LloydBrown's page

Rob, you were launching this about the time I sold my store, I think. Your name on it is worth a purchase, as far as I'm concerned.

I don't get on here much, but I need some help.

What utilities are out there for statting out characters or monsters for Pathfinder?

Making sure all the details are right on stat blocks is the most tedious, mind-numbing part of writing anything. I need automation for this.

Long post.

Let me preface my comments in response to your post quoted above by saying that I have greatly enjoyed your work in Dragon over the years.

Thanks. I take my attaboys where I can get 'em. For the rest of this post, let me justify my existence (and credibility, to some degree) by pointing out that I was a successful retailer for over five years, before I finally sold my store to write full time. As a retailer, I was active on the Game Industry Forum and its successor, the Game Industry Network, two online message boards frequented by several hundred top retailers, nearly all distributors, and over 100 manufacturers. I also read (and still read) Comics & Games Retailer, Games Quarterly, and any news & information I can get. I’m working on two books for the industry: one about retail, and one about freelancing & publishers.

Your statement about Kenser & Company, I will imagine, derives from their ability to display the D&D logo. This hardly, however, makes your point....If any of your Dragon articles had been able to be published in other than the Dragon and had been so published, they would have in no way been diminished by not being in an "official" publication. The technical trees cannot obscure the practical forest.

Based on the presence of the D&D logo, the Kenzer core books sold about 10 times as many copies as most D20 products. Generic D20 products have less legitimacy in most D&D campaigns and no validity at all in things like RPGA D&D events (more on this thought in the shared world discussion in a minute).

Look at it another way. How “legitimate” do you think Kalamar was before the 3E license? It was Kenzer’s first RPG product, released in 1994. It was intended for use with D&D, but it wasn’t D&D, just like the fantasy D20 products on the market today.

Consistency in quality is a much more subjective statement.

That I certainly agree with.

Malhavoc Press publications (Arcana Unearthed etc.) are not equally consistent in terms of high quality? Green Ronin? Of course they are, to judge by their success and the reviews and industry awards they have recieved.

How about Crunchy Frog Enterprises? The early Mongoose stuff? Look at the difference in graphic design between AEG's much-loved L5R material and their hop-on-the-bandwagon Evil, Mercenaries, Good, and Gods books for D20. Bastion Press--Jim Butler has a good reputation, is a former WotC designer, and I think his books are ugly. They might be well-written, but I don't know. In fact, I can probably name 200 publishers (without hyperbole) whose products sell less than 50% of the time off of a game store's shelves in any given calendar year. Or off of their own table at GenCon. With D20, you don’t know what you’re getting. WotC is so reliable that you can usually tell what color the book will be by the title.

Shared world experience? Limited or even predominantly a function of a Wotc logo? Absurd. First, D&D is the shared experience, not any one setting, and the d20 license and OGL allow this sharing as never before.

You’re apparently not familiar with the concept; it’s a specific RPG term, not something I just made up. Allow me to demonstrate. Familiar with the Keep on the Borderlands? Of course. Am I? Yes. Is Eric? I’m sure. If we meet up at the Dungeon booth at GenCon and talk about the Keep, the others all nod their head. We know about the ogre in area E and the bag of coins the goblins keep behind the barrel. That’s the shared world experience at work.

Now for the flip side. How about Akrasia, Thief of Time, by Eden Studios? Dungeon Crawl Classics #7, by Goodman Games? Horses, by Avalanche Press? Not everybody here can chime in on those. Official D&D products, with their far greater circulation, are experiences that many D&D players share. I can assure you that no product with a print run of 2,000 (of which 900 are still in a warehouse, unsold) has been shared by a majority of D&D players.

Many players assume that they are typical of gamers, and that their buying habits represent the majority of players. Naturally, many of those people are wrong in one respect or another. *Most* D&D players stick with core D&D products. I have seen thousands (again, literally) of D&D players and examined their purchasing patterns first-hand. Those that branch out into D20 primarily buy general utilities (I’ve sold cases of Green Ronin’s Character Sheets) or licensed products with IPs they recognize—DragonLance, Ravenloft, etc.

displays an ignorance of the market so easily revealed as to leave me wondering if you have any great familiarity with the game in recent years

And we started off so politely! In all honesty, there are a few people in the industry with a greater general understanding of RPGs, their sales trends, their buyers, and the numbers in which they appear in the market. I think I communicate with all of them on a regular basis. If you have *evidence* to back up your statements, rather than general impressions and anecdotes, please share it. I’m always eager to learn.

DeadDMWalking wrote:

You want him to do something - your post made that obvious. His outside activities were getting in the way of that. You want his outside activities to "go away". That part isn't a joke. Now, maybe you don't really want his character to die, but that just isn't cool.

No, it was a joke. I don't give a rat's f#@@ing brown, caking a%&&*#& if Erik shows up to Greytalk or not. I am asleep during most of it anyway.

You people all need to learn how to relax and stop taking yourselves so seriously. Christ, it's a f#@@ing message board, not a gladiatorial pit.

Well, that's an unpleasant thing to read on a message board that only gets a few posts a week anyway. I'll check back in a few months and see if there's any quality content here.

I haven't had much time to flesh anything out yet, but one thing that I've noticed is that every campaign setting I've seen involves thousands upon thousands of years of history, with the ruins of multiple great civilisations littered around the landscape.

I've loved that concept, ever since first reading the basic D&D adventure Chaos Reigns about 20 years ago.

The lack of magic items is a good point. Just keep in mind that it gives PCs an edge. Since they'll almost certainly take item creation feats, they'll probably be more magic-heavy than the monsters.

I see such as setting as very much meddled-in by the gods. They haven't yet had their hands burned, so to speak, and they might even rule empires on earth.

You might want to pare back the spell lists, removing everything with a name attached (Tenser's floating disk, Bigby's hand), and a lot of very specialized spells.

I'd remove half-breed races. Make each such incident a "first" (this is a campaign with a lot of firsts) and a major storyline point. I'd keep one goblinoind type--like maybe goblins--and any further appearance of orcs or hobgoblins is a Thing of Dread, devised by the BBEG to destroy mankind.

Remove any racial antipathy between dwarves & elves.

You might remove halflings and enhance gnomes somehow--make them foreign and mystical or something.

Some further slight changes would help reinforce the image in the player's mind. No hoards of money--the concept of a coin as a symbol of money rather than as money in its own right might not even exist. No thieves guilds (or any other guilds, for that matter). Governments would probably be tyrannies, but they certainly wouldn't be feudal.

As a retailer, I ask for a product's trade dress from my sales rep when it's announced. I used to order extra copies of a D&D book if it carried the FR trade dress. Then I started ordering fewer.

FR titles are currently selling (at my old store) about 25% of the number of generic titles. They were selling almost 100% for the first three releases under 3E.

Eberron is selling about 75% compared to generic titles.

I see it as profoundly disrespectful to an author to retroactively edit his work

As a writer, I have no problem with someone editing my work. The only time I have a problem with it is when the editor has a poor grasp of the rules.

disrespectful to the history of the game to alter these documents from their original form

Those products are still out there in paper form. Collectors can still have those. Nothing about the history of the game is changed.

Again, from a writer's point of view, the chance to be reprinted (and therefore gain additional market presence) is awesome. It's like a car dealer saying "Hey, remember that car you bought from us four years ago? Well, just because we're trying something new, here's a rental for a week."

If 3.5 players want more material that badly, they can buy any one of thousands of third-party D&D and d20 products

There is only one source for third-party D&D products, Kenzer & Company.

A lot of D20 product is out there. Few products match WotC products for graphic design, consistency of quality, and the shared-world experience.

Buying BAD product is not the answer to people that want more product.

That proposal hasn't gotten to me yet, Lloyd, but one major hurdle is that WotC no longer has the Lankhmar license

I sent it e-mail on June 1, according to my handy writing log. Should I re-send?

To go along with the thread I did for non-WOTC/TSR worlds, I think that every once in a while, an article supporting or updating an old world would be nice.

I submitted a proposal for Lankhmar. We'll see what sort of feedback I get from it.

"Why bother? Mainly because I really liked the idea behind "L'Trel." The adventure was just too ambitious for a totally inexperienced writer to pull off. Secondly, I never quite got a full rejection. Barbara never sent me a letter saying, "I never want to see this again."

Ah, L'trel. I've kicked off three campaigns with that adventure. It so rocks.

Let me see if I can add the footnotes from memory.
1. At first, we thought Ted was two people. Later, we learned he was three people.
2. Actually, that *was* a full rejection.
3. What could we do? By then, he was like family.

Not that I remember that particular guest editorial or anything.

We just finished the latest such meeting for Dragon, which ought to include your proposals, on Friday.

So my first queries in 6 years gon in at the beginning of the cycle, huh? Oh, well. It's not like I don't have enough work to do. Keep an eye out for me, Erik.

One of the reasons KoDT left Dragon was the issue of money. I've asked Rich what he charges for premium strips, and the number approaches what Jolly charges for premium KoDT strips. Paizo might not be able to afford him.

The storyline issue would be easily enough handled. That's not an insurmountable obstacle.