Got No Class, So To Speak
I will probably never make another 4e character class.
This is not because it was a bad experience. Making the Witch Doctor was _hard_, a lot harder than you might expect, and it has some warts, but I was happy to do it and happy with the net result. No, the problem lies elsewhere.
I ran a level 18 game this weekend, and while it was fantastic, it drove home a simple but profound point: to play D&D beyond a certain level - definitely into Paragon and beyond - you either need to have the D&D character builder software, or you need to be willing to commit a simply insane amount of time to bookkeeping. That bookkeeping challenge is so profound that I am comfortable saying this: I cannot conceive of playing 4e over level 10 without using the character builder.
Consider for a moment what that means if you make third party material. It's not going to be in the character builder, which means that the barrier to using it is going to be problematic. For something simple, like a feat which modifies nothing else, you can maybe hack that by hand if you're comfortable getting into the XML, but when you start talking new powers? New Paragon Paths? New races? Or, god forbid, new classes? Even if you create something fantastic, it's going to be really, really inconvenient for people to _use_.
In a logical world, the solution to this would be third party software to help generate those third party characters. Unfortunately, the OGL puts a very strict kibosh on this. WOTC knows how much of a value add for a DDI subscription the character builder represents, and they're unwilling to give that up. Makes sense from a business perspective, but that doesn't help me much.
Now, I'm not trying to paint WOTC as some kind of boogeyman here. I don't think their _goal_ is to stifle third party rules creation, it is simply that they prioritize that below their income stream. Looking at the handling of PDFs, DDI pricing and so on, it seems pretty clear WOTC is still feeling out the business model they're going to follow, and it's unlikely that they're going to embark on any particular campaign of world domination until they get their own ducks in a row.
Now, there's still lots of interesting stuff that can be done under the OGL, but the unpleasant twist of the knife is this - player options sell better. People buy new feats, powers, races and such - things that give them more options. And those are exactly the things that I'm really feeling may be less and less commercially viable.
If nothing else, I find this kind of darkly amusing. For all the issues and concerns with the OGL, it's really these indirect matters (Closed software, and WOTC's ability to trump concepts) that bother me far more than any fear that they're going to swoop down and crush all OGL businesses.
This is not because it was a bad experience. Making the Witch Doctor was _hard_, a lot harder than you might expect, and it has some warts, but I was happy to do it and happy with the net result. No, the problem lies elsewhere.
I ran a level 18 game this weekend, and while it was fantastic, it drove home a simple but profound point: to play D&D beyond a certain level - definitely into Paragon and beyond - you either need to have the D&D character builder software, or you need to be willing to commit a simply insane amount of time to bookkeeping. That bookkeeping challenge is so profound that I am comfortable saying this: I cannot conceive of playing 4e over level 10 without using the character builder.
Consider for a moment what that means if you make third party material. It's not going to be in the character builder, which means that the barrier to using it is going to be problematic. For something simple, like a feat which modifies nothing else, you can maybe hack that by hand if you're comfortable getting into the XML, but when you start talking new powers? New Paragon Paths? New races? Or, god forbid, new classes? Even if you create something fantastic, it's going to be really, really inconvenient for people to _use_.
In a logical world, the solution to this would be third party software to help generate those third party characters. Unfortunately, the OGL puts a very strict kibosh on this. WOTC knows how much of a value add for a DDI subscription the character builder represents, and they're unwilling to give that up. Makes sense from a business perspective, but that doesn't help me much.
Now, I'm not trying to paint WOTC as some kind of boogeyman here. I don't think their _goal_ is to stifle third party rules creation, it is simply that they prioritize that below their income stream. Looking at the handling of PDFs, DDI pricing and so on, it seems pretty clear WOTC is still feeling out the business model they're going to follow, and it's unlikely that they're going to embark on any particular campaign of world domination until they get their own ducks in a row.
Now, there's still lots of interesting stuff that can be done under the OGL, but the unpleasant twist of the knife is this - player options sell better. People buy new feats, powers, races and such - things that give them more options. And those are exactly the things that I'm really feeling may be less and less commercially viable.
If nothing else, I find this kind of darkly amusing. For all the issues and concerns with the OGL, it's really these indirect matters (Closed software, and WOTC's ability to trump concepts) that bother me far more than any fear that they're going to swoop down and crush all OGL businesses.