Quote from: Mistwell;373589...

Thousands and thousands of companies every day operate under licensing agreements that allow the licensor to alter the agreement, and the instances of it causing harm are extremely infrequent.  It's a standard clause, that D&D third party publishers are all whiny about purely because they were spoiled by the OGL and have not had to deal with the real world of licensing for a long time, if ever.

...

But no, instead he whined about the GSL being changeable by WOTC, which is something he couldn't agree to, despite him probably drafting dozens of similar agreements for non-RPG companies without blinking an eye in his law practice.  Such a crock of shit.

Really?  I mean really?  In what industry is this standard?  If by "change at any time" you mean cancel on x days notice, maybe.  

What's an agreement mean if one party can unilaterally change it at any time?  

Are you saying the GSL and it's ilk are in essence agreements not to sue if you follow certain rules but those rules could change at any time?  So count yourself lucky publisher.

Quote from: shalvayez;373329Blah. I take personal JOY in putting as much work into my world as possible.

Me too. I do buy a lot of modules though, and love to pillage them for particular locales, encounters, this or that group or faction... whatever the case may be. Putting a lot of pride in your work as a world-builder doesn't necessarily mean rejecting modules and campaign supplements. At least for me.

Quote from: Mistwell;373589It really doesn't.  The GSL is pretty damn reasonable as far as licensing agreements go.  People got all butt-hurt (...)

OK. Stopping reading right there. It's all about the OGL, Mark. Some people supported the OGL, and the very idea of open gaming. Some people still do, and to them, the GSL was like a slap in the face. It was the very company that launched the idea of open gaming that suddenly went "Know what? Nevermind."

They tried to sell the GSL as a more "reasonable" OGL to them, but it really isn't an OGL at all. It's a licensing contract. Not open gaming. And that's why people are pissed, still.

Well that, and no responsible company would surrender its business activity to another company with such a capricious (that's being nice) track record as WotC's, which seems to listen more to what Hasbro's shareholders want in terms of bottom-line than anything else.

That's it.

Quote from: JimLotFP;373482for me the greater point of using someone else's adventure is to get away from my own assumptions when running a game.

That sort of thing is what will really draw me to a published adventure... if it's somehow off the norm... if it adds a new direction to the mainstream of the game or just seems like a cool idea.
Sometimes a published adventure is just good to have as a starting point to riff off of and build my own... vs. starting off tabula rasa. The end result might not bear any resemblance but the original is what motivated the creative differences. In that way I've found some of the cheaper 'homemade' stuff on RPGNow to be more 'inspirational' than really well-produced mega-adventures where I'm afraid to touch anything in what seems to be a finely-crafted work of art.

Also, published adventures are just more useful for certain games. It's more work to hash out a complex mystery for Call of Cthulhu so it's nice to have a published one to use, at least as a skeleton of a plot.
The adventure books for The Whispering Vault were particularly useful to me because they helped to showcase variations on what at first seemed to be a pretty rigid formula for game sessions... they helped 'break the mold' so to speak.

Quote from: Mistwell;373589It really doesn't.  The GSL is pretty damn reasonable as far as licensing agreements go.  People got all butt-hurt because of the clause that says it can be changed by WOTC at any time.  But realistically, they have not touched it in a long time, have no incentive to touch it now, and wouldn't mess with it just for an adventure module.

I mean think about it.  A HUGE portion of the sales for a module is in the first few months of publication.  What is the realistic risk of them not just changing the GSL, but changing it in a way that material damages your company, in that first few months? The answer is "infinitesimally small".  

Thousands and thousands of companies every day operate under licensing agreements that allow the licensor to alter the agreement, and the instances of it causing harm are extremely infrequent.  It's a standard clause, that D&D third party publishers are all whiny about purely because they were spoiled by the OGL and have not had to deal with the real world of licensing for a long time, if ever.

Truly, I blame Clark for this bullshit attitude.  His company didn't want to do 4e stuff after he had fought for changes (due to his partner I believe), and instead of sucking it up and admitting that to Necro's fans, he made up this bullshit legal excuse about that stupid clause.  But as an attorney he fucking well knows the clause was never going to be used, and even if it were used the odds were WAY WAY WAY against it impacting an existing product of his.  Had he gone ahead with the planned 4e modules, they would have been out long ago, and his sales run would also have been out or nearly out long ago as well, with no harm from the GSL and a lot of profit to him.

But no, instead he whined about the GSL being changeable by WOTC, which is something he couldn't agree to, despite him probably drafting dozens of similar agreements for non-RPG companies without blinking an eye in his law practice.  Such a crock of shit.

The GSL sucks ass.  

I was glad to see Clark finally agreed with all the stuff I said back on ENWorld, after making a big deal of publicly disagreeing with me regarding the riskiness of the GSL.

Recently, even the Paizo CEO said the GSL and the clauses you point out above were too uncertain for her to risk her company's future on.  

To summarize...The GSL sucks ass.

At this point it doesn't matter anymore anyways.

Whether deliberate or by happenstance, the 4E 3pp market isn't exactly a happening scene and it's probably not going to change much from what it is presently.  The train has already left the station, more than a year ago.

Today, why bother anymore?

I don't think it is that they don't sell.

I think the problem is thus.  It takes as much effort to write a 64 page adventure as it does a 64 page supplement.

However only the GM really needs to buy the adventure, the players don't, so you cut your potential sales by the number of people in the group almost instantly.

Source books don't suffer from this problem as much, and many times each player will want one.

so if you are a small company, looking to make some money you can put the same amount of effort into each and one sells better than the other, then it is sort of a no brainer.

just my thoughts on it though

Welcome, Lejanus.

It's not just that.  alot of players do not like playing purchased modules. I am one of those , from his posts Clash is of similar mind set.

So -

i) Only a limited pool of players will buy modules at all (unlike supplements which in theory all players of the game may be interested in)
ii) Only the GM needs buy a module and there is no pollination , by which i mean when one player brings it along and uses it the other players decide they would like a copy of their own (its hte same point really but explains why supplements spread more)
iii) It takes as much effort to produce a module as it does a supplement (in fact I would say more as efforts round graphics, maps etc are more time consuming that text) but you can charge less and it has a lower take up.
iv) A module has limited reuse. If a group of players buy it and play it they will not want to play it again and so will not be willing to spend as much as they would on a supplement that will become a tool for players for the next x many games.

Quote from: jibbajibba;373740It's not just that.  alot of players do not like playing purchased modules. I am one of those , from his posts Clash is of similar mind set.

.

Is it all modules, or have you played published modules you've enjoyed?

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;373748Is it all modules, or have you played published modules you've enjoyed?

I have played a handful that were bought and run by friends or lent to me. I found them internally inconsistent, illogical, too specifically tied to an existing gameworld and pretty linear. That was when I was 10 - 11 years old.

There are some exceptions. In White dwarf there was a written up modulecalled search for the golden spire or something must have bene in 83/84 I guess that was well done.

Quote from: Benoist;373653OK. Stopping reading right there. It's all about the OGL, Mark. Some people supported the OGL, and the very idea of open gaming. Some people still do, and to them, the GSL was like a slap in the face.

Er, what you just said was that it's all about the GSL, not the OGL. It is, as Mistwell said, the GSL they don't like.

Seanchai

Quote from: Joethelawyer;373656Recently, even the Paizo CEO said the GSL and the clauses you point out above were too uncertain for her to risk her company's future on.  

What a hypocrite! I'm assuming she'll be removing similar clauses from her own company's open license agreement posthaste, then...

Seanchai

Quote from: Seanchai;373757Er, what you just said was that it's all about the GSL, not the OGL. It is, as Mistwell said, the GSL they don't like.

Seanchai

Context, moron. That's what it's about. People are pissed about the GSL because it followed the OGL.
Stop misconstruing posts on purpose. That's fucking annoying.

I think casualoblivion already wrote a very good response on this. There's several "tiers" of material which you can put in a scale of people being increasingly more comfortable to homebrew that stuff . That scale goes like this (as casualoblivion said): base rules > supplement rules > campaign worlds > modules. Base rules people rather buy than write from scratch, modules not so much.

I think that's correct. But that just prompts the question why that's the case. My take on it: the aforementioned hierarchy, "base rules > supplement rules > campaign worlds > modules", coincides with a downward scale on making increasingly greater assumptions about your group's preferred style of play.

The vast diversity in play styles among people playing the various editions of D&D, e.g., are testimony to just how wide open the written rules of that system are when it comes to play style.

Modules are not like that, at all. The default expectation (not that I share it) is that you can run an adventure off the book after reading it through, without needing to redesign huge swaths thereof from scratch. With rules books there's always the idea that you can port the mechanics over into your game, your campaign, your character, and then make it your own. The result is that modules face steeper hurdles to sell well - they need to fit your preferred play style rather tightly. And that's a tall order.