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A History of Wizards of the Coast
HerderOfCats writes "Shannon Appelcline has written up an excellent independent history of Wizards of the Coast, the company that brought us Magic: The Gathering, eventually acquired TSR and D&D, transformed the paper RPG game industry with d20 and the Open Game License, and eventually was acquired by game giant Hasbro." From the RPGNet article: "Overall, Hasbro was looking to make Wizards meaner and leaner, and thus a better profit making machine. In 2001 and 2002 Habro also divested themselves of their conventions. Origins went to GAMA and GenCon to Peter Adkison. Around the same time they also outsourced their magazines by licensing Dungeon, Dragon, Polyhedron, and Amazing Stories to Paizo Publishing, who continues to publish the RPG magazines today. Two years later another pruning would come. Wizards had also been running 85 'Game Keeper' and 'Wizards of the Coast' retail stores, but in early 2004, Hasbro shut them all down. Together with selling the conventions, this relieved any concerns that Wizards might be developing a vertical monopoly, like that controlled by Games Workshop in the UK--and really such a monopoly wouldn't have made sense given the d20 strategy. "
I must say, Wizards did an incredible job improving D&D with the changes they made going from advanced to 3.0 and then eventually 3.5. I began to play advanced d&d only about a year before the 3.0 launch and got to witness the new life that was injected into the industry. A much more streamlined ruleset and (fairly) well playtested books made me into the RPG addict I am today.
Anail Nathrock Uthvass Bethudd Dochiel Dienve
In case anyone in interested in spring of 1997 I visited TSR on a business trip. This was just after the Wizard's of the Coast buyout. For the curious here's my writeup on visiting TSR during the final days in which you can hear my perception of the mood (poor, but improving since the buyout) and learn useless things (Peter Adkison really likes ketchup. And why 50th level Dwarven Paladins, an illegal combination in 2nd ed, was a major test case.).
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WotC is too young to have a 'history of' article. For god's sake, I wasn't -that- old when Magic first game out. It's still a young company, dammit! Get off my lawn!
I bought WotC's _The Primal Order_ back in the day. It was amazingly well-written. One of the few RPG books I ever read cover-to-cover. In the very back there was an appendix that listed out how to convert The Primal Order to other systems. That's what Kevin S. and Palladium were suing over -- just that one or two pages in the back of a book from a tiny little RPG company.
I believe it was also around this time that I read about how Palladium had sent off some cease & desist letters to game magazines, asking them not to publish certain types of content for their games. (I don't even know of any independent RPG magazines these days -- not that I've been paying attention. Back in the day, it was normal for these magazines to publish adventures, characters, and other materials for various RPGs.) I recall one magazine editor wrote an editorial saying that since Palladium seemed to be so heavy-handed, they wouldn't be covering anything about Palladium games from then on.
Reading Kevin's history of Palladium on their website is a bit disturbing. It's clear that this guy is very full of himself. And for what? He re-made D&D with renamed alignments, two types of hit points, and a larger number of classes.
-- dR.fuZZo
From the article: ... and very, very few game companies do. By that reading, a book like The Primal Order can be produced without permission from the original publisher, as long as care is taken in the use of the trademarks.
By most peoples' reading of laws, game companies can protect the actual text of the games via copyright, and they can protect the use of their system names for marketing via trademark. However, they can't actually protect the game systems themselves unless they file patents for them as inventions
Back in 2000, Ryan Dancey, the D&D Brand Manager for Hasbro, and to a lesser extent, Peter Adkinson himself, were involved in a rather large multithread debate on rec.games.frp.dnd (there are a lot more threads), the TSR/WotC website, etc where Dancey pretty much explicitly stated that any creative work players produced in their AD&D games were derivative works of TSR/WotC and thus wholly owned by TSR, automatically invalidating any copyright that the actual creator had on the work and granting full copyright on their material to TSR/WotC even if the majority of the work was generic and made little reference to AD&D.
At the time, I immediately pulled all of the material about the campaign world I created off the net. It basically only used the AD&D rules and involved new character classes, monsters, maps, new worlds, etc. Dancey went so far as to claim even using the rules (which weren't patented and even if they had been patented, would have already expired) made the work of campaigns like mine derivative of AD&D and thus the sole property of TSR/WotC.
Needless to say, I never moved on to 3E and flat out refused to participate in anything like D20/OGL due to Dancey, because I refused to legitimize any of his stance. I have an entire three foot shelf of TSR books but I haven't bought anything in the last 6 years mostly because of what they tried to pull then. I find it rather ironic that when WotC was the small guy startup, they nearly died from the bigger fish suing them over the idea derivative works and less than a decade later, when WotC was the big fish in the sea, the same people took the exact opposite stance that got them off the ground.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
I think its because every once in a while, WotC comes out with a "stand alone" expansion pack. Its basically works out to a starting point for new players. Instead of playing with the core set where you'll get pwned in tournaments by people who have 15 years worth of cards collected you can play in a, lets say "Ice Age" only tourney (I use ice age cuz thats when I got off the crack^h^h^h^h card game). This works to help reduce the cost of entry, and allow new people a chance to catch up, or just play from that point on.
I got nothin'
I've been saying this for a while now, and think that the writing has been on the wall for at least ten years, if not fifteen. The absolute biggest problem with the gaming industry is treating it like an industry. No matter how many editions and point releases (point releases, for Chrissakes!) of a system there are, or how many different Revised Guides to the Jakes of Waterdeep are printed, games do not suffer from planned obsolescence. This is a major problem for publishers, because there is a distinctly finite market for their wares. Even if they do come up with entire new settings and flavour texts (see the proliferation-- nay, metastasis of Everquest and Warcraft D20 and their ilk) instead of repackaging the Compleat Guide to Elfs again, the publisher is still spreading itself and its profits thinner: not everyone will purchase setting-specific source material, or official setting material in the first place.
Presentation and packaging is the absolute worst element of the industry now, by far, though. In my younger years, I used to collect RPG material, especially GURPS supplements and obscure titles. $20 CDN for a 128 page perfectbound book? Hey, that was good value to me. When prices crept up to more than $25 for the same material, my purchases slowed dramatically. Now, the few GURPS books that come out each year, priced at roughly $50 a pop, don't even get a second glance. They're filled with the ugly, glossy art and oversized print that D&D paved the way for with 3rd Edition, and Evil Stevie is wondering why his profits have been dropping. Oh, but hey! They're offering PDFs of the books now, that's got to be good, right? Well, aside from the fact that 1:1 scans of 8-1/2"x11" books are an incredible pain in the butt to read on a screen... and that they're selling those for $25 a shot, too.
Palladium is screwed for the same reason that it's always been flirting with disaster: Its owner is an asshole with delusions of adequacy. This is the man that green-lit a tie-in game for the N-Gage of all platforms. The most popular books in his stable were written by people that have long since run to saner pastures, leaving him to erase their contributions through sheer mudflation.
Wizards of the Coast... well, they're probably going to be the only outfit that survives the crash of this so-called industry, because they have diversified like nobody's business-- and they have done it in directions that do not suffer the pitfalls of an industry based on the end user's imagination. Just take a peek at the front page of their website: Pokemon, Magic, Neopets... all titles and games that have officiality and collectability stamped all over them. When was the last time that someone seriously tried trotting out a homebrew pokecritter or magic card? Sure, they're still grinding out D&D material and plastering it up on that turgid mess of a website, but I can guarantee that they're making much more money out of the games that you can get into for ten bucks, and keep yourself hooked on for the price of a pack of smokes whenever you go up to the cash at the comic shop or variety store.
That's nonsense. The fact that they keep coming out with expansion is *precisely* what keeps the game alive. They come out with new cards, change up the tournament formats, and all of a sudden, the players have to actually design, build, and test new decks rather than using the same old Psychatog deck that they ran in Extended 4 years ago. This applies even in formats like Type 1 where you can use any card ever printed. Fundamentally, the fun of the game isn't in the game itself, it's in the metagame. Keeping up with the meta, finding ways to exploit and overcome the decks you expect to see at the tournaments, these are the things that keep people coming back to the game.
The one problem with Hasbro shutting down all the game stores is that in alot of places, the WotC or Game Keeper store was the only game store in town. And a lot of people looked at these stores closing down and thought, "If they can't keep a branded store open, why would anyone open an indy store?" So these places lose a venue to get gamers together and encourage gaming as an activity and a hobby. Yeah, I know, you can buy anything you need to game off the internet. But it's getting harder and harder to find people for TT gaming if you want to get a game going in your living room. If anything is contributing to the decline of the gaming industry, it's that fact. Because for all our high tech nature and the potential geekiness of the people who game, gaming still thrives on face to face interaction. Another thing lost, with many of these little game shops closing down, is the last refuge for the geeks and misfits that we are in some very geek/misfit unfriendly parts of the country. Even the most anti-social amongst us still liked to go to the game store, if only too look over the latest game offerings and get an idea of what's coming down the pike (yeah, they would still go home and order it off the internet where it was probably cheaper). And for all of you who will chime in and say, "My local game store is doing fine," I'm happy for you. But I'll tell you, it was nigh impossible to find a gaming store in LA (lots of card stores, and the Games Workshop store, sure, but not a plain old gaming store). And now that I've moved back to Ilinois, the local gaming stores that used to be here have both closed. So I am reduced to searching the net for my games. Yeah, I can get in the car and drive, but it lacks both the convenience and the comraderie of a local game store, where you know the guy who runs it and you know a lot of the people who go there. I'll miss the local game store; it was often a fun place to be.