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Layoffs at WotC
Abies writes "During last year or so, quite a lot of people were fired from WotC - current owners of the D&D line. A few days ago, _most_ of big names out there had to quit - including Skip Williams and Jeff Grubb. Official WotC press info, Enworld news about that and a Monte Cook thread contain some more detailed info.
Do you think it will spell an end to D&D ? After something which seemed to be a ressurection of old-time RPG, Hasbro seems to kill the biggest RPG company out there. Will OGL and the D20 license be enough to preserve the genre ?"
Remember folks - roleplaying is about together creating characters and a world. The roleplaying system you use can help you to get there, but it is not the important part. In fact, it is very possible to use a very simple system, or even no system at all. As long as your Game Master is fair, and you players play for the fun of it instead of trying to 'win' somehow, the sky is the limit!
RPG's as a genre won't go away, I promise you. There are always MUDs (Multi-user dimension/dungeons) which people can play. Play is free and you make as many characters as you want. Runs on telnet, so you can do it from any OS. My personal favorite is Imperial, at telnet://imperial.modeemi.cs.tut.fi:6969. They also have a web page at that address, minus the port. It is supported by the goodwill of the founders. There are thousands more - www.mudconnector.com. Cheers!
Apparently the Epic (levels higher than 20) rules D&D are already designed so they have their next cash cow in the bag already. Licensing for D&D and continuing Magic sales will keep them profitable for quite some time, given they don't have any expensive employees anymore.
Its just business. Short-sited myopic business maybe, but not surprising at all. Hasbro is still in business while the much of the competition isnt. The employees can always invent a new game, become hugely popular, and sell out to Hasbro again.
going to go up in a puff of smoke or something?
An RPG is nothing but a set of rules, a framework, around which a campaign is built. The rules have already been published. If people wish to play D&D they will continue to play D&D no matter what the hell happens at or to WotC.
Hey, remember the days when a single human being could carry all the rules to D&D without the aid of a forklift? In his *pocket?* Go get a copy of those rules somewhere, Xerox them if you have to, it'll just make them look more authentic anyway, and then find come creative type with a good *imagination* to run the show. All the players need are some pencils and graph paper.
Does the genre need to be preserved? Only if we've sunk so low in our society that college kids these days can't have fun sitting around the commons and * making cool shit up!*
KFG
... or immediately lose your job. On the other hand, if the rumors I've heard in the industry about WotC's downhill slide are true, it's good that a bunch of talented designers are now free to look for positions elsewhere. These are all good folks, and I'm sure they'll land on their feet elsewhere.
"This is your world. These are your people. You can live for yourself today, or help build tomorrow for everyone."
If WoTC's plans are to get all these people to come back as freelancers, they're screwed. Microsoft caused a law in Washington to be enacted where dismissed employees cannot freelance for the same department for 1 year. Art department: gutted. RPG R&D: gutted.
I also read last night that WoTC's entire RPG operation may be for sale, with one interested party being Jordan Weisman. See this thread on the RPG.net message boards.
WotC announced its big contest for a new gaming world months ago. This isn't surprising. They fired the original game world owners to make room for new staff and a new setting that they can make pure profit on without coughing up cash to the original setting creators.
Oh, you mean will D&D software survive. That has nothing to do WotC. They only control things that are called D&D. Example:
A long time ago a undergrad name Michael Toy used the D&D fighting system and monster stats to create a Curses game called Rogue, the predecessor to NetHack. (Ignore Glenn Wichmann -- he's a legend in his own mind.) TSR didn't care for this, of course, and sicced their lawyers on him. The only result was that all the names got changed to non-D&D things. Which was actually an improvement -- there's no place in the D&D universe for my own favorite player character, the Tourist
Bottom line -- you don't need the media monopolies to play games, any more than you need them to make music. Pity about Farscape though.
The only thing d20 still needs is a good set of software tools for GM's who like to run the game from their laptops, and due to the open nature of d20, I'm sure a lot of amitious hackers are going to fill that void anyway.
As long as WotC offered these guys a nice, fat severence package as a way of saying "thanks" for their efforts, I have no problem with seeing them cut loose.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Is that failing as well? It seems to be me they went about it completely the wrong way.
Magic is a fun challenging game... if you can afford to spend at least $300-$600 a year on it or can bargain like a madman. People stop playing because they got tired of the upgrade treadmill and seeing their old cards more or less become useless.
So, for the on-line version, what do they do? They make an even worse version of that flaw! You have to pay full retail for virtual cards. I never paid that much even with the real ones. I would buy by the box at a substantial discount. That's how I stayed in it for so long. This just ensures people burn out sooner.
I think if they had merely charged $10/month for access to all the cards, they would've done insanely well. Over a year, it probably adds up to about the same as the booster approach for many people, but that whole year I would've been able to build any deck I wanted.
As it is, I'm staying the fuck away from it. It's a pity. I really liked the first computer version of Magic the Gathering.
Almost everyone I see who has this opinion was never a very good magic player.
True Story: A friend of mine had a dream deck. He saved up so that he could spend almost $500 in order to get all of the rares for this deck, including some cards that weren't even legal anymore, such as some Arabian nights.
He came to my house, and I didn't have any decks built. In about 20 minutes, and using a grand total of one rare card worth about five bucks, I built a tournament legal deck that beat him ten games in a row, six with his new deck, and four with an older deck he'd built.
This friend had a deck published in the Duelist, so it's not like he didn't know what he was doing... but it proves that it's quite possible to be a dominating Magic player with less than $20.
When encryption is outlawed, ?o'AZ-,++o+i++##4AoA+-/-C++bI+/.+~
it is literally prehistoric.
You want prior art, centuries old?
*King me!*
KFG
I know this might sound harsh. but after roleplaying for nearly 15 years, D&D just doesn't offer anything interesting anymore. I used to play it when I was 10 and thought all that there was to RPGs was hack an' slash, but that was a long time ago.
There are some nice odds and ends that came out of TSR - I personally thought that Ravenloft, Darksun and Planescape were interesting attempts to breath new life into the increasingly stagnant fantasy genre, but look at how bland the rest of the backgrounds are: Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Birthright - footnotes to Tolkien at best., they are nothing more than cashcows. The D&D system just plain sucked, still does, and if you just want to do hack an' slash then there are plenty of multiplayer computer games such as Diablo II, Everquest, and even the biosphere offerings will more than fill your needs and are probably much more fun. Or why not just do wargaming instead - Games Workhop and other cater to this market just fine?
The reason that roleplaying keeps me interested theses days is the background, complex plots, characters and interesting players/GMs - the sort of interactivity that computers games will not yet achieve for some time to come. Look at the two biggest RPG companies aside from WotC: Whitewolf and Steve Jackson Games:
Love or hate it (which I do in equal amounts) WW has done much more to actually build interesting and innovative fictional environments for roleplaying with the World of Darkness and Trinty Universe lines than TSR/WotC has ever managed with various flavours of D&D. They sell not because the system, but because of the content and quality of the background material.
Likewise, GURPS is popular not because of the system, (although it is a much better attempt at a universal system than D&D3 will ever be) but because of the hugh range of excellently written background books -regardless of what system you like to use, even if you hate the system, many of the books are still highly entertaining, and useful.
The opensource game license is an interesting idea, but I believe ultimately flawed. They are working from the premise that getting into RPGs is hard because there are so many systems and they are so different to learn - their solution is that we all use the D&D system and so don't have to learn new systems for different genres of play and then everyone can then write their games for the largest possible market (D&D system). The problem with this is that one system doesn't suit all types of games, all types of genre and all types of groups!
If you are into interesting system mechanics then look at Phage Press' Amber Diceless Roleplaying games (set in Zelazn'y Chronicles of Amber Universe), or Jonathan Tweet's Everway RPG, based on using vision and fate card. Both are truely unique and interesting games because the systems facilitates storytelling. The first time that we played Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu was a milestone for our gaming group: WHAT WE CAN'T JUST KILL THE ENEMY? We had to actually think about innovative ways to defeat the enemy while avoiding combat!
Our group LIKES there to be different flavours of rules for different types of games we play - hell most of the games we play these days barely require any rules: the ROLEplaying of characters is what is important not the ROLLplaying of dice! Do the roleplaying community a big favour and let D&D die!
Corporate marketing people will always concede that the ultimate promotion is word-of-mouth. They do their best to create this, but they'll readily admit that it's mostly beyond their control.
Another parallel with DnD: in both games, players tend to improvise rules not approved by the publishers. In Monopoly, most players make the fine revenue into a prize you get by pulling a card at the right moment. (This change makes the game too random for my taste, but most people seem to like it.) And of course, serious Dungeon Masters use the TSR books as departure point, not a bible. In both cases, game is sustained by a critical mass of enthusiasts, not by corporate marketing.
It is easy to blaim Hasbro. But it is probably neither fair nor correct to do so.
/. or Kuro5hin. He wrote of how WotC and its founder changed. My understanding was that this was due to a sudden understanding of reality and markets demands. Hasbro was just one piece of the puzzle. The article also discussed the aquisition of TSR and how that was not a happy merger. IIRC this article was written by one of the first employees who stuck around for a year or two. Even after he left he still had an inside scoop as he was friends with many of the employees.
There was an article floating around written by a former WotC employee. It may have been posted to
Hasbro's record is not that bad. Look at some of the other titles they aquired. They picked up the excellent Shogun/Samurai Swords, and Axis&Allies. They also picked up Avalon Hill which was basically dead. Initially Hasbro did not understand these markets which are much older then the kids Hasbro knew. Hasbro made some initial mistakes. But look now. The Avalon Hill line is doing well. There are a number of quality games produced under Avalon Hill. (You can buy Diplomacy again!)
Likewise with TSR and D&D. TSR was dead. It was running at a loss with zero plan for recovery. TSR owed people money and was selling it books at a loss. WotC stepped in and instantly regreted it. Hasbro came onboard. We now have the best D&D rules ever. It is quite possible that without Hasbro D&D 3rd would not have seen the light of day. It is fact that someone had to step in and rescue both WotC and the D&D line.
There is no evidence to support a claim that Hasbro has harmed D&D. D&D 3 was published and is an excellent product. Hasbro has also treated the Avalon Hill line well. As other posters have written Hasbro probably saved WotC and D&D.
Reports of the great mage Elminster applying at a Local Seattle McDonalds are coming in. Many witnesses say they saw him standing in line for a job application practicing his lines, 'Would you like fries with that?'
More as the story breaks.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
I have to say something in reply to this as I've recently been talking with some other long term roleplayers about different products & different Publishers...
We decided that most games (even GURPS the generic roleplaying system) have their niches which they do well... Outside of those niches some systems break & some just aren't fun...
<a href="www.wizards.com">D&D</a> is good at fantasy settings & as their Star wars RPG shows it starts to lack when asked to do something else...
<a href="www.sjgames.com">GURPS</a> does alot of settings well, but is more complex & so looses it's fun when you try not to be complex... For instance it's vehicle rules are better than most, but it's a drawn out process to flesh out a GURPS vehicle, so unless you find that complexity fun it's not for you...
<a href="www.guardiansorder.on.ca">BESM & SAS</a> are designed for Anime/Manga style games (BESM or Big Eyes Small Mouth) & Silver age comics based games (SAS or Silver Age Sentinels). BESM is horrible at modeling real world situations & SAS isn't much better...
<a href="www.palladiumbooks.com">Rifts</a> & the other related Palladium games/licenses did a good job of modeling the settings desired, but due to the lack of depth in equipment things have gone to the power gamers & munchkins who abuse the rules...
<a href="http://www.white-wolf.com/">White Wolf's WoD</a> games are good at forcing roleplay, but combat isn't very defined & equipment/skills are simplistic...
I could go on, but if you look at the examples you may see the pattern... Certain systems model certain things & situations better than others. The idea shouldn't be that one RPG publishing company is better or hungrier, or newer, or anything... It should be that you look at each systems unique advantages & disadvantages & pick the best to meet the needs of the group...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
you'll get my DMs guide when you pry it from my cold dead Gauntlets of Ogre Power.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on