt to do so. I can always use more maps, so if I were just able to buy the Lost City maps for 2 or 3 bucks, I’d be more apt to do so. In the past, it made more sense to bundle everything into one large book because of legacy printing costs. In the digital age, when files of a chapter can be mixed and matched, where we have page number only because of wanting to look like the books we used, modular has the potential to be everything the old guard was, and more.

2) …Which Teach Me How To Fish Rather Then Just A Few Fishes…

As hinted, I don’t use ready made campaign worlds, 1st or 3rd party. Half the fun of running a campaign is making up the NPCs, cities, monsters and cultures, reacting to what the players want and where they go. This is doubly true with the crunch as well as the fluff. Once WotC’s Monster Builder came out, I stopped using unmodified 4e monsters. Heck, I bought the MM3 and have not opened it once since purchase. To me, DMing is like cooking, you need to constantly taste and add things to suit to taste. The DMG2′s math rules for everything means I never really have to

Quinn Murphy’s Worldbreakers are something I’ve mentioned time and time again here at this site. I’ve fought 3 of them as a player, and created 3 to use in my campaigns. They are what solos should have been. Quinn’s got a book of Worldbreakers coming out soon, and it’s the first 3rd party product I’ve actually paid cash for.

But odds are good I will not use any of the Worldbreakers as is. I want to see examples of good Worldbreakers and mix and match them for my own creations. In the same way I will pay money for a database of basic monster templates that I can change, reskin, and shift abilities around, I will pay money for a resource of specialized solo monsters that I can Frankenstein on my own.

I understand products go through many phases of design, rewrites, and edits. Good products have iterations of garbage behind them, each one sandblasted in red pen until only balanced, fun working examples of a concept are left. But if I get these examples I want to know how and why they work so I can make may own. WotC is doing that with the DMG2 math and Monster Builder, and I want 3rd parties to do so as well.

3) …And In The Format I Want

Here’s the big thing that falls into WotC’s corner, and where I think everything falls apart. PDFs and self-publishing make it real easy for anyone with a good idea to sell it. But I don’t want real books, or even PDFs. If those are the only offerings you have available to me, I will pass. I’ve stopped buying WotC books after I realized I never used them, the same goes with 3rd party books. And while PDFs are great because they’re searchable, I have a folders full of PDFs and html files I never, ever look at. Everything I ever do is in a digital tool, even my games are all done in virtual table tops. When I do rarely game in person, laptops at minimum are present, Android phones with Sylloge and iPads with iPlay4e are in use. Soldiers of Fortune sounds like a great product, but because it’s not part of any tool set I use, it’d be a purchase I’d never use.

For a while now I’ve been saying WotC needs to create an ‘app store’ for their online tools. Give 3rd parties a way to have their stuff appear next to the official tools in their online offerings. Characters and monsters have a xml schema that 3rd parties can write for, maps and encounters in the VTT have their own as well. The old offline character builder has even been reserve engineered and hacked to allow all sorts of 3rd party offerings into it.

If WotC opens up access to their online tools (Even if there is a ’3rd party’ flag like the house rule flag that used to exist in the old character builder) everyone would win. 3rd parties can get their products next to the first party big boys, and WotC can have new content coming in. By taking a certain percentage off the top of every ‘app store’ purchase, WotC remains profitable while 3rd parties have a way (but not the only way) to be on equal footing with WotC.

And listen up, WotC. If you don’t do this relatively soon, someone else will. With a DDI sub, all of your data exists in a malleable xml form. Your online tools require this. But an enterprising individual may create an online character builder, or an online monster builder, and work in this 3rd party functionality as well. The hacking of the offline character builder shows that something like this is possible. I want to pay good developers, 1st or 3rd party, for quality products, and will turn to the process that allows me to do so.

Well, now that I’ve probably angered WotC, all my designer friends, and everyone in between, what are your thoughts? Are you a fan of 3rd party works in 4e? What 3rd party 4e offerings would you like to see, and how would you like to see them?

Tags: 3rd party, 4e DnD
This entry was posted Wednesday, 9 March, 2011 at 1:04 pm
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What a jerk! :)

Seriously though, good thoughts. I like the modular ‘purchase what you want’ idea. The only problem is how to slice up a piece of work? There are a few models I can think of. It might be worth a try.

You don’t come off as a jerk, you come off as someone with a definitive opinion, which I personally value. It’s one of the reasons I kept prodding you with stuff on twitter and not other people (who were either trolling or just didn’t have opinions defined enough to talk about).

gamefiend on March 9th, 2011 at 2:25 pm

Excellent points! I’ve been thinking about this myself, too.

While I still buy and use books, I have the same problem with any product: it has to fit my campaign world, and too many third-party offerings are slices of other peoples’ campaign worlds.

Assuming WotC doesn’t provide this wonderful “app store” approach, how could a third-party developer provide fungible materials to players and DMs? What would that look like?

I’m reminded of the approach taken in “Die, Vecna, Die!” in which the characters are presented with major plot points, providing the DM with the overall shape of the adventure and the creatures involved, leaving room for the DM to decide exactly how many enemies should be in a particular encounter and in what configuration.

Thanks! You’ve given me a lot to think about.

Why I Don’t Buy Adventures | Brent P. Newhall's Blog on March 9th, 2011 at 2:49 pm

I don’t generally purchase 3pp either, especially for 4th edition. The chance of something I purchase falling apart in game is just too high, considering how many people you see claim that design is ‘easy’. There’s a place for it, and I think you’re very right about online offerings, and someone creating a new XML database is pretty likely, especially if they get a good lawyer behind them to keep Hasbro’s hounds at bay.

I think this topic is a subnote of the things in the entertainment industry at large, things that are finally shaking up traditional publishing and television. The future will be interesting, but I’m done trying to predict it!

Patrick Thunstrom on March 9th, 2011 at 5:16 pm

Here’s one issue. If I make a bunch of monsters and make them available as xml files, how do I really get people to pay for them instead of having them download the files without paying? I don’t mean to get into a whole piracy discussion but that is one big barrier to the piecemeal and digital offerings approach.

Also the smaller sized payments necessary for this system are too expensive for content providers or will drive up the cost of the content. It works great for apple because of the large audience, but I’m not convinced that the gaming audience could support a similar model.

Sarah Darkmagic on March 9th, 2011 at 5:32 pm

@Sarah — Using the existing DDI model: content you ‘buy’ become unlocks in the online software. If I buy ‘Sarah Darkmagic’s Awesome class’, then in the web only version of the character builder, Sarah Darkmagic’s Awesome class is now an available option for me. Loser McHatesPuppies doesn’t buy the class, and so it doesn’t appear as an option for him.

@Patrick — 3pp being a source of poor design is an oft-cited complaint, one that actually doesn’t drive my aversion to 3pp. And it’s why I think a central market might help over all. In any large quality of mess where yahoos can make anything, quality will rise to the top (I forget the name of the law, where 95% of a certain population is crap, but the other 5% is of extremely high quality)

@Brent — The first thing I can see is using a system similar to how the iPlay4e app works. Log in with a valid DDI account, then start to cross reference WotC data with the data that you’ve purchased. A valid .dnd4e file is just text with certain xml fields filled out. A lot of that data contains link to the compendium. A 3rd party character builder can still have those links, or it can have links to similarly composed data in the 3ppcb store. Auth and security are among the issues with that, but that’d be the high level approach.

@Quinn — How to split it up could be a market driven decision. Start off with an even pricing, then react as the market demands it.

Sarah Darkmagic on March 9th, 2011 at 8:02 pm

Counterpoints: People bundle content (a) so that there is something for everyone who might be interested in buying the product, and (b) as it really looks crappy to consumers to buy item X and be told that to get the most out of it they also have to buy item Y. The solution is to design greater modularity into your products, but still compile all the relevant componants into a single work, whether that be electronic or dead-tree.

I would also argue that your pricing comments in section one are off-kilter. Compare the price of a 120-page PDF with that of a 120-page dead-tree book from WOTC or any other game company, and you will find that the electronic format costs about 1/3 as much – or less. That means that in order to get your money’s worth, you only have to use 1/3 of the product, not ‘just about all of it’.

You arguement also suffers from the democratic fallacy, ie that all parts are of equal value, or even of value proportional to their page count. Anyone who writes can tell you that sometimes 1 page is as hard to craft as 20. Heck, your opening paragraph where you mention rewriting the article multiple times, makes the same point. Sometimes the most inspired creation takes only a page or two and the rest is exploration of implications and derivatives, plus all the tentative and meandering explorations that led to that moment of insight. In order to fund the process of producing the moment of brilliance, you need to sell the rest of it – or load the whole burdon into the price.

An alternative segregated-content proposal should make clear what I mean: instead of buying the whole product for $XX, you get to buy just one componant of the product at $XX – but if you do, then you get all this other stuff of perhaps lesser or questionable value TO YOU for free.

In other words, if you were able to buy just the maps from Lost City, it still costs just as much as buying the whole Lost City game product to produce it, and so the price is the same. Everything else is a value-added contribution TO YOU. For other people, it might be the game crunch that’s worthwhile and the rest that’s filler. And for still others, the entire package might be worthwhile.

Assigning value to a product is a subjective thing, and no two people will agree on it. Dividing up production costs on a project (like Lost City) is equally subjective, because the production is a synergistic process of one creator being inspired by the work of another. At best, you can determine “Yes, this product represents value for money for me”, or “No, I don’t think it’s worth the asking price” – especially since valuations would change with changing circumstances. This week, I may be running something with Voodoo Necromancy – so anything on that subject has greater value. Next week, I may be running something else – so it has less value.

And that’s why the modular proposal won’t work.

Mike Bourke on March 9th, 2011 at 10:02 pm

@Mike, some good points. Allow me a counter-counterpoint? I’ll map 1 to 1 my paragraphs to yours.

Full version of the content can exist as is. Modular parts don’t need to reference one another. And even if it does, say content is divide in 3 parts, maps, crunch, fluff. Fluff can say Captain Shinypants of the Trouser Guard is a McGuffin class. (Not “…is a McGuffin class (see page 42)) McGuffin class is in the crunch part. Someone who bought the fluff only either a) doesn’t need to know what the McGuffin class does or b) can make it up on their own or c) go out and buy the McGuffin class.

This, we may just not see eye to eye on. My money’s worth is what I paid for a product, not what I paid for a product in comparison to its analog price.

Thanks for pointing this out, because I didn’t make it clear in my arguement. In the Lost City example, I’d pay $10 dollar out of a $20 product just for the maps. 5 pages of a 100+ example is worth 50% of the total price to me. Definitely not 1 to 1. Now how is this division set up, I don’t know.

See above paragraph.

Again, we may just not see eye to eye. Again with the Lost City / Maps thing. I want maps. Maybe looking for just maps in a full product is silly, so normally I would just ignore Lost City all together. But I could get maps, half of a sale of a product is better then no sale at all. In other words, the non-map part isn’t value added, it’s value reduction. I want maps, McGuffin Class Captain Shineypants and his statblock and motivations, as well as the description of the Trouser Guard he belongs to is detracting from the maps I want.

A product’s value to me may be zero because it’s too much. Offer that same product in a smaller, different way, and that becomes a non-zero value. Non-zero > zero is not a subjective thing. The question is can 3pp make that division to enough to make that non-zero value worthwhile?

@Sarah — You’re right, it doesn’t. However, 3rd party hacking of the old offline character builder has shown that feeding it the right xml can have the data in that xml running inside the cb. This is a simplification, but apply that process to the web cb, create a system to gate data, piggy back on the existing authincation process, and something can be done to the web cb.

I focus on the cb because it, along with the rest of DDI, is one the main reasons I stick with 4e. And if 3rd party developers clamor for it and show how it can be a winning bet for WotC, it might happen. On the other hand, if a different company was able to deliver the same type of set up, where I pay not for raw data (books) but for the ablility to modify data (compendium/cb/at), say, Paizo, and offer this app store ability as well, odds are good I’d jump ship, as would the 3rd party devs out there.

Simon Withers on March 10th, 2011 at 12:25 am

I kept thinking about what you wrote. I really like how you fostered though with what you wrote. It drove me to exploring the topic further on my blog. 3PP may seem unnecessary, but it really is becoming critical to many gamers. How many of us shape encounters based on something we read in a blog? I can’t think of a recent adventure that wasn’t somehow influenced by something a non-WotC person wrote about, to be honest. I may primarily use WotC content (such as monsters), but I tweak my game consistently based on outside sources. And I am firmly behind the iTunes concept for 4E. It would be fantastic to subscribe to a channel for some of the great bloggers out there and purchase (and review/recommend) their content.

Alphastream on March 10th, 2011 at 7:01 pm

All great points, psychopez. You’re the one of the first bloggers to talk about working backward from what the customers want instead of forward from what the creators want to produce or about the “limitations of the market”. Would love to hear more as you develop these ideas!

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