GenCon Report

I finally got back from GenCon last night at 9 pm. It was a successful and fun show and as is usually the case it helped recharge my creative batteries. It’s really nice to spend the week with other passionate game enthusiasts and see the cool stuff going on in all aspects of the hobby. The focus of my con was, of course, the Green Ronin booth and I spent most of each day there pimping our wares and talking to people about Dragon Age. We did a DA promo flier for the show and there was a lot of interest in the game, which made me happy. I don’t have the time or energy for a day by day breakdown but here are the things that stand out in my mind.

Ice and Fire: This is the first GenCon since the release of A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying and it was great to see the depth of interest in the game. We sold out of core books and the new adventure Peril at King’s Landing by noon Sunday. Jim Kiley ran demos at our booth three of the four days and all slots filled up easily. And it won two ENnie Awards. The game has got legs and once we get the Campaign Guide out it’ll really be cooking.

Girl Scouts Gone Wild: GenCon did a program with the Girl Scouts this year. I donated five copies of Faery’s Tale Deluxe for GMs and an adventure. The demos went over so well that many of the girls and their families came to our booth and bought us out of the game. I love the idea of Girl Scouts learning to roleplay at GenCon. Thanks to Faith Felice for organizing this very cool program.

Punking the Punk: After our post-ENnies dinner, I ended up at this horrible dance club with Nicole and Paul Tevis. There was a party for the Brave New World movie there and Nicole wanted to drop by and congratulate Matt Forbeck. You could hear the music a block away and inside you had to yell to talk to anyone. We found Matt and the last holdouts of the party in a small room off to the side. After a couple of minutes, Nicole went out to the main room and the others followed. This left Tevis and I alone in the room. It didn’t take long for other patrons at the club to discover it. As Paul and I tried to have a discussion about wargames, the room filled up with dancing drunks taking pictures of each other. Imagine trying to talk about PanzerBlitz and For the People over thumping house music as club kids gyrated all around. Then they started taking pictures of us and still our friends were nowhere to be found. Finally, I yelled, “Are we being punked?” We were not but we didn’t stay too long either.

Sympathy for Monte: Fantasy Flight announced Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Third Edition at the show. I, of course, designed Second Edition so this was of some interest to me. To be clear all I know about it is what was said at GenCon. I heard rumors it was in development but no one from FFG ever contacted me about it. It’s taking an interesting approach, but my gut reaction is that they should have called it something else. There have been many, many games using the Warhammer IP. If they had called it Warhammer Uberquest or something, I doubt anyone would have cared. Calling it WFRP 3E invites comparisons to the previous editions, however, and seems bound to create the same sorts of tensions that are tearing up the D&D fanbase right now.

Grub Quest: Indianapolis loves its chain restaurants, which is bad news for people who want to eat good food. I made an effort to find some decent places to eat this year, though lunches still ended up being Chick Fil A more often than not. Finds included Café Patachou, which was a good spot for breakfast; TaTa Cuban Café; and Maxine’s Chicken and Waffles, a great soul food restaurant whose only downside is its distance from the convention center. We did our end of con GR meal at Barcelona Tapas, which was also quite good. Weirdly enough, the only disappointment in the meal was the sangria, which tasted like it was missing an ingredient or two. Their tres leches cake, which I dubbed by 20th GenCon cake, was awesome though.

A Night with Dr. Evil: Rob Schwalb ran a D&D game Thursday night in which I played my minotaur barbarian. Eight players plus a bottle of brandy made it a raucous affair. We all had a good time, though I think Rob regretted running for level 21 characters. He says I’m on the hook for next year, so maybe I’ll run Dragon Age. Hal and Adam AKA “Tennessee Hal” need to sit apart though.

Stuff and Things: It wouldn’t be GenCon without bringing home some swag, though this may be the first time I didn’t bring home even one miniature. I bought Kate a Dr. Who graphic novel and myself Chronica Feudalis, which was a pretty easy sell to me considering my history with Ars Magica. I finally got Trail of Cthulhu, as well as Shadows Over Filmland and Mutant City Blues from Pelgrane. I did a trade with Richard Iorio of Rogue Games for Colonial Gothic, Thousand Suns, and their various supplements. I got the boardgame Ubongo from Z-Man Games, which looks right up Nicole’s alley. Andrew Hackard of SJG also dropped by copies of their boardgame Revolution and the card game The Stars Are Right. I played the latter with Evan Monday night and it was fun. Lastly, I picked up the second edition of Reaper’s Warlord miniatures game. I set up a trade for Starblazer Adventures and then forgot to go to the Cubicle 7 booth to make it happen. D’oh!

A Small Thank You: It’s always hard to know how much stock to bring to the show. You don’t want to run out of a title early but neither do you want to pay to ship a lot of stuff back. On Sunday a couple of the big consolidators came buy, asking if we wanted to sell our overstock to them. I could have taken the princely sum of 5 cents on the dollar but instead Steve Kenson and I carried four boxes of books to the GenCon office. These books were given away to the many volunteers who staff the convention. I figured they deserved our thanks for making the show run so smoothly.

That Would Have Been Timely

Months ago I agreed to be on a panel at Norwescon called Game Publishing Goes Digital. With the events of last week in the game industry, it was quite timely. I ended up moderating the panel, which included Jeff Combos from Exile Game Studio, Erik Mona from Paizo, Donna Prior from Flying Lab, and David Stansel-Garner from Catalyst Game Labs. I asked the Norwescon staff and the other panelists if they minded me recording the affair. I thought it would make a good episode of the Green Ronin podcast.

I need to listen to the file but I fear it isn't going to be usable. For one thing, there was a woman near the front with a cold and she was sneezing and blowing her nose throughout. The con hotel was also in Seatac, so the occasional jet would fly overhead. Then at the end of the panel I noticed my recorder had shut off. I had tried to get fresh batteries beforehand in the hotel shop but despite being an airport hotel they had no AA batteries. So I'll see how much got recorded and whether the sound is OK, but I may have to do something else for the next episode of the podcast. Too bad, as the panel went well and the topic is on everyone's minds in gamerdom.

Norwescon overall was a good time. Tim Nightengale did an excellent job on the gaming panels and the con was well run. All but one of my other panels went well. I wasn't sure what to expect out of the Orc one, but I was joined by Tolkien scholar Michael Martinez and he had some interesting things to say about the literary side of things. I also attended two seminars, one about writing for comics (because one day that proposal I put in last July might go somewhere) and one about the pulps (in which Erik Mona was in full effect). It was good to catch up with folks I hadn't seen in awhile, though I also missed seeing many others. It's wacky that we all live in the same city but often only see each other at conventions.

For You 4E Freeport Fans

Once Green Ronin had made its final decision not to sign the revised Game System License, my thoughts turned immediately to licensing. While Green Ronin could not do a Freeport Companion for 4th Edition D&D, a company that had signed the GSL could. One of the points of doing the Pirate's Guide to Freeport as a systemless setting book was that mechanical support for different RPGs could be provided. Since it had begun as a d20 setting, I knew there were Freeport fans amongst the 4E community and I wanted to support them with a companion if I could.

So I started thinking about companies who could publish a 4E Freeport Companion. I wanted a company with a reputation for quality products who would treat the property right. It didn't take long for Expeditious Retreat Press to bubble up to the top of my list. I contacted Suzi and Joe and asked if they were interested in licensing Freeport for a 4E companion. It took us less than a week to hammer out a deal and a contract. They announced it today.

I'm glad we were able to work this out. There are already Freeport Companions for True20 Adventure Roleplaying, Savage Worlds, Castles & Crusades, and D&D 3.5. Warriors & Warlocks, a sword and sorcery sourcebook for Mutants & Masterminds, has a section on Freeport and acts as a default M&M companion as well. That's heading to print any day now and the PDF will be out next week. Once XRP gets the 4E version out, the Pirate's Guide to Freeport will have mechanical support for six different game systems.

I look forward to seeing how XRP models the Freeport setting with the 4E rules.

The End of My Grim and Perilous Adventure

I thought I was done with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay after Black Industries closed and Fantasy Flight licensed it and other properties from GW. Then one day I got an e-mail from Jeff Tidball asking me if Green Ronin would be willing to do ease the transition by doing some final work on the line. My initial reaction was no but then I thought about it some and changed my mind. Rob Schwalb had left Green Ronin by this point, so I would be handling development duties myself. This made it a double return; WFRP to GR and me to development.

I pitched several ideas (including a Career Encyclopedia, which I guess FFG liked because they did it later) and we settled on a book of organizations. I sent out an e-mail entitled "Getting the Band Back Together" to some of our most reliable WFRP freelancers (Jody Macgregor, David Chart, Andy Law, Steve Darlington, and Eric Cagle) asking for pitches on flavorful organizations. I worked out a format for each organization, and made clear that I wanted each one to be a group PCs could join, as well as being suitable for GM use in adventures and intrigues.

I also decided to write up an organization myself. I hadn't done any WFRP writing since Children of the Horned Rat, so I thought I'd take the opportunity. The group I chose to do--the Knights of Magritta--had their origin in a proposal I wrote for James Wallis at Hogshead around 1995. It was for an adventure in which the PCs went looking for a legendary group of knights who had left Estalia centuries before. I took the basics of the group but then changed their history after leaving Estalia, turning them into a secret society more like the Freemasons than the Knights Templar. It was fun taking something I had created at the beginning of my professional work on WFRP and reinterpreting it for the end of my WFRP work.

The finished book, Shades of Empire, came out a couple of months ago and for a project that had to come together quite quickly I'm pleased with the results. WFRP stuff is so often centered on cults and Chaos, it was nice to do a book that explored some other aspects of the Old World. Cheers to my co-authors for helping GR leave WFRP in style.

For now it seems my professional connection to WFRP is at an end. It remains one of my favorite RPGs and I'm glad I had the chance to help bring it back for a new generation of gamers. While the road was sometimes dark and perilous, I only really regret the products I most wanted to do that never happened. Here are the top three.

A Proper Starter Set: My initial product proposal for GW included a boxed starter set to recruit new players into roleplaying. I argued that most roleplayers got their start with D&D and then other companies had to win them away. Wouldn't it be nice if we recruited them directly so they bypassed D&D entirely? I proposed using single piece plastic minis already developed by GW for other products like Warhammer Quest. With the molds paid for, producing the minis would cost very little. As it was to go throughout our relationship, any suggestion of mixing roleplaying with minis was a no go. That was a real shame.

The Age of Sigmar: I wanted to do a series of campaign setting books that explored the Empire in different historical periods. The Age of Three Emperors was high on the list, but the one I wanted to do the most was the Age of Sigmar. This would allow a campaign to take place at the very founding of the Empire as Sigmar united the various tribes under his banner. We'd replace Renaissance trappings with brutal barbarians, doing WFRP Conan style. GW was reluctant to do this book because so little had been written about the era and basically if anyone was going to detail it was going to be them. It's their IP so fair enough, and subsequently Black Library did some books about Sigmar so there's more info now. I should probably just do this as a home campaign some time.

Orks and Blackfire: There was a point where we were pairing a sourcebook with a tie-in adventure. We had an Ork book on the schedule for awhile, planning to do for them what Children of the Horned Rat did for Skaven. The tie-in book was to take place in Blackfire Pass, allowing us to detail that out as an adventuring area. These two books got pushed back several times for various reasons and then went off the schedule altogether. The Orks haven't gotten a lot of love in WFRP and it would have been nice to have that chance.

I will be interested to see how the line develops under FFG. I also hope that GW itself explores other areas like Araby and Ind some day. For now I can just go back to being a WFRP and Warhammer fan and that is pleasantly liberating.

Once More into the Breach

I didn't want to write this post.

The revised version of the Game System License, which allows third party companies to publish support material for the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, came out this week. I dutifully looked it, noted a couple of improvements, but quickly realized it wasn't enough to get me to change my mind about using the license. An e-mail discussion with my Green Ronin cohorts confirmed that they felt the same way. I didn't really feel like talking about it public though, so I was going to let it lie, but then queries started rolling in. Lots of folks wanted to know what GR's plans were regarding 4E with the license change. I realized then I was going to have to say something, so here we are.

The reason I was reluctant to get back into this discussion goes back a couple of months. I was trying to remember something I did last year and went back to look over the entries in my blog for 2008. Paging through my entries I realized how much time I spent thinking, writing, and analyzing D&D4E, the OGL, and the GSL. And the upshot of all that was that we did one product, the Green Ronin Character Record Folio. It's an awesome accessory but ultimately the time I spent on all this was not well spent.

Now you will see people on message boards say that GR never seriously considered supporting 4E because I hate WotC, blah, blah, blah. While our ultimate decision is to go our own way, that was in no way predetermined. We had discussions about what 4E could mean to our various lines as far back as 2005. After it was announced, we brainstormed a bunch of ideas. I started doing some research and taking notes for a potential new campaign setting. We look at what sort of adventure support we might provide. We considered a 4E Freeport Companion to join the four we had already done. I even commissioned a conversion of an unpublished 3.5 adventure so we'd have something to release if the license looked good.

Had the rollout and the terms of the license been better, perhaps things would have ended up differently. The fact that it took 10 months from the announcement of 4E to the actual release of the GSL was in itself a problem for a company of Green Ronin's size (never mind the fact that the announced plans changed several times throughout that period). GR sells into the book trade, and that means that ideally we want to solicit new books 9 months in advance of release. Well, I certainly wasn't going to solicit books for a game I hadn't even seen using a license who terms I didn't know. Nor was I going to start designing blind in the hopes that it'd all work out.

It became clear during this period that there was a faction with WotC that wanted to close the door to third party publishing all together. There were also advocates, most notably Scott and Linae, but it seemed they were in a constant battle to make anything happen at all. The resultant license, the GSL, looked like an attempted compromise between the factions within WotC that probably pleased no one. It certainly pleased few of the established third party publishers. So within two months of the release of the original GSL, a revision was announce to address some of these concerns. It took over six months for that to happen, and while the revision has some improvements the core of it is very similar indeed to the original.

Now while this was all going on, Green Ronin was by no means standing still. We had existing lines like M&M and True20 to support, a new game line in A Song of Ice and Fire to launch, and new deals to negotiate. The company had begun diversifying away from d20 material many years earlier so it was really just a case of continuing that momentum. While d20 was good to us and we published some great books in that era, we ultimately got to a place where we controlled all of our own lines and were beholden to no one.

So when the GSL revision came out, I had to ask myself if I wanted GR to get pulled into WotC's orbit, even a little bit. The answer had to be no. I don't ever want to have to wonder again what a new edition of D&D means to my business. I don't want to worry about whether 5E or 6E is going to be open to third party publishers. I don't want to live with the spectre of the wrong person becoming an exec at WotC and wrecking my business with the stroke of a pen. It's just not worth it, particularly for the level of sales we'd be likely to see doing 4E support. (The best anyone has been able to say about sales of third party 4E stuff is that it's better than late era 3.5 sales, which is like saying that Friday the 13th Part 13 sold more tickets than Friday the 13th Part 12.)

And even leaving aside all the business talk and analysis for a moment, it might still be tempting to publish something for a game that we were excited about. I spent the second half of last year both running and playing 4E. I would play it again, but I have no burning desire to design for it. Nor do my GR cohorts. It has been my experience in the game industry that you don't do great work on a game that you aren't passionate about. You may recall during the d20 boom, a bunch of established companies jumped into the pool once they realized there was money to be made. They didn't really know or care about the rules and that was clear in the resultant products. Fans quickly sussed this out too. Well, I don't want to be one of those guys who is designing through gritted teeth because that's what he thinks "the kids" like these days.

I know there are some GR fans who were hoping we'd end up doing some 4E support. I'm sorry to disappoint you but I know that I'm making the right decision here. We can be much more successful working on games that excite us and that we control. Creatively and financially, it just makes more sense for us to chart our own course.

3rd Era

With the status of the d20 logo unclear, I decided to go ahead and create a new brand under which to sell our d20 back catalog. Sparky is working his way through the PDF files, deleting out the d20 logo and its legal language, and subbing in the new 3rd Era logo (nicely designed by Hal). We should be able to put up a couple a week, so in time our whole catalog ought to be available (save for a few titles due to the deals under which they were published). This doesn't mean we're going to be doing new D&D 3.5 material; it's just a way to ID our existing products.

Some of you may recall that I pondered whether or not to brand our stuff as Pathfinder compatible rather than creating our own brand. I decided that this was the more honest approach. While you'll certainly be able to use any of the 3rd Era books with Pathfinder, we won't be spending the time to update them to reflect Pathfinder's changes to 3.5. I wouldn't want someone expecting that to be disappointed when they purchased one of our books. 3rd Era seemed a better way to go.

One bonus of this move is that we're going to start offering these books on Lulu, so folks who want print copies can get them. For titles that have been long out of print (like Book of Fiends), this gives us an easy way to make print copies available again.

There's a press release about this on GR's website. You can read it here.

Game Industry PR 101

When you have just laid off 20+ people right before Xmas and it's time to try to put the best face possible on that, do NOT pull out the bullshit corporate doublespeak. Here is the money quote from WotC President Greg Leeds in an article on ICV2 on the recent layoffs (oh sorry, "digital consolidation"):

“Consolidating internal resources coupled with improved outsourcing allows us to gain efficiencies in executing against our major digital initiatives Magic Online and D&D Insider. Wizards of the Coast is well positioned to maximize future opportunities, including further brand development on digital platforms. The result of this consolidation is a more streamlined approach to driving core brands.”

Ah yes, gaining efficiencies and maximizing opportunities! The only phrase this masterpiece is missing is "leveraging our core competencies." Maybe he's saving that one for the next round of layoffs. Seriously, this sort of soulless gibberish may play with Hasbro shareholders but it the 100% wrong way to communicate with the gamers who make up WotC's audience. Next time, I suggest Mr. Leeds try showing a human face and some compassion for the people he just put out of work. Quotes that read like passages from 1984 only reinforce the idea of WotC as an "evil empire." And you don't need an expensive market research campaign to figure that out.

RPG Musings

Since the announcement of the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, there have been continuing flamewars about the game all over the internet. This is to be expected, but what I find interesting is the amount of time that's also spent discussing whether 4E is selling well or not. Every gaming message board I visit has some variation of this topic right now. For most gamers, you wouldn't think it would matter. Either they are playing and enjoying 4E or they not. How many others are playing it would seem largely irrelevant, but some people who hate 4E want to crow about its failure and some people who love 4E want to exalt in its success. The trouble with the game industry is that companies rarely share their sales data, and at large companies like WotC accurate data is not necessarily passed down the chain of command. It is thus the executives and the sales people who know what's really going on at a high level and they of course are the least likely to talk about it. You may see vague and qualified statements, but almost no one provides real numbers.

Due to the GSL situation, Green Ronin isn't doing much with 4E. Our one planned product, an update of our d20 System Character Record Folio to 4E, just went to print. I am looking forward to its debut because it will give me some direct and measurable data. The original folio was Green Ronin's best selling product of all time, going through six odd print runs. It will be informative to see how the 4E version stacks up.

Now the anecdotes I hear are sometimes interesting, but I try not to read a lot into them. I had a retailer at the Alliance Open House in Las Vegas, for example, tell me he stopped carrying 4E because his customers tried it, didn't like it, and went back to playing 3E. I can believe that happened in his store, but I don't think such an extreme reaction is common. The only commentary I have taken seriously has come from the two halves of the distribution system: the game trade and the book trade. In separate conversations, an executive in the game trade and the former RPG buyer for a major chain of bookstores both told me the same thing: 4E sold in well but follow-up sales were slow. One of them told me that 4E supplements were selling at the same level as 3E supplements at the beginning of this year (i.e. 8 years into 3E's lifecycle).

That is interesting info if true. Even so the picture might change as more supplements and support material comes out and new organized play programs have an effect. I've said previously I don't think we'll know what kind of legs 4E has until next summer. A year after release gamers will have had a chance to put it through its paces and judge the development of the line. While brand power is important (and D&D has plenty of it), it's ultimately the play experience of the fans that will tell the story.

Yesterday's layoffs at WotC add an interesting wrinkle, but it's unclear what they signify (other than a shitty Xmas for the folks who were let go). It seems most of the layoffs were centered on WotC's digital efforts and certainly their part in the 4E launch did not go as planned. It was surprising to see Jonathan Tweet and Andrew Finch, both long time employees I'd have thought immune to the seasonal layoff cycle, on the list. Their departure could be a cost saving measure, but it's also possible they volunteered for the layoff. I've seen people who are ready to move on take bullets to spare others before.

What is unambiguous to my mind is that the third party market for 4E material is a shadow of its former self. By early 2001 you had publishers selling huge amounts of d20 product and more companies jumping into the fray every week. This time there is a trickle of product and no one is seeing the gangbuster sales of 3E's heyday as far as I can tell. The GSL revision has yet to appear and the d20 diaspora continues to splinter. If WotC was serious about wanting the support of third party publishers, the GSL has been a strategic failure to date. If the goal was to cull the third party market though, mission accomplished.

Moving into 2009 the state of the biggest RPG in the industry is unclear, the RPG category in general continues to struggle in retail stores, and we are in a recession that may get much worse before it gets better. In this environment you can give up or look for opportunity. I have chosen the latter course and I'll have more to say about that in the future.

An Interesting Question

By the end of this year third party companies need to stop selling products with the old d20 logo on them. For print product this means selling, giving away, or destroying backstock. PDFs though can simply have the logo and legal info taken out and then be put back on sale. The question for Green Ronin then is what brand do we re-release these PDFs under?

We could simply create a new brand like "Classic 3" to indicate that these are former d20 books that work with D&D 3 or 3.5. The downside of that plan is that we'd be creating the brand from scratch and we'd have to educate people about what "Classic 3" (or whatever we chose) meant.

The other leading option is to re-release these PDFs under Paizo's Pathfinder brand. Right now Paizo is playtesting the Pathfinder game, which is basically the next iteration of the D&D 3.5 rules (as opposed to 4E, which goes off in another direction entirely). Paizo will be doing something like our True20 Trademark License, which will allow other companies to release Pathfinder branded material. When Paizo announced Pathfinder a few months ago, it was big news and it is serving as a rallying point for those gamers who want to stick with the 3.5 rules. It would thus make a certain amount of sense to use Pathfinder for our old d20 stuff and Paizo has already done a lot to establish the brand.

The issue for GR is that Pathfinder won't be taking its final form for some time. There's a beta out next month but the final game isn't releasing until August, 2009. Paizo has said that backwards compatibility is a big goal for them, but there are going to be some differences (possibly some big ones) between Pathfinder and D&D 3.5. It makes total sense for Paizo to evolve the rules, but I wonder at the implications for GR if we use the Pathfinder brand. We are not planning on going back to these books and making major revisions. If we turn the d20 Freeport Companion into the Pathfinder Freeport Companion, for example, the contents of the book would remain the same. We'd just be changing the title and logo. What I wonder is whether gamers would expect our old books to be revised for 100% compatibility with Pathfinder? Or would they understand that while our books are compatible in the way any 3.5 book will be, they weren't designed originally as Pathfinder products.

It's an interesting question and we have until the end of the year to figure out the answer. What do you all think?

Decision Made

I don't normally cross-post announcements from GreenRonin.com to my blog, but since I have written a lot about D&D and third party publishers this year I thought readers would be interested in the final decision.

Green Ronin and 4E

I know a lot of fans have been waiting to find out if Green Ronin is going to support 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons and it's a fair question. Green Ronin's second product ever was Death in Freeport, an adventure for 3rd Edition that debuted the same day as the Player's Handbook almost eight years ago. We went on to do quite a lot of 3E support, ending only a couple of months back with the d20 Freeport Companion. Now Wizards of the Coast is terminating the d20 license and offering a different way to support the new edition of D&D. It's called the Game System License and we waited from August of last year until June of this year to see it. We've spent the last few weeks reviewing the license and discussing it internally and we have come to a consensus.

Green Ronin will not be signing the Game System License (GSL) at this time.

We plan to do one product in support of 4E: the Green Ronin Character Record Folio. This will be an update of the d20 System Character Record Folio and we'll be publishing it under the Open Game License (OGL).

Other than that we'll be giving our full attention to our own game lines: Mutants & Masterminds, A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, True20 Adventure Roleplaying, and Freeport: The City of Adventure.

We had hoped to include 4E support in our plans, but the terms of the GSL are too one-sided as they stand. We certainly do not blame Wizards of the Coast for wanting to defend their intellectual property and take more control over the type of support products D&D receives. We do not, however, feel that this license treats third party publishers as valued partners. Under its terms WotC could frivolously sue a signatory for supposed violations of the GSL, lose the actual court case, and still ruin the winning company because the license specifies that the signatory has to pay WotC's legal fees. Also, the GSL can be changed at any time and WotC is not legally required to so much as inform its licensees.

Let me be clear in stating that I don't think that the people in charge of WotC currently are just waiting to attack companies with frivolous lawsuits. Once you sign the GSL though, you open yourself up to that at any point in the future. Who knows when new people will take over the D&D brand and who can say what their vision will be? Who knows when the political winds at WotC will change again and things will get even more restrictive? We do not want to operate under such a cloud moving ahead so that's why we won't be signing the GSL.

This means the Green Ronin Character Record Folio is the only 4E compatible product you'll be seeing from us this year and likely for 2009 as well. Perhaps WotC will revise the GSL in the positive way, but we cannot build our business on maybes. We know this will disappoint those of our fans who have embraced 4E and we're sorry about that. We have to make the best business decision for Green Ronin's future and right now this is it.

Thank you for your continued support.

Here's a Product We Won't Be Doing

I wrote this up a couple of weeks ago, so it'd be ready to go if the GSL was friendly to the concept. It's not, so scratch this idea.


Power Cards, Set 1
A 4E Card Accessory
Format: 8-deck display box; 80-100 cards per deck
MSRP: $11.95 (individual deck); $95.60 (8-deck display box)
Product Code: GRR3XXX (display box)
Release Date: October '08

Your 4th edition D&D character has a lot of options. Tracking so many powers can be a pain, but all that has come to an end. With Green Ronin’s new Power Cards, choosing powers and using them in play has never been easier. Set 1 has four decks to choose from: cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard. Each deck has cards for all the powers of that class. Simply keep your power cards handy and you’ll always have the right info at your fingertips. Set 2 will follow in November with the remaining four core classes: paladin, ranger, warlock, and warlord. Get ready to power up!

On My Sinister Motive

Several threads about my Friday post about 4E and new gamers erupted on various message boards this week. I can only imagine what would have happened if I had actually written an anti-4E diatribe but hey, that's the internet for you. Many people wondered why I give a shit if D&D is new player friendly. Some people posited that I must have an ulterior motive, like trying to sell more M&M and True20 books or some such. Well, it's true, I do have a sinister motive and here it is:

I want D&D to attract a lot of new players so there will be more gamers to sell RPGs to.

D&D has always been the biggest gateway into roleplaying, so of course I don't want 4E to fail. I'd rather see my boat lifted by its rising tide. To really take the RPG audience to that next level though, there has to be a lot of new blood. That's why the 4E acquisition strategy concerns me.

4E and New Players

Note: I want to be clear up front that this is not a review of 4E in general. I am critiquing it as a vehicle for introducing new players into roleplaying. I am not saying it's a bad game or that you are a bad person if you like it. Nor does this bear upon Green Ronin's plans to potentially support 4E with product. That's a whole other discussion (the gist of which is, if it makes sense, we'll do it).

D&D occupies a unique place in the RPG ecosystem. It was the first RPG and created the entire category it continues to dominate. It also tends to be the entry point for most people into the hobby. While there have been some alternate avenues, most notably Vampire: The Masquerade, most roleplayers get their start with D&D. Despite this D&D has a checkered history in attracting new players since the days of the original Basic Set. TSR and WotC after them have had acquisition strategies that were either confused or ineffective. When I heard that 4E was going to radically rebuild D&D, my biggest hope was that the new iteration would be good acquisition game. The hobby needs more roleplayers, plain and simple, and I hoped 4E might help deliver them.

My assessment after having the books for a few weeks: it fails.

I say this because ultimately the new Player's Handbook is not a viable entry point for most new players. Now I know there are some entry products coming down the pipe, but to my mind a new player should be able to read the PHB and learn how to play the game. Entry sets come and go and stores may or may not have them in stock, but the Player's Handbook will always be there. It is the cornerstone of the line, the book that sells better than all others. It should be approachable and friendly to new players.

The 4E PHB, however, has some issues. Let's take a look at them in detail.

No Sales Text: I remember when we got in the 3E PHBs at WotC. I immediately flipped mine over to read the back cover text. I was appalled that it made no attempt to sell D&D. It basically said, "Hey, it's the new edition of D&D." Imagine my surprise to find 4E repeating this same error. Most of the back cover is empty. There are two short paragraphs of text and again they do not even try to sell the game. They don't explain what a roleplaying game is or why it's fun. It is apparently assumed that anyone looking at this book already knows that. You can tell someone that the book "provides everything players need to create and run heroic characters through legendary dungeons of dread," but that means nothing to folks new to roleplaying.

The Great Wall: Chapter 1 does have a reasonable, if short, intro to the game. Then the book gets into character creation. It's a little hinky that the races chapter has a bunch of powers in it when they haven't been explained yet, but I can see why they are there. The trouble starts in Chapter 4: Classes. This chapter is a killer. Since each class has 80-90 powers and all of them are nested here, this chapter is enormous and daunting. It is 125 pages, or almost as long as the entire 1st edition PHB. I've been gaming since I was 10 years old and my eyes glazed over the first time I tried to make it though Chapter 4. The powers soon started blending together. Also, a huge number of them use the [w] notation and this is explained nowhere in this chapter. You don't find out what it means until Chapter 7: Equipment, in fact.

No Newb Class: In every previous edition of D&D there has been at least one easy-to-play class that you could start people off with, fighter being the classic choice. 4E gives an equal number of powers to all classes, which means that playing any of them is like running a spellcaster in previous editions. There are at least some suggested builds for each class, so that's something but playing a 4E character for the first time still requires a more decision making than I think is advisable for new gamers

Not Enough Examples: Good rulebooks should have a lot of examples. You might think a rule is clear when you write it, but it often isn't as crystal as you believe. There are very few examples in the PHB until the combat chapter and even that really needs more. There is no character creation example that follows through the entire process and no extended combat example. Showing a new player how it all comes together is key, so leaving these out is a mistake.

Poor Reference Tools: This is a 320 page book and it has a 1 page index. Not helpful. Nor does it have a glossary of terms. Oh, and all those powers in Chapter 4? There's no alphabetical list of those with page numbers so you can look them up by name. All of this is bad enough for experienced players but it's deadly for newbies.

Core Experience Is Hardcore: All the preceding could have been mitigated to some degree if the core experience was easy to get into. Unfortunately, 4E is for hardcore gamers, not casual players. It seeks to provide a robust system for tactical combat and in so doing it makes the game fairly unapproachable. Or to put it more simply: the game is too damn complicated. There are powers and feats and class abilities (which can be like feats or like powers!), there are multiple temporary modifiers that need to be remembered and tracked, and there are ultimately too many choices for new players to make. I learned (ironically enough, when I was working at WotC) that limiting options is often better for new players, as offering too much choice can paralyze them.

What is perhaps most perplexing about these choices on WotC's part is that their new publishing plan involves releasing one big hardback book per month. That being the case, they could have easily pushed the more complicated elements into the supplements and made the core game a whole lot more approachable. That would have given the hardcore gamers what they want, while not pushing away the newbies and the casual gamers.


Now I understand 4E is selling well and this is no surprise. We are talking about a new edition of D&D here. It's a brand so powerful that even WotC's godawful marketing campaign for 4E couldn't make this a non-event in the world of nerdery. Only a tiny fraction of the people buying the books are new players though. The vast majority of them are current or lapsed gamers. They want to check out the new edition of this classic game and see if it's for them. The real test will come a year from now, when the newness will have worn off. Then we'll see if 4E really sticks.

I am sure, however, that WotC will end up with a healthy audience for 4E. Will it succeed in really bringing in new players though? That I am much less certain of. I do not think the PHB is the introduction to D&D is should have been. Titles like the Basic Set may help somewhat, but it's likely that true acquisition will continue to come from existing gamers introducing others to the hobby. That's a shame because I think 4E had a real chance to bring in the new blood the RPG industry desperately needs.

Not a Good Start

If I was a game retailer, I'd sure be pissed this week. Not only have some book trade accounts broken the 4th edition D&D street date by nearly two weeks, but also pirated electronic versions of all three core books have appeared on file sharing networks. Even worse, they seem to be from production PDFs, which probably means they were leaked internally or from the printer. Bad news for WotC and for retailers.

Having seen the books (and no, not pirated PDFs), I was most surprised by one thing. While art is quite good overall, the graphic design is really mediocre. I expected something better out of a flagship product from the biggest company in the industry. The best thing I can say about it is that at least the layout errs on the side of readability.

Not as Small or Agile

Those of you who have worked for or dealt with large companies know that they usually move with agonizing slowness and this can be frustrating for all concerned. Getting an organization behind an idea can take time, and then getting it to act can take even longer. One advantage of smaller companies is that they can be more agile. With less bureaucracy to deal with, they can make decisions quickly and move on things right away. That kind of freedom is nice, but if you are always ready to turn on a dime your planning can never truly get long term.

I'm thinking about this because normally by this point I'd have a pretty firm idea of what Green Ronin will be doing next year. For a variety of reason I don't and it's bugging me. We have several deals in negotiation that are dragging on and on. They may come through or they may not. Another game line is getting a start but needs a firm hand to move it forward and I'm down one hand. And of course the saga of 4E and third party publishers goes on. So while I should be recruiting authors and such for a bunch of products, I'm in a holding pattern instead. Convention season is rapidly approaching and things will get crazier. It would be nice if some of these things could get sorted out before we start traveling hither and yon.

I guess the truth is that while GR is still a relatively small company, we do too much to be as agile as we used to be. When it was me, Nicole, and Hal concentrating on one project at a time, it was easier to jump on an idea and make it happen. Now there are always a dozen or more balls in the air at once and sometimes it takes only one more ball to cause total chaos.

Before I go to Finland and hopefully before Origins, I need to find clarity, solidify plans, and get new projects in motion. Otherwise 2009 is going to start chaotic and go who knows where.

More GSL News

So last week WotC released a FAQ about their new Game System License, which will allow third party publishers to put out 4th edition D&D support books. It took them a few weeks but they finally did clarify that the choice of Game System License or Open Game License did not have to be made per company. This greatly increases the odds of Green Ronin doing some 4E material, as we could continue our own OGL lines like M&M and True20. One wrinkle is that rather than going with the simple solution of making the choice per product they're making it per product line. This is going to create a lot of corner cases, like Freeport, so I'm not sure why they are bothering. It will be interesting to see how they phrase this in the final license, which is due June 6.

Another thing that was made clear was that the GSL can be revoked, unlike the OGL. I don't expect that it will be any time soon, but this does have some interesting implications. If most third party companies now make the switch that means at any later point the genie can effectively be put back in the bottle. I think it's understandable that WotC wants more control this time, but publishers need to go into this with their eyes open. They need to understand that at any point the plug can be pulled, so supporting only the GSL has an inherent risk. For many companies the potential reward is worth the risk, but this is something each publisher will have to consider.

WotC also confirmed that the d20 System Trademark License will be going away in June and there will a six month sell off period for books with the d20 logo. I don't know why they feel this is necessary. It's going to flood the market with a ton of cheap 3E material at just the point when they should want it going away. In 1999 WotC actually bought up some 2nd edition D&D books to make way for 3E if I recall correctly. GR is not the only company that has a fair bit of inventory with the d20 logo. PDFs at least can have the logo stripped and then continue to sell but actual books need to be sold or destroyed by the end of this year. I bet a company formed with the specific purpose of liquidating old d20 inventory could do pretty well.

Anyway, fairly positive news overall. I do still need to review the final GSL when that's released, and of course I want to see the actual rules.

The Country Where I Quite Want to Be

Back in the dark days of the original Ronin Publishing (also known as the mid-90s), my business partner got invited to be a guest of honor at a convention in Switzerland. They offered to pay his way over and pick up his hotel. I told him he should go for it and he arranged to attend. I think many convention organizers outside the US don't realize what a cheap date American designers are. Offer us a ticket to someplace more exotic than Columbus or Milwaukee and odds are we'll come. Anyway, months go by and this Swiss show approaches. The night before the flight my partner has this dream in which his dead grandfather told him not to go. This freaks him out and he cancels at the last minute. I told him a free trip to Europe was probably the coolest thing he was ever going to get out of being in the game industry, but it was too late. He skipped the trip and a couple of years later he was out of the industry.

All of this is a long preamble to the fact that I've been invited to be a guest of honor at Ropecon in Finland and you can bet your ass I'm going. I was actually invited last year for the first time but it was on the same weekend as Recombination in Cambridge, England. This year I had no previous obligations so I was happy to accept. Nicole, being a proud Finnish-American, will be coming with me. We hope to arrive a few days early so we can see some of Helsinki and perhaps beyond. I, of course, am keenly interested in the Winter War and the Continuation War but I'll try not to drag her to all war-related sites. Anyway, very much looking forward to it. The only downside is that it's the weekend before GenCon. It seems likely that Nik and I will have a 15 hour flight home and then have to get on another plane the next day for GenCon. We may be quite zombiefied by the time we get there, but whatever: we're going to Finland, baby.

You're With Us or Against Us?

More information has emerged about the new Game System License and for Green Ronin it is looking more ominous. It seems--and I've asked WotC to clarify--that if you want to use the GSL you must cease using the Open Game License as a company. Scott Rouse of WotC posted this on EN World (http://www.enworld.org/showpost.php?p=4173113&postcount=99):

"It won't surprise me if the GSL is not for everyone. If M&M, C&C, Conan, or other OGL stand-alones are successful enough for those publishers to sustain their business more power to them. You'll get to buy their books in the future. If not, then they can jump on our license and take advantage of some pretty good perks including getting to use the most valuable trademark in PnP RPGs on their products and gain access to our IP/PI."

This makes it sound like we'll be forced to choose. We could continue to support Mutants & Masterminds and True20 Adventure Roleplaying or support 4th Edition D&D, but not both.

It has also come out that the original d20 logo will be going away come June. Not only can you not put the logo on new products, which was expected, but it'll apparently have to be stripped off old ones if you want to keep selling them. That's possible with PDF products but it'll mean you can't sell printed products after a certain date. In the short tem this means that a lot of 3E product is likely to be dumped on the market for pennies on the dollar. That will make it harder on companies that have decided to keep supporting 3E, most notably Paizo. It also means huge swathes of backstock for many companies will be wiped out.

In short, it looks like it's more stick than carrot. Now I will point out yet again that we haven't seen the GSL yet, and we really must before making it a final assessment. If WotC is seriously asking me to give up the #1 superhero game on the market for a chance to support a new edition that has yet to prove itself, that's really not much of a choice.

Last night when I couldn't sleep I spent some time pondering what Green Ronin could bring to the table for 4E that would be fresh and cool. Tonight I'll be thinking about something else entirely.

Ah well, I'm off to Vegas in six hours. Better finish packing and try to get some shuteye.

A Bit of News

Well, we finally got some news out of WotC yesterday about third party publishing for 4th edition D&D. The things I most want to comment on I can't at the moment because of a NDA. Guess I'll have to wait until WotC itself makes more details public. What I can say is this:

Good news: There will be no $5,000 fee.

Bad News: There also won't be any "phase 1" publishers, so in October absolutely everyone can pile into the pool at once. That's going to be a rough month, and it's also when we have the Song of Ice and Fire Campaign Guide scheduled. Ugh.

Good news: GR is one of a small group of companies that are getting early access to the rules.

Bad news: We still haven't seen the new license. However, they claim we'll see it very soon now.

So basically WotC are keeping the 4E marketplace to themselves from May to October, which makes sense from their POV. This does mean that there will be no third party material at GenCon. On the one hand this is a missed opportunity because GenCon sales are always great, but on the other hand product rushed out for GenCon likely would have been sub-par so maybe it's for the best.

That's all I have to say about it for the moment. When we get a chance to look at the license and the rules, we'll be able to assess what we might want to do.

AP Article on D&D

A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed for an Associated Press article about 4th edition D&D. The reporter had found me via my blog and he explained to me that this a common technique for journalists these day. Funny. I was little concerned about being quoted correctly, because he was transcribing as we talked instead of recording the conversation. The article is out now and the quotes he used do seem to be what I actually said though, so hooray.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23903817/

It's also up in some other places like the Huffington Post, as you'd expect from an AP story. As mainstream media coverage of gaming goes, it's not bad. Certainly a big step up from the hysterical stuff we used to see in the early 80s.

One thing I ought to point out is that the estimate of the size of the RPG business (and note I was just talking RPGs, not minis, TCGs, boardgames, etc.) that I gave him was an educated guess on my part and I told him so. I based it on what I knew of the D&D business a few years ago and what I know of sales numbers today, but since most game companies are privately owned and don't report their sales it's difficult to know for sure.

Debating the OGL

Over the weekend there was a bit of a brouhaha at ENWorld because of a quote from Liz Schuh, the Brand Director of D&D (and one of the better marketing folk at WotC in my experience). People were asking after the Game System License and Liz gave the following quote:

“We’re still vetting our final policy regarding open gaming. As soon as that process is complete, we’ll make an official announcement. Stay tuned for more information.”

This raised some eyebrows because previously statements had been more along of lines of, "We're working hard to finalize the GSL." If you look at this as a carefully worded bit of PR, you might suspect that WotC is rethinking its whole open gaming strategy. Some people began to wonder if this might be the prelude to an announcement that there will be no GSL or OGL of any kind for 4E, effectively closing the game off from third party development. That could be, though it's also possible that Liz was trying to make a neutral statement and didn't realize how it might be interpreted.

It's not the statement I want to talk about but the ensuing debate. What I found fascinating was the almost religious zeal of open gaming advocates. Over and over people would assert highly debatable things not only as facts, but also facts so obvious that a drunk blind man on an acid trip could see them. The upshot of these posts was that if WotC did not embrace open gaming for 4E, they were not only betraying the community but also cutting their own throats.

Now look, the OGL has certainly been good to me, and probably only Monte Cook has benefited from it more, but many of the oft-repeatedly claims of the open gaming advocates are theories, not facts. No one, including WotC, has done the market research to confirm these suppositions. At best people offer anecdotal evidence. I think it might be useful to run through a few of the open gaming theories and see what the facts support.

Third Edition D&D was a success only because of the Open Game License.

This is the easiest one to debunk because I was at the epicenter of both the 3E launch and the beginning of open gaming. When 3E came out, open gaming was a new concept and barely anyone knew about it. The game debuted after an intensive year-long marketing campaign. It was the first new edition of D&D in over 10 years and people were excited about it. By the time the first d20 products, Death in Freeport and Three Days to Kill, were in stores, there were already at least a quarter million Players Handbooks in retail channels. The brand power of D&D at 3E's launch was enormous; that of the OGL was nil. I think it's fair to say that 3E would have been a hit OGL or no.

The OGL created a safety net to catch gamers who otherwise would have left the hobby.

The theory here is that gamers who previously would have left roleplaying altogether when they got bored with D&D were kept around by various OGL offerings. The sheer variety of stuff available and the fact that the rules of many OGL variants were close enough to D&D that they were easy to pick up kept these gamers in family. In many cases this led folks back round to D&D, ultimately offering WotC income they would have lost. I'm sure there are folks who fit this pattern. What we don't know is if the number of them is statistically significant.

Without the OGL WotC would have had no talent pool for recruitment.

It is certainly true that the OGL created a pool of people who garnered a lot of experience working with the D&D rules. That idea that without the OGL WotC would have had difficulty finding talented designers to hire is pretty ludicrous though. The industry has always had more designers than it knew what to do with and TSR and WotC after them never had any difficulty finding talent. Those D&D books that came out for 25+ years before the OGL didn't write themselves.

The OGL made WotC money.

I think this is the most highly debatable belief of the open gaming advocates. The argument from the beginning has been that the OGL would help WotC sell their core books and the PHB in particular. I must admit I always found this idea dubious. It is entrenched gamers--folks have PHBs in other words--who buy third party products. Were there people who bought D&D core books so they could play Dragonstar or Broncosaurus Rex? Maybe a few but there is not proof that this happened to any great degree. When complete OGL variant games like Mutants & Masterminds hit the market, this clouded things even further. If you like M&M, I've got plenty of books to sell you and none of them require you to own or even be familiar with D&D.

You can argue that third party products kept people playing D&D when otherwise they would have moved on to another game and I think that's a fairly reasonable assertion. The question is whether the revenue generated by those people was enough to offset the money spent by D&D fans on third party products? Again, evidence is lacking. What we do know if that at the height of the d20 boom, an enormous number of books were sold to D&D fans and WotC saw not one cent of the revenue generated. Green Ronin alone sold books in the hundreds of thousands. Now add in Malhavoc and FFG and Atlas and Necromancer and Privateer and Goodman and how many books are we talking about (never mind the booming business of PDFs)? People love to say that WotC has no real competition in the RPG field, but I think it's easy to see how the aggregate effect of the OGL might be perceived as detrimental to WotC's bottom line.

For the folks at WotC trying to figure out a strategy for open gaming, that is a serious decision. They have to weigh the sales of well over a million books to their fans under a royalty free license vs. a bunch of theories that claim this was of benefit to them but have never been tested by real market research. Then there are the PR implications and the possibility of market fragmenation to worry about. It's a tough spot to be sure and the longer this drags out the more difficult it becomes.

I've said before that I was surprised that WotC was going to continue with open gaming in the 4E era. If they come through with the GSL and open gaming in some form continues for D&D, great. If they are rethinking their strategy and they do decide to make 4E closed, I wouldn't blame them either. The OGL has indeed been good to me, but WotC doesn't owe me or any other publisher anything more.

Question Answered

Six weeks ago I posted this:

"I think the big question is whether any of the prominent third party publishers will decide to just skip 4E and the GSL and continue to publish 3.5 material. I think Paizo is best positioned to pull this off but it would be a gamble for sure."

Paizo announced today that they are taking that gamble. They will continue to publish under the 3.5 rules and are beginning an open playtest to lead up their own core rulebook based on those rules for August, 2009. This is a ballsy decision and I have to salute Erik Mona and company for rolling the dice. I think they are approaching this in the right way too. They are not trying to put out new rulebooks in the face of 4E. Instead they are doing what WotC did not: conducting a long open playtest. They are also making backward compatibility a big goal, so folks can continue to use their large library of 3.5 material with Paizo's new stuff.

I'm sure that some fans will think this is a foolish move on Paizo's part. How do you fight against the 800 lb. gorilla after all? Here's the thing: they don't have to. If Paizo can peel off even 20,000 current D&D fans and make them Pathfinder fans, that's a great business for a company of Paizo's size. WotC is likely going to lose at least that number of fans anyway, so at the end of the day I doubt it'll really affect 4E. I can easily envision 4E and Pathfinder both being successful for their parent companies.

Less good for WotC are the PR implications of this announcement. Third party companies have been waiting and waiting to see the new Game System License and here is a major player in the field saying, "Sorry, can't wait any more." If WotC is going to support third party publishing, they really want companies like Paizo as allies. Now Paizo is still Necromancer Games' publisher and Necro says they are going 4E regardless, so if the GSL allows it Paizo will be publishing 4E books as well. That really can't mask the shock waves this is likely to send throughout the world of third party publishing. Interesting times.

For the record Green Ronin's position remains the same: we'd like to see the GSL before making any decisions.

Worm Can: Open

Sunday's post sure opened a can o' worms. A few things have come up in comments, e-mails, and message board posts that I'd like to address about my 4E Test Drive.

1. I have had a taste of the new rules, but I have by no means come to a final verdict about them. I really do want to read the new core books and see the whole thing in the proper context. Green Ronin may indeed support 4E, but I need to see the GSL first and then review the game. The new rules do look like they support a specific style of play, but within that style I can envision some good products GR could do.

2. D&D feel is indeed hard to nail down. All I can say is that play reminded me more of FFG's Descent than D&D.

3. When I bring up other types of games, I'm not making comparisons in a pejorative sense. I like Descent, I like minis games, and I like some CCGs. When I said the new rules were interesting, I meant it. The question is will they feel like D&D to the players out there? I can't speak for anyone but me on that issue.

4. I do think that a third party company could stick with 3.5 or do a "3.75" upgrade and make a good business for itself catering to fans who feel disenfranchised. Green Ronin, however, is not that company. Our last 3.5 books, the d20 Freeport Companion, just got back from the printer and is releasing this month. That's going to be it for us. I just don't think that we're well-positioned to be that company and frankly I'd rather be more forward-looking. We have A Song of Ice and Fire coming out this summer and we have True20 as an already existing alternative.

5. Saying that I see TCG roots in the 4E rules does not mean that I think the game is a CCG. Of course 4E is a RPG. The question is how important is the "R" in the new edition and I don't have enough info to say yet.

6. However this shakes out, I'm not worried about what I'll play myself. I have more games already than I could play in a lifetime. If I want a D&D experience and 4E doesn't do it for me, I have many previous iterations to choose from. Hell, the most recent game I've been playing has been using the D&D Rules Cyclopedia and that's been a blast. At the moment my primary concerns about 4E are business oriented.

7. Gary Gygax died today. There's no better way to honor him than playing some D&D--of any edition--this week. I know I will.

4E Test Drive

I had a chance to actually play D&D 4th edition today. A friend of mine who still works at WotC got permission to run the demo adventure from the D&D Experience at her monthly game day. Since I'm still waiting for WotC to finalize the Game System License, this was the first opportunity I've had to see something of the rules and try them out.

Short Review
It's an interesting system that didn't so much feel like D&D in play; nonetheless, the brand power of D&D all but ensures this will be a success and it may even redefine what D&D means for the next generation.

Long Review
Since the announcement of 4E last Gen Con, a common critique of the emerging rules was that they looked more to MMOs than RPGs. My play experience suggests something else. The roots of the new rules are not in MMOs at all, but collectible card games. Building your character seems much like building a deck in Magic: the Gathering. You have a selection of powers and special abilities that are exceptions-based. Some powers you can only use once per encounter, like tapping a card in a CCG. Character turns have a very specific order, with beginning and end of turn actions used to handle bookkeeping issues. Part of character and party building revolves around power combos. In short, 4E seems to be what people feared was going to happen with 3E after WotC bought TSR, though thankfully without a collectible component.

Now one of my concerns had been that 4E would simply be a revised 3.5. I'm glad 4E is not that. I really felt that 3.5 was just more complicated than it needed to be and I hoped that 4E would simplify things. While it does fix many of the ongoing issues with 3.5, my feeling after today's session is that it's just complicated in a different way. It's not something I think experienced gamers will have a huge amount of trouble with, but it does seem that 4E may be even more unfriendly to new players than 3.5 was. It looks like 4E requires newbs to make too many choices and track too many things to make it truly accessible. Since D&D has always been the entry point for most RPG players, this is my most serious concern.

Of the current D&D players, I suspect most of them will switch over to the new edition, despite the unimpressive marketing campaign that we've seen to date. There are many options for character customization and players who like tactical combat will find a lot to work with. I understand there are some kind of social interaction rules, but I haven't seen them. The focus seems squarely on combat from what I could tell. There were interesting choices to make during fights and it wasn't just a matter of trotting out your best attack again and again. The CCG style of the rules and the changes to the IP did make the game feel a lot less like D&D though, at least to me. And since the rules seem to have been tailored to provide a very particular experience, I don't think they will make as good of a base for the variety of campaign settings D&D used to see. It's pretty clear that WotC realizes this, which explains why they felt the need to advance the timeline and have an apocalyptic event in the Forgotten Realms. I don't think many of the old campaign settings will transition over without a lot of cutting, spindling, and mutilating.

What I think WotC is going for here is what Marvel managed to pull off with their Ultimate line of comics: take the core of the IP and redefine it for a new generation. There will certainly be some longtime fans disenfranchised by this move, but I don't think there will be enough of those folks to hurt 4E. (I do think, however, that there will be enough of those for a third party company to carve out a good business for itself catering to them, but that's a topic for another day.)

All of this is, of course, based on what I've managed to glean so far from released info and today's play experience. I would naturally like to see the new rules in their entirety and doing so may change my opinion about some things. If the GSL gets sorted out this month, maybe I'll get the chance for a more in-depth read soon. If I feel like spending 5K to do so anyway.

GDC Seminars

Here's a brief overview of the seminars I attended at GDC. Good stuff overall.

Casual Games Summit: The first two days of the show were taken up with summits. It was a toss up for me between the Independent Games Summit and the Casual Games Summit, but I ended up choosing the latter. The first part of the summit was a general overview of the casual game space and then there was a series of more focused lectures about content, business models, future developments, and so forth. I heard some attendees complaining that they weren't learning anything new, but as someone who didn't know a lot about the business end of casual games I found it quite useful.

Rules of Engagement: Blizzard's Approach to Multiplayer Game Design: In this lecture Rob Pardo talked about multiplayer design in WoW and Starcraft II. It was interesting enough, but not particularly illuminating.

Game Writer's Roundtable: Tricks, Techniques, and Concerns: This was basically a bull session for writers, moderated by ex-White Wolf developer and current Red Storm Manager of Design Rich Dansky. I really enjoyed this, as it was a chance to talk shop with a bunch of other writers. That's a lot rarer than you'd think. It was interesting to note how practically every company handled writing differently. Some of the people there had more or less been thrust into the role when there was a need for writing and no one on staff to do it. There was a woman from Harmonix, for example, who ended up writing descriptive text for clothing and other accessories for Guitar Hero, though she was hired to do something else entirely.

Collaborative Writing and Vast Narratives: Principles, Processes, and Genteel Truculence: The shtick here was a mock argument between Ken Rolston and his partner Mark Nelson. The two worked on Morrowind and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Ken, who came out of the tabletop game industry, argued that best way to handle vast narratives was to concentrate on setting and theme. He talked about the big vision stuff he did when creating the worlds for his previous games. Mark countered that all that was useless without character and story. He stopped short of calling Ken an ignorant slut, which was too bad. Anyway, this lecture was pretty entertaining and of course the conclusion was that the two approaches worked best in concert.

Proper Use of Episodic Content in a MMO: Despite its title, this was really more of a City of Heroes/Villains post mortem by Jack Emmert. With CoH bought out by NCSoft, Jack was quite willing to be forthright about the history and challenges of the game. He then talked some about Cryptic's just-announced Champions Online, and how it would benefit from the lessons of CoH. He was talking about that when I got up to ask a question. Jack, misinterpreting my move, said to the audience, "Chris Pramas is walking out because I didn't license Mutants & Masterminds!" I laughed and then asked my question. Then I gave Jack some good natured shit after the seminar was over.

The Future of MMOs: Probably the most packed session I attended, this was a roundtable with Jack Emmert (Cryptic), Ray Muzyka (Bioware), Mark Jacobs (EA Mythic), Rob Pardo (Blizzard), and Min Kim (Nexon) discussed what was coming down the pike for MMOs. Moderator Jon Wood of MMORPG asked the panel some questions and then opened it up to the audience. The funniest moment was when Jon asked if microtransactions were the wave of the future for MMOs. Jack went off, ranting about how microtransactions were seen as a silver bullet and how he just didn't see it. Jack, he loves the subscriptions. Then the Nexon guys pipes up, quoting player numbers for games like Maplestory and noting how much money the company has made using microtransactions. Later many people tried to get Ray Muzyka to spill on what Bioware's upcoming MMO is, but he did not take the bait.

You can read some quotes from this panel here:

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9278&Itemid=2


Let Me Win: Kate Stone-Perez, a Microsoft producer responsible for dozens of Arcade titles, gave an interesting presentation about customer retention through more forgiving gameplay. Her basic argument was that video game design often uses techniques that date back to the arcade game era. Those games were designed to get you to spend more quarters. Today, she says, games don't need to do that because people pay up front. You've got their money, so make sure they have fun. She had some interesting stats, showing how few people bought sequels to games they never finished. It's thus really in the publisher's interest to ensure that people can finish the game without undue frustration.

Teaching Players: Tutorial and Opening Mission Design in Company of Heroes: Despite some technical problems with the Powerpoint presentation, this was a really interesting seminar. Two guys from Relic, Neil Jones-Rodway and Aldric Sun, talked about their design choices in the teaching content of Company of Heroes. This included both the tutorial proper and the opening suite of missions. What I liked about this presentation was that they showed clips of the missions from different stages of development and talked about how playtest feedback contributed to making this opening content better. One thing I found curious is that the opening mission is D-Day, but the second mission goes back in time to cover the paradrop the night before. I asked if any of the playtesters had conceptual problems with moving back in time and they said no. One of the Relic folks told me afterwards that the issue I brought up vexed him for months. In the end they really wanted the first mission to have the drama of D-Day. I certainly saw the point, but I argued that 20,000 paratroopers dropping into Normandy was also pretty damn dramatic.

Post GDC

I am back from GDC and trying to catch up on all the stuff that piled up while I was away. I had hoped for some movement on the Game System License, but still no joy there. When I see things like classes getting fixed hit points at each level, it makes me fear the new edition will be so totally overdesigned that I won't even need to show up at the table; my character will play itself. Not going to worry about it until I can see the whole ruleset though.

GDC was great. I attended many interesting lectures, made new contacts, reconnected with some old friends from the game industry like Rich Dansky and Josh Mosqueira, ate some excellent food, and saw some of SF to boot. I would definitely go back and I'm already plotting on how that's going to happen next year. I may have more to say about the lectures later.

Later this week I have another sleep study, this time to fit me out with the CPAP machine that'll help me breathe better during the night. If things go as they should, I soon will enjoy the first good sleep of my adult life. Wohoo.

So Much for That Then

So when GW announced the closure of Black Industries a few weeks ago, I contacted them about the possibility of licensing WFRP and Dark Heresy. Since Green Ronin had created just about every product in the WFRP 2nd edition line, this was of course a natural move. The licensing lead at GW told me that many other companies had expressed interest, which was no real suprise. He also said that things were a bit chaotic over there and that it would take them several months to sort it out. However, if I wanted to put together a proposal, they'd be happy to consider it.

The following week we had some big internal debates at GR about what to do and how this could impact the company. A German publisher then contacted me to talk about the possibility of a joint venture. Since they were interested in the board games and we were more interested in the RPGs, this seemed like a good fit. However, one does not set up an international business deal in a matter of days. Nicole and I met with a friend who's an executive at Microsoft to get some advice on the situation and then last Sunday I flew to SF to attend the Game Developers Conference. Since I had been told that this process was going to take months, I thought it would be OK to submit the proposal after I was back from GDC. I e-mailed my licensing contact at GW from SF mid-week and got a message saying that its delivery had failed. That was curious, but I was not unduly concerned.

Today GW announced that they had signed a deal with Fantasy Flight for all the board, card, and RPG rights. No one at GW warned me that a deal was going to happen this fast. I wasn't give a deadline for the proposal, or a heads up that they were close to signing with FFG. After having had a close business relationship with GW for over three years, I was surprised that the negotiations were handled in this way.

I'm sorry that GR wasn't able to make this work, and particularly disappointed that we won't be able to continue what we began with WFRP. That said, if it had to go to another company, I'm glad it was Fantasy Flight. They are good folk and with Jeff Tidball on staff they have the know how to do the RPGs justice. I wish FFG the best of luck but they should be warned: it's a grim world of perilous adventure!

The Brief Version

I wrote a lengthy post last night about my first two days in SF, only to have LJ eat it. The computer I'm on apparently can't use the autosave function either. Boo.

In brief then, the trip is going really well. I spent Sunday at Endgame, one of the best game stores in the country. I hung out with Chris Hanrahan and crew and after dinner we recorded a podcast that GR will share with 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction. Yesterday I discovered that you can't judge walking distances in SF by using a map because it doesn't indicate where the giant hills are. I took part in the Casual Games Summit and that was very interesting indeed.

After a full day of lectures at GDC I took the bus to Haight St. and visited the Giant Robot store and Amoeba Records. The latter is one of the most awesome record stores I have ever seen. Acres and acres of records, CDs, and yes, even 7' singles. I had not planned to buy any CDs; I left with 11. My reason for the trip was that local punk legends Flipper were doing an in-store performance to promote a new DVD. Since I happened to be here the right week, well, I just had to go. Their noise-damaged aural assault was still powerful and the new songs sounded good as well. The funny thing about Flipper is that they've lost two bass players to heroin overdoses over the years and yet they somehow managed to recruit Krist Novoselic of Nirvana to take on those duties. You'd think that dude of all people would not tempt fate.

Today more casual games seminars and perhaps a trip to the Ferry Building.

Open Gaming Licenses: Past, Present, and Future

Warning: This post has a lot of talk about RPGs, business, and licensing and thus may be baffling and/or tedious for some of you. If this type of thing is not of interest, you probably want to just skip it.

These are interesting times for companies that make use of the Open Game License. While many games have now been released under the OGL, the big one has always been Dungeons & Dragons. I had been pretty sure that WotC would just close off 4th edition, but was surprised to hear in August that they intended to release it under the OGL. Their specific plan was murky until last month, when they announced a two-stage rollout. Companies could publish starting in August if they bought a development kit for $5,000. Otherwise, no publishing for 4E by third parties until January of next year. The actual details of the new OGL remained unknown though. Green Ronin and many other companies signed NDAs and waited for WotC to deliver the new license for review.

That wait continues, but an interesting fact came out this week. This new license is not going to be called the Open Game License, but rather the Game System License. From previous discussions with WotC, it had already become clear that the new license would be more restrictive than the old one. This move confirms it. It sounds like the new license will not be the next iteration of the OGL but a completely new license. This makes it clear that WotC had some issues with the previous OGL and is trying to learn from previous experience. So what are those issues?

1. Stand Alone Games Don't Help WotC
In the early days of the OGL, everyone used the d20 logo and that prevented the creation of stand-alone products. If you wanted to use the d20 logo, you had to point back to the D&D Player's Handbook (or later, other WotC core books). At the time publishers thought you had to have the logo to make a successful product. Then variant games like Mutants & Masterminds and True20 Adventure Roleplaying began to appear. These games built off the SRD but became games in their own right. One of the stated goals of the OGL was to help WotC sell core rulebooks. If people are buying stand-alone games, that doesn't help to sell WotC's books. We've already heard that the new license won't allow such games any more, though it cannot prevent the continuation of games already on the market. This is an understandable move on their part, though one could argue that some of the most innovative design work of the d20 era happened in those very games and that GSL restrictions may not lead to the same advancement of the state of the art.

2. The License Should Be About D&D Support
When Ryan Dancey was selling the idea of the OGL at WotC in 1999, one of his points that was third party publishers could provide support for D&D in areas that WotC itself had difficulty doing so profitably (most notably adventures). There was indeed a wave of adventure products, led by Death in Freeport and Three Days to Kill. Soon third party companies started taking on bigger projects and expanding out into sourcebook territory. Then they ranged farther still, into genres that had little to do with swords and sorcery. Several years later Charles Ryan, then in charge of the D&D brand, said that WotC was going to start doing more adventures because the third party companies weren't providing the type of support WotC had originally envisioned. The GSL will thus be more explicitly about supporting D&D. There may be limits on the types of products allowed, similar to the "no miniatures" provision of the old d20 STL.

3. Strip Mining is Bad for the Environment
With the original OGL WotC put up something called the System Reference Document, which contained most of the rules for D&D. It could be copied or modified by use of the OGL. People asked if it could be republished as is, and in a FAQ WotC replied that those who thought they could make money doing so were welcome to try. I doubt anyone really thought that people would but naturally this is exactly what happened. There were "pocket" and various PDF versions of D&D core books published by other companies, and some companies saw their own books re-released by other publishers as well. An ex-Guardians of Order employee recently noted, for example, that "within days of d20 Mecha coming out and being released on SRD, other companies were selling clones of the product, sometimes with better production values..."

Another thing that happened was that some open game content was taken from its original products and given away for free on various websites. This is legal under the original OGL but it was a development that many publishers weren't so happy about. They were, of course, trying to make money from their work and someone else giving it away for nothing was not considered helpful. One example of this that has cropped up a lot in recent conversation is what happened with GR's True20 game. The True20 rules originally appeared in the Blue Rose game and we eventually decided to release them on their own as a more generic rule set. Before the True20 core book was even released, we were queried by someone who had taken all the rules out of Blue Rose and wanted to give them away on his website as a True20 SRD. We answered that if we wanted there to be a True20 SRD, we'd do one ourselves. With our core book not even out, we really were not hot on the rules being given out for free. He agreed not to make the site public for a year but since then the rules have indeed been available. We took no hostile action in this case. We were asked a question and we gave our opinion. We did not try to impede the effort, we sent no cease and desist letter, we didn't pillory the guy on the internet. Nonetheless, other folks have accused of all sorts of things, from working against "the spirit of open gaming" to being big bullies to benefiting from the OGL without giving back. One designer (ironically enough, a WotC employee) even accused us of using "ignorant and deceitful tactics". This despite the reams of OGC we've released, the sharing of content between us and other publishers, and the entire M&M Superlink program that lets companies publish branded material compatible with our best selling game for nothing.

I don't think it's too surprising then to hear that WotC has some different plans this time around. The SRD will more of a reference guide that lets you know what's open without putting text files of the rules up. They have said that the new license will be designed to encourage creative extensions of D&D rather than the wholesale reprinting of OGC. I will be curious to see if the GSL also has something to say about the giving away of open content on the internet.

4. Did We Say Perpetuity?
The original OGL is forever. It can be updated but it can't be revoked. I'm sure this is a big reason why the Game System License will be released as a brand new thing, rather than an update of the existing OGL. What sounds good now maybe doesn't sound so good 8 years down the line.

The thing I'm really interested to find out is whether the GSL will have a clause that forbids its use with the OGL. I think this is entirely possible. It would the mean that you couldn't take previously released OGC and use it in a book released under the GSL. A book like the already announced Tome of Horrors 4th edition would not be possible under this restriction. This would make things clean and easy for WotC, but would probably cause a lot of chaos in the world of third party publishing.


Clearly many changes are in the wind. Until we see the Game System License we won't know all of them for sure. No matter what I'm positive publishing under the original OGL will continue (that's how we'll do M&M and True20, for example). A year from now the publishing landscape will likely be quite different though. I think the big question is whether any of the prominent third party publishers will decide to just skip 4E and the GSL and continue to publish 3.5 material. I think Paizo is best positioned to pull this off but it would be a gamble for sure. As for WotC I guess I continue to be surprised they are making this attempt at all. I seriously wouldn't blame them for saying, "This is a huge headache with few tangible benefits for us, so 4E will not support 3rd party publishing."

So far 2008 has been nothing if not interesting in the world of RPG publishing.

End of an Era

Today Games Workshop announced that it is shutting down Black Industries, its roleplaying wing. Green Ronin worked with BI for many years as a design house and put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into the products we created for them. Getting to design the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was in many ways a dream project for me and seeing it become the #2 fantasy RPG on the market was pretty gratifying. It is sad to see WFRP come to an end yet again, though I'm sure the fan community will keep it going for many years to come.

Many people have asked me what this means for Green Ronin and if the closure of BI will adversely affect us. There's nothing to worry about on that score. Our contract with them concluded last year and we turned over the files for Thousand Thrones last month. We knew this transition was coming and were ready for it. We just didn't realize that WFRP itself would not be moving forward. At least the line is going out with a bang though. Thousand Thrones is a huge adventure that'll take a long time to play through. It seems like an appropriate way to send things off.

Best of luck to the GW folks affected by this. I've been through similar days and they are never fun.

Some Further Thoughts

My previous entry sparked some lively debate over on EN World. I posted the message below earlier and figured I might as well add it to my blog. Here it is:

Running a hobby game company is a curious thing. Nearly everyone gets into the industry because they love games but at a certain point you have to face the realities of doing business. Now a part of me will always be a D&D fanboy. I started playing when I was 10 years old and it really did change my life. I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing today if I hadn't cracked open that white boxed set all those years ago. Tapping into that passion is an important part of being an effective game designer, but it takes more than that to run a successful business.

It is tempting to just say, "Wohoo, it's D&D, let's go for it!" That is in fact just what I said back in 2000 when I started Green Ronin. At the time though the company was a side project and the only money I stood to lose was my own. Now I have seven staffers relying on me to make the right decisions for Green Ronin and I don't take that responsibility lightly. I thus have to be a little more sober in my assessment of what's going on and what will be good for GR.

Right now Green Ronin has four important lines: Mutants & Masterminds, Freeport, True20, and the upcoming A Song of Ice and Fire RPG. We could easily keep ourselves busy handling just those four lines and we don't need to rely on any other company to do so. M&M and True20 are stand alone games and they won't be changing because of 4E, A Song of Ice and Fire has its own brand new system and doens't use the OGL, and the new Freeport book is systemless and can be used with any fantasy RPG. So really none of what we're doing at the moment is reliant on what WotC does or doesn't do with the new OGL.

The question we are now wrestling with at GR is what to do with 4E. Should we support it or just keep doing what we're doing? If we do support it, should pay the 5K to become a phase 1 publisher or wait until next year? My blog post took a short look at some of the factors in play. We are giving this serious consideration but we are not ready to finalize plans yet. First we must see the new OGL. I have to know under what terms we'd be doing business before I agree to anything.

There are absolutely some great designers at WotC. Hell, many of them have done work for Green Ronin. Jesse Decker, Chris Thomasson, Rodney Thompson, and Matt Sernett all worked on d20 books for us. I have a lot of respect for 4E's lead designer, Rob Heinsoo, who has been a friend and collegue of mine for over a decade. I know these folks can kick ass, but having worked at WotC for four years I also know that it's an environment that doesn't always get the best out of its designers. I hope 4E is a real step forward, but the question is whether or not I'm willing to bet $5,000 that it is? I don't think it's unreasonable to wish I could see what I was buying before I write a check, though I do understand why WotC is handling things this way.

I'm heartened that so many of you want to see GR keep its place in the d20 world. I hope that we'll be able to and that it'll be a win/win for everyone.

To 4E or Not to 4E

After the announcement of Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons back at GenCon, I wrote in my blog about what would need to happen for this to really benefit Green Ronin. Today WotC announced the new terms of the Open Game License and how publishing would work under it. I was part of a conference call yesterday with nine other companies in which WotC gave us the skinny, so I've at least had a day to chew over the news. Back in September I said six things would need to happen for 4E to work for us. Let's take a look at these again in light of the new info.

1) The new rules need to be good.

Jury is still out on this. More to the point, I can't find out if they are good any time soon unless I'm willing to shell out $5,000 to get early access. That's a big leap of faith.

2) WotC needs to convince the lion’s share of their fanbase to make the switch.

The marketing of 4E has not been stellar to date. This is still an open question.

3) The new rules need to be more successful at recruiting new roleplayers.

This remains unknown.

4) The d20 brand needs a new iteration that sheds the bad connotations the original took on.

We now know the d20 logo is dead. There will now only be the Open Game License, but it is going to include the type of strictures that previous only appeared in the d20 System Trademark License. The new OGL apparently will allow the use of some kind of compatibility language that includes a variant of the D&D logo. This may remove some of the onus of the d20 logo, but it is going to make it harder to solicit books to retailers and distributors.

5) WotC needs to get us the new rules in time to learn them well enough to design good product and to make strategic plans that can capitalize on the game’s launch.

If you are willing to pay $5,000 up front, this can happen for the hobby market at least. It doesn't help the book trade business of companies like GR and Paizo, since we needed to get info on our summer releases out this past October. One hopes that six months of lead time is enough to learn the rules and design for them, but without seeing the rules it is still hard to say.

6) WotC needs to do something to prevent a second d20 glut.

They have done something but perhaps not enough. The six months of exclusive time for those that pay for the Designer's Kit will prevent a huge rush of stuff from small companies. This plan does nothing to prevent well funded and established companies from flooding the market with junk though and that was just as much of a problem in the original d20 market.

Naturally, people want to know what Green Ronin's plans are for 4E. All I can tell you right now is that we are still debating internally. When WotC gets us the new OGL, we have to review it and see what we can and cannot do under it. So while I was hoping that this news would make our decision easier, our path is not yet clear. It may be that the smart play is just to put all our muscle behind a A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplay and push that like mofos. We'll see.

4E, d20, and the OGL

When 4th edition D&D was announced at Gen Con, the immediate question that publishers like GR asked was, "What's going to happen with the Open Game and d20 Licenses?" There was a meeting that Friday night and we thought we'd be getting info from WotC then. Turns out they were looking for feedback from existing publishers and they did not yet know what they were going to do with the two licenses. A few things were clear coming out of that meeting. 4th edition would be released under the Open Game License and they wanted to create a new d20 logo that was more of a mark of the quality than the original became. However, WotC itself was not interested in any program that would involve oversight on their part. That would require staff work and it's (understandably) not something they want to spend money on when the licenses themselves are free.

At the meeting I suggested that WotC might offload that approval work to the better 3rd party companies. The idea was that WotC create a new d20 logo and then pick the top 10 or so companies and give them the right to use it. Smaller companies could then approach the official d20 companies and try to make publishing deals. How those deals would work would of course be up to the companies involved, but I imagined something akin to Green Ronin's deal with the Game Mechanics. This would essentially turn many of the smaller companies into design houses and the d20 companies would be the publishers. The point of this plan would be to prevent a second d20 glut and to ensure that products bearing the new d20 logo met some benchmarks for quality. WotC would probably want to review the list of d20 publishers every 12-18 months, adding companies that had proved themselves and dropping publishers that were doing a poor job.

The important safety valve to this entire plan is the Open Game License itself. The above process would be important only to those companies who wanted to use the new d20 logo. The OGL would continue to allow companies to publish what they wanted without restriction. Many people conflate the OGL and the d20 STL and they are different beasts. Mutants & Masterminds and True20 use only the OGL and do not bear the d20 logo at all. Changing the way the d20 STL worked would not change the OGL and publishers of any size would always have the latter as an option.

Yesterday news came out of the Lucca show in Italy that WotC was going to adopt a plan like this, referring to it as a "three tier" system. Scout Rouse, the man in charge of D&D these days, quickly showed up on EN World to debunk this rumor. He says they won't be using a three tier system. He's previously said that the new license won't use a fee structure either. I'm not sure what else WotC could do that would provide any kind of oversight at all. They can control the timing of a new d20 STL certainly. They might not allow any d20 products until the Fall, for example. I'm beginning to think though that in the end the new d20 STL will allow a free for all just like last time. I don't think that's a good idea.

Update: Well, over on EN World Scott Rouse has made a further clarification that is actually pretty big news for 3rd party publishers.

"There will be the OGL and Wizards D&D products period. No d20 STL (tiered or otherwise) to be even more clear."

So there will be no d20 logo at all. This means not only will there be a free for all, there will also be the added market confusion of a dozen or more new brands, as companies scramble to find their own way of indicating compatibility with the new edition. That is not awesome.