I also heard he's behind YDIS, along with me and Kellri as coauthors, though we might just as well be the same person writing under different pseudonyms.

Quote from: Benoist;503829I also heard he's behind YDIS, along with me and Kellri as coauthors, though we might just as well be the same person writing under different pseudonyms.

Your Dick is Small?

That's a pretty shit abbreviation.

Just reading Your Dungeon Is Suck, you can tell just how microscopic its author(s)'s dick must be, yes.

Just reading Your Dungeon Is Suck (a blog on the intarwebz that melts your grey cells at the first read), you can tell just how microscopic its author(s)'s dick must be, yes.

Quote from: One Horse Town;503830Your Dick is Small?

That's a pretty shit abbreviation.

I don't want to "get behind" Your Small Dick btw, thanks for asking.

OK seriously now. Bill Silvey is thedungeondelver on this board.

Quote from: Benoist;503839OK seriously now. Bill Silvey is thedungeondelver on this board.

Thedungeondelver has a small dick? That explains a lot.

Seriously, however, i now take Ancientgamers posts in a rather dim light.

Ignored!

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;503825He wrote some chunk of OSRIC.

Tiny bit - just some descriptives in the monsters section of the book is all.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;503818To write good modules, WotC would have to hire some people who knew how to write adventures. Lemme know when that happens.

I think the problem is deeper than that.

Bruce Cordell used to write good adventures. Before going to WotC, Mike Mearls wrote several creative and entertaining D20 modules. If you had told me in 2007 that 8 out of the 9 tier adventures for 4E were going to be written by them, I would have said: "Hey! Sign me up!"

... and yet those adventures sucked. And Cordell's earlier Expedition to Castle Ravenloft also sucked, despite doing a lot of cool stuff to expand the original.

The problem at WotC is that there is a corporate methodology for "how we publish adventures" which is anathema to good adventure design. And it's been a problem for WotC since 2006.

Before that, WotC had a different corporate methodology which was also crippling their adventure design. (The idea that you could squeeze an expansive Underdark mini-campaign into 32 pages was insane... And yet Deep Horizons happened.)

I'm not entirely sure WotC is capable of fixing that problem. As a corporate entity, they want product that fits nicely into whatever cookie cutter their management has currently deemed "a good idea". Sometimes that cookie cutter is strict; sometimes its loose. But, no matter what, the cookie cutter severely restricts the creative freedom of their module creators.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;503884I think the problem is deeper than that.

Bruce Cordell used to write good adventures. Before going to WotC, Mike Mearls wrote several creative and entertaining D20 modules. If you had told me in 2007 that 8 out of the 9 tier adventures for 4E were going to be written by them, I would have said: "Hey! Sign me up!"

... and yet those adventures sucked. And Cordell's earlier Expedition to Castle Ravenloft also sucked, despite doing a lot of cool stuff to expand the original.

The problem at WotC is that there is a corporate methodology for "how we publish adventures" which is anathema to good adventure design. And it's been a problem for WotC since 2006.

Before that, WotC had a different corporate methodology which was also crippling their adventure design. (The idea that you could squeeze an expansive Underdark mini-campaign into 32 pages was insane... And yet Deep Horizons happened.)

I'm not entirely sure WotC is capable of fixing that problem. As a corporate entity, they want product that fits nicely into whatever cookie cutter their management has currently deemed "a good idea". Sometimes that cookie cutter is strict; sometimes its loose. But, no matter what, the cookie cutter severely restricts the creative freedom of their module creators.

I agree with you, corporate culture is a substantial part of the problem.

I don't know if you've ever read Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, but he's a psychologist who wrote a book on creativity back in the 90's that's extremely interesting.

In that book, he discusses how creative endeavours rarely develop in isolation, even ones that are done in private like writing. What instead happens is that people with similar interests and drive tend to clump up into communities that at some point develop a critical mass. That critical mass makes all the members of that community more productive in their creative endeavours as ideas are bounced around and debated, high-quality feedback on work is given, and the members serve as spurs and inspiration for one another's work.

I would suggest that Wizards, even if has a few good adventure writers on hand at any given time, does not have that critical mass. Moreover, by pulling self-employed individuals who previously participated in a wider gaming discourse into a smaller, more hermetic environment with corporate norms, it cuts them off from that broader gaming discourse and basically shuts down their ability to participate in that community, except in extremely formal and rigid ways (PR-minded interviews, magazine articles in a house publication, press releases, etc.). This would have the obvious effect of a creative decline, perhaps not instantly but certainly over time.

This is especially true if the corporate norms don't emphasise relationship and community-building with their clients, something WotC has done effectively with MtG but never with D&D. e.g. CustServ back in the 3.x days was notoriously unreliable and ignorant at answering rules questions. Another example would be that WotC has only ever done one comprehensive survey of its D&D customers (or of D&D players including non-customers) that I am aware of (under Ryan Dancey). This is so completely contrary to best practices that I still find it kind of hard to believe.

With regard to specific individuals being cut off from the broader gaming discourse, let's use the example of Mike Mearls. Mike Mearls used to have a livejournal on which he would talk about his gaming and his games, and the broader gaming public who were interested could come by and argue, discuss, etc. his various works (hell, even I commented once or twice on something he said). Mearls also used to post here, and IIRC he was on rpg.net as well (and probably other places beyond that). When he joined Wizards, all of that interaction began to slowly stop, until sometime before 4e came out he was basically no longer part of the broader gaming discourse.

If I were WotC, I would do exactly what I said above. I would hire on a group of 4-6 full-time employees, supported by freelancers as necessary, who were a "adventure development team" responsible for at least 1 64-page module every two months (or maybe 1 32 page module every month), as well as adventure content for all D&D publications (include DDI/Dragon, the adventures that show up in campaign settings, etc). They would handle creative, copywriting, stats, alpha playtesting, etc. Probably including at least one artist amongst them to do maps, cover graphics and internal art.
Everything other than production, really. These people would be allowed to speak to the D&D community - in fact, I would encourage them to. I would also encourage them to run contests where fans submitted their modules and the best one was published and sold, with the writer receiving a monetary prize ($500 bucks and a free copy would be a solid investment), probably once or twice a year.

FFG does something like these contests already, IIRC, for Dark Heresy, and it helps them identify potential talent. WW used to as well, since Malcolm Sheppard was recruited off the WW boards in 1998-1999 to help write Tradition Book: Akashic based on some posts he made. The hiring goal I mentioned above would be aggressive, but not unreasonable - it's about typical for a large direct mail firm.

My goal there would be to create a "skunkworks" or critical mass of creatives in discussion with a wider community of my customers who could consistently produce new and original content suited to the taste of those customers.

Yeah, I completely with you guys. The corporate setup and mindset is part of the problem, and the really frustrating part is, it could be solved, if they really challenged the design and development MO and rebuilt it efficiently.

I'll be happy if they don't rehash ToEE, Giants, etc. Just how many versions of these adventures do we need? Make something new!

I think there may be one more issue to the modules here - except the obvious "Why won't they release the classics as PDFs", but that's really just indeed, corporate logic.


Internet.

Or namely - these days, if you need an adventure on the fly, you type "D&D x edition adventures", and bam - thousands of freebies. In the days of yore, you had to either buy a complete one, or you had to get them from Dragon or Dungeons magazine - both of which were none the less, and still are, a part of D&D revenue stream.

Of course, modules still bring profit, that's why they are made - but they aren't just that profitable to mandate doing so much work for them, I guess.

Quote from: Rincewind1;503970I think there may be one more issue to the modules here - except the obvious "Why won't they release the classics as PDFs", but that's really just indeed, corporate logic.


Internet.

Or namely - these days, if you need an adventure on the fly, you type "D&D x edition adventures", and bam - thousands of freebies. In the days of yore, you had to either buy a complete one, or you had to get them from Dragon or Dungeons magazine - both of which were none the less, and still are, a part of D&D revenue stream.

Of course, modules still bring profit, that's why they are made - but they aren't just that profitable to mandate doing so much work for them, I guess.

One thing I never understood about 4e's modules.  The delve-only mindset aside, why did they not package them all as a set with map tiles and minis that would allow you to run the whole thing?  Cards with the stats for new magic items found in the adventure?  Etc.

Right off the bat they fumbled with KotSF.  Sure, the module plot and RP opportunities sucked, but it was lame even for what it was: no counters to use on the maps they gave you and they leave you to figure out how to put together a map for most of the dungeon crawl parts yourself.

Even if you liked the rules and style of 4e (I did) the modules still sucked.  I'll never understand how you could have minis games and card games and board games, build a RPG that is made to use those kind of components, then utterly fail to leverage those other games and their components for the RPG.

Quote from: jgants;504137One thing I never understood about 4e's modules.  The delve-only mindset aside, why did they not package them all as a set with map tiles and minis that would allow you to run the whole thing?  Cards with the stats for new magic items found in the adventure?  Etc.

Gardmore Abbey has all that, except (of course) tokens for minis, to keep the price tag manageable. But yes, it's the first ever regular product to feature item cards for the major artefacts. And it features extra dice to help you run the mod with (otherwise) simply a copy of the Dungeon Tiles master set.

Like you, I'm amazed that they didn't hit on these ideas in 2008 (apart from tokens for minis, that came about later as a necessity, not by way of preference).