The new version of Traveller, which will be OGL and had an open playtest, is at the printer! Look for it to drop in a gaming store near you soon!
Why Open Gaming Is Good For Business
The OGL was largely single-handedly responsible for reviving the RPG industry overall and it and 3e took D&D from a bankrupt and largely irrelevant position back to its current state of RPG primacy and pop-culture relevancy.
Let me note something about real world economics. A healthy market sector means more for everyone. My IRL company has been posting record revenues for many consecutive quarters. Our stock took a big hit lately. Why? Because our major competitors posted big losses. This cast the entire sector in a bad light. Doing well in a bad sector isn’t any better than doing poorly in a good sector, and is arguably worse, to investors.
In a post on the ENWorld boards, a WotC rep says that they’re still reviewing the basic premises behind the GSL. Has Paizo’s Pathfinder RPG play scared them into thinking that any degree of openness isn’t the way to go?
To me, this is one of the largest decisions that Wizards could make regarding D&D 4e. The prior OGL was a huge moment in gaming and helped catapult D&D back to the top from being a bankrupt and irrelevant little thing. In my opinion, any decision to go back on it would be both stupid and ultimately harmful to D&D/WotC. I’ve played D&D a long time and would love to keep playing it. Even if 4e has retarded stuff in it, I can houserule it, heck, publish my own “nonretarded” variant, and keep going. If they choose to make it not open however – then I won’t bother, I’ll go with Pathfinder or something else exclusively.
Posted in talk
Tagged 4e, D&D, gaming resources, GSL, licensing, OGL, open gaming, RPG, RPGs
So how many of you have actually had a character that does some honest old school demon summoning? Well, wait no longer. Complete Scoundrel has a prestige class called the Malconvoker, which is a good person who tricks demons into fighting the other evil critters they face. Here’s Treantmonk20’s thread on the Wizards Character Optimization board on “Mastering the Malconvoker.” I chip in on good Planar Binding options. I have a related thread on all the legit 3.5e Summon Monster targets. My current character, Valgrim the Summoner, in the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path from Paizo, is a malconvoker and loving it.
A couple fun things in the wake of Gygax’ passing. One, this huge D20 on the MIT campus (courtesy FARK).
Also, an unexpected place for retrospectives on Gygax – various Presbyterian pastors! (Thanks to the Mad Doctor for these.)
“Verys Arkon” has compiled all the info about 4e revealed so far into a preview “Lite Edition” PDF. Check it out here. It appears to only include the stuff from DDXP, not the various things designers have revealed on blogs or whatnot (marking, etc.).
As I read it I get back to my familiar ambivalence with 4e. The initial changes in terms of simplification and encounter powers – basically all the stuff they showcased in Star Wars Saga Edition and Book of Nine Swords – I love. All the other crap they piled on top of it – I hate. Alas.
The Stinky Cheese:
It’s official! Paizo Publishing is the gaming company that was publishing Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine for years until WotC pulled their license. Since then they’ve been publishing the best D&D adventures on the market (and Dragon and Dungeon are languishing in low-content electronic-only hell on wizards.com).
Well, Wizards screwed around and screwed around; even after announcing that they’d get the license and rules to third party publishers (for $5k a head) they never executed on it. So now Paizo has decided to fork D&D by creating a RPG called the Pathfinder RPG based on 3.5e via the OGL. The “alpha” version of it is freely available – in fact, they say once they start selling the beta sometime around Gen Con it’ll still be available freely as a PDF. The beta will be an open beta for a year and the “final” version will launch in August of 2009. They are also launching the Pathfinder Society, which sounds like a competitor to the RPGA.
There’s a thread on the Wizards forums I refer to from time to time – The Base Classes as Rated by You. The community voted on relative class power and the results are interesting.
Rated 1-10, with “10” being “most powerful” and “1” being “least powerful”.
*= not enough responses to mean much
D= highly debated – the ranks were widespread
C= consensus – the ranks were often the same
9.4 Druid C
8.6 Wizard C
8.6 Cleric
8.6 Artificer *C
8.1 Psion C
7.7 Wu Jen * C
7.5 Psychic Warrior
7.5 Favoured Soul
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The New York Times, in last Sunday’s edition, published a nice article from Adam Rogers of Wired about D&D, E. Gary Gygax, and how D&D informs so much of modern geek culture (which is steadily taking over mainstream culture). They have a big fun flowchart to follow your own journey of geekiness, too!
I ran across this online survey while surfing. It’s a comprehensive questionnaire that determines your D&D class, race, and alignment! Here’s me. Appaently I’m a goon because who would go bard/wizard?!? I assume the bard part is for my strength in leadership, but bah! Other than that, it’s about right. And since clerics are “leaders” in 4e, and I scored pretty high on cleric, maybe I’m really a Wizard/Cleric. Mystic Theurge, here I come!!!
I Am A: Neutral Good Human Bard/Wizard (3rd/2nd Level)
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