Addressing @adzling, His Demeanor, and the Points He Raises

[Dark Lord Galen]

*Removed in response to Peace Accord*

To Rob> Thanks for taking the time.

To AEIOU my apologies for inclusion of your post without forewarning but you had been reflecting my own thoughts perfectly. So either great minds think alike or we are both twisted. Either way I know I am in good company.

Lastly to Adzling, take the opportunity Rob is offering you. There are things we ALL wish were better or different, but it is not your job (nor mine or anyone else) to be the programmers, that's LWD. It is our "job" as forum members to provide guidance and support to the community for those things that ARE there currently and as they change) and work-arounds for those things with "warts" until Rob and his team can remove the warts. IT is not to say feed back isn't important, it is, but so is delivery. Delivery in not only of how its delivered, but what is delivered. I have often mentored a saying once mentored to me. Don't bring a problem without bringing a solution or a workaround.

DLG

[Dark Lord Galen]

Originally Posted by Originally Posted by monsterfurby

I'd be interested in where the idea that people want pre-written content is coming from. That's still somewhat true in the American market - the largest one by several degrees of magnitude, admittedly - but does indeed miss the reality of gaming groups here in Europe. Even in the US, the tendency seems to be going more towards custom content with universal systems.

Originally Posted by Parody

I only have anecdotal information from the US, of course, but I can point at a few things:

For at least 10 years, my various home gaming groups have been based on pre-written content in not-really-universal systems. Working backwards through time: Pathfinder, Shadowrun 3rd, D&D 3.5, Hackmaster 4th, AD&D 2nd, Shadowrun 4th (very short), D&D 3.0. Then you hit Gear Krieg, whose adventures I believe were written by the GM. It's not far past that where I was in a Feng Shui game with rotating GMs and self-written adventures, but that puts me back into the 90s or very early 2000s.

In the last few years I've GMed both pre-written (in Pathfinder) and self-written (in Paranoia) adventures. The majority of my GMing has been Pathfinder, both in a home game and in Society. The last home campaign I ran was Kingmaker, one of Paizo's Adventure Paths.

Like Parody, I have witnessed an evolution (of sorts) to the style of gaming. Having played 90% in the US and some sporadic PBM and overseas play. the cultures have changed as the evolution of gaming systems. Even the PC can be a litmus of observation of this change. from the Pre 1e 4 character classes (with dwarves & elves being classes and not races) all the way thru a myriad of choices now.
IMO the gaming industry is representative in my own table. I have one OLD school 1e player, two 2e players, four 3.5 players, one pathfinder, one starwars, and me an old miniatures wargamer. Certainly an odd mix.

As to pre-written versus world building, from my own experience Americans as a whole are more fast paced, now type people. Its in our work, play and leisure activities. Working 40-50-60 or more hours in a week is more "normal" than overseas (except for expats but that's another tale).
With that fast pace and lack of time for self-preparation, I think that has changes in the gaming industry we all share. Lack of Free time = quick fix pre-made adventures. Even what has brought us all here is a testimony to that. The promise that RW brings to streamline managing your campaign. Isn't that to make things faster, but more detailed? hehe

While I use (sparingly because most don't fit my world) pre-made adventures, it doesn't mean I can't repurpose them.
Overseas, the combination of abit more leisure time and the higher cost of economics due to exchange rates might drive our "cross the pond" adventuring colleagues to create their own. (just IMO)

Originally Posted by Parody

Nobody I know runs using a truly universal system. As you can tell from the above I don't really consider D&D 3.x/Pathfinder a universal system at this point, and neither do the other GMs I know. Even if you discount that, nobody I know runs using any system that's more universal about their system, so to speak. (Ex: GURPS, Fate, Savage Worlds.)

Totally agree with Parody here, we all tweek what we like and don't like.

Originally Posted by Parody

The practical upshot of all this is that I can easily believe that pre-written content is likely to be the major sales driver even if that's not everyone's experience. Whether that's how it works out is yet to be seen; selling a new content platform is hard. It should be interesting, though!

I agree, and for my perspective while I may not use the "whole" I would probably cannibalize.

Originally Posted by Parody

PS: I hear Realm Works is already decent at helping you create that custom content for your home campaign in a universal system. ;)

Isn't that a vicious rumor {snark} I heard its a repository for calendar whiners.

[MNBlockHead]

As someone who is building his own world for a D&D 5e campaign, I still find pre-created content useful. I have no interest in products like WoTC's Tyranny of the Dragons or Elemental Evil campaigns. It doesn't fit well into my campaign world and it is too readily available to the players. Even if they never played the campaign or bought the books, they can still browse through them.

But I do like to buy short adventures and various "mechanics" content. I subscribe to EN World's En5ider through Patreon and I've bought content on DriveThru RPG. As a World Builder it is VERY helpful to have, say a collection of "urban adventures" that I can easily tweak and have ready, or pre-created villages, cities, and dungeons.

I'm looking forward to the Content Market allowing me to buy similar content but save on all the cutting, pasting, and clean up. Pre-written content is clearly going to drive LWD's profitability, not only from DMs too busy or uninterested in building their own rules, but also those of use who are building highly custom campaigns and could use some help in creating content for them.

[Pollution]

Am I the only one around here who didn't have a clue who the F* this guy Adzling was before this post?

Honestly, Rob and company, I'd have just banned his @$$ and moved on, maybe made this kind of a post without mentioning him at all.

Now, enough with "drama" and get me some Marketplace functionality! And Web Views! And custom calendars, and Printing (actually, I don't care about printing), and, and, and, and, and.

[Pollution]

Originally Posted by MNBlockHead

As someone who is building his own world for a D&D 5e campaign, I still find pre-created content useful. I have no interest in products like WoTC's Tyranny of the Dragons or Elemental Evil campaigns. It doesn't fit well into my campaign world and it is too readily available to the players. Even if they never played the campaign or bought the books, they can still browse through them.

But I do like to buy short adventures and various "mechanics" content. I subscribe to EN World's En5ider through Patreon and I've bought content on DriveThru RPG. As a World Builder it is VERY helpful to have, say a collection of "urban adventures" that I can easily tweak and have ready, or pre-created villages, cities, and dungeons.

I'm looking forward to the Content Market allowing me to buy similar content but save on all the cutting, pasting, and clean up. Pre-written content is clearly going to drive LWD's profitability, not only from DMs too busy or uninterested in building their own rules, but also those of use who are building highly custom campaigns and could use some help in creating content for them.

My personal Vision for the market place would be to have a way of incorporating source books and modules/APs.

So, you'd pick up Pathfinder Core which would be say the main book, UM, UE, ARG, APG, and UC. That would be all your crunch for rules. Each class would be in there, all the items, spells, feats, etc... I imagine something like that would cost a fair amount of money, let's say $100.

Then you'd pick up modules/APs. So you'd have a RotRL Realm. you could tie in your $100 rules set you picked up before into that world and it would be almost everything you need to run RotRL in one place, all hyper-linked (you'd have to add in the ability to scan the entire flippin' thing for links into RW though).

If you finished RotRL, and wanted to keep the same party, you'd then add in more modules to your Realm (some high level stuff right there) and maybe pick up Mystic Adventures, which would add in not only the new stuff, but also CHANGE the old stuff (so under a spell, it would have standard spell description followed by a new section called Mystic or whatever).

My vision is a way to keep adding things to your realms via the Marketplace. I want a Core ShadowRun Realm for sale (Hell, I'll design it, and put it up for free). Then I want the ability to merge Adventures, Runs, or Missions into the core realm. Then when a book Chrome Flesh (Augmentation book) comes out, I want the Rules in RW so that I can QUICKLY see what the stats are on something. Later, when the Technomancer book comes out, I want to incorporate that too.... If I want to do a one off campaign at GenCon that's not related to my insane home game, I can create a new SR core realm, import my source material I've bought/designed already and put in my one shot.

My vision for what Realm Works can and should be are pretty lofty. But after seeing what we've seen so far, I would be surprised if this doesn't happen.

[Jaynay27]

Originally Posted by Pollution

My personal Vision for the market place would be to have a way of incorporating source books and modules/APs.

So, you'd pick up Pathfinder Core which would be say the main book, UM, UE, ARG, APG, and UC. That would be all your crunch for rules. Each class would be in there, all the items, spells, feats, etc... I imagine something like that would cost a fair amount of money, let's say $100.

Then you'd pick up modules/APs. So you'd have a RotRL Realm. you could tie in your $100 rules set you picked up before into that world and it would be almost everything you need to run RotRL in one place, all hyper-linked (you'd have to add in the ability to scan the entire flippin' thing for links into RW though).

If you finished RotRL, and wanted to keep the same party, you'd then add in more modules to your Realm (some high level stuff right there) and maybe pick up Mystic Adventures, which would add in not only the new stuff, but also CHANGE the old stuff (so under a spell, it would have standard spell description followed by a new section called Mystic or whatever).

My vision is a way to keep adding things to your realms via the Marketplace. I want a Core ShadowRun Realm for sale (Hell, I'll design it, and put it up for free). Then I want the ability to merge Adventures, Runs, or Missions into the core realm. Then when a book Chrome Flesh (Augmentation book) comes out, I want the Rules in RW so that I can QUICKLY see what the stats are on something. Later, when the Technomancer book comes out, I want to incorporate that too.... If I want to do a one off campaign at GenCon that's not related to my insane home game, I can create a new SR core realm, import my source material I've bought/designed already and put in my one shot.

My vision for what Realm Works can and should be are pretty lofty. But after seeing what we've seen so far, I would be surprised if this doesn't happen.

Shut up and take my money

[MaxSupernova]

Okay, I'll be a bit of a contrarian and just say that I think we need to separate the messenger from the message. (Part of his message about interface, anyway).

The method of his delivery coloured the responses to his message, I think, and that's unfortunate.

To be perfectly frank, the Realm Works interface isn't great. Can you figure stuff out and work out how to do things and remember where the commands are? Certainly. But don't confuse "I have gotten used to it once I finally figured it out" with "This is a good interface".

I believe much of the confusion about how to organize material and how to arrange data and the like could be reduced with an improved interface. I think a number of problems we see are confusion between how the interface presents concepts and the concepts themselves, which makes the concepts seem even scarier and more confusing.

It's the difference between a poster for an event designed by one of the event organizers in Word, and a poster made by a graphic designer. They both present the information in acceptable ways and are perfectly functional, but the designer's poster will be more usable, will catch the attention of more people, and will present the event in a better light to everyone who sees it.

So, if you strip away the tone and aggression in his messages, I think the response to Adzling is "Yes, it's not great, but we'll survive, because they are working on functionality which the majority feels is more important." But I also think that that doesn't in any way diminish his point that an improved interface would go a long way in making the product more newb-friendly and accessible and generally easier to use for users of all levels.

[Dark Lord Galen]

Originally Posted by MaxSupernova

Okay, I'll be a bit of a contrarian and just say that I think we need to separate the messenger from the message. (Part of his message about interface, anyway).

The method of his delivery coloured the responses to his message, I think, and that's unfortunate....................................... ..........................So, if you strip away the tone and aggression in his messages, I think the response to Adzling is "Yes, it's not great, but we'll survive, because they are working on functionality which the majority feels is more important." But I also think that that doesn't in any way diminish his point that an improved interface would go a long way in making the product more newb-friendly and accessible and generally easier to use for users of all levels.

True, and well put counter, Max

[rob]

Originally Posted by monsterfurby

A question mark on the business model part though, Rob: as someone having worked in the industry and still maintaining contact with quite a few people who I believe have a fairly good understanding of more recent developments, I'd be interested in where the idea that people want pre-written content is coming from. That's still somewhat true in the American market - the largest one by several degrees of magnitude, admittedly - but does indeed miss the reality of gaming groups here in Europe. Even in the US, the tendency seems to be going more towards custom content with universal systems. The only space where published content is really going to thrive is going to remain online (because groups are generally lower-commitment affairs there, though Fantasy Grounds suffered heavily from bad customizability and an over-reliance on published content). Of course, the sample of people using the software right now is skewed towards the latter and I'm sure you guys have done your homework there, but I'm a bit worried that while the strategy as a whole is sound, the underlying assumptions especially methodically [via the surveys] still bear a degree of uncertainty.

Our focus is squarely on the US market, for a number of reasons...

1. It's the market we know and understand. We've operated in the US market for a long time now. We have close working relationships with a number of the more prominent US publishers, which allows us to get their perspectives on things, and their expertise skews to the US market as well. Most US publishers license their products to other companies for translation and European distribution, relying on the licensee to have the expertise in a particular European market (e.g. France, Spain, Germany, etc.).

2. The US market dwarfs the European market, especially when the added complexity of localization rears its ugly head (which would be required to truly embrace the full European market). If we simply limit ourselves to the English language within Europe, the market is tiny by comparison to the US. Localization is not something that makes sense while the product is still evolving in the ways Realm Works is.

3. We need to establish Realm Works on solid footing as a product before we do anything else. With any product, you pick your target market and then work to capture it. Then you worry about branching out. The US is that market for us.

With regards to your point about the shift towards universal systems, I think the perception may outweigh the reality there. Yes, there have been some significant RPG products released in the last couple of years that are universal in focus (e.g. Fate and Cypher). Yes, their Kickstarter numbers were spectacular. However, lets keep those numbers in perspective. Selling 10,000 copies of a universal game system is still quite tiny compared to the sales numbers for a game system like D&D or Pathfinder. There's definitely been a notable renaissance of universal systems, but this isn't a sea change for the industry, as some seem to think.

Again, this comes back to picking the initial target market to establish as the beachhead. We've made sure to create Realm Works in a manner that can readily be adapted to universal systems, which allows us to embrace those systems like any other. Most importantly, the primary emphasis of Realm Works is the story, which is system agnostic. The Content Market will make it possible to create and distribute material that is completely generic in nature right alongside material that is specific to GameX or GameY.

Since you didn't specifically ask a question, I'm not sure if this addresses the general concerns you alluded to. Hopefully, it does.

[rob]

Originally Posted by MaxSupernova

So, if you strip away the tone and aggression in his messages, I think the response to Adzling is "Yes, it's not great, but we'll survive, because they are working on functionality which the majority feels is more important." But I also think that that doesn't in any way diminish his point that an improved interface would go a long way in making the product more newb-friendly and accessible and generally easier to use for users of all levels.

That latter take-away is absolutely true! Addressing that consideration is a major focus of the web-based tool, which will become the product entry point for a huge percentage of users. Armed with an understanding of the basics and having seen how existing content "fits" into Realm Works, the "development tool" version of the product (i.e. desktop) will become vastly more accessible to new users. And then we can look at ways to refine the UI on the desktop once the remaining high-demand features get into place.

Note: We've also been making some steady headway on general refinement and enhancements to overall product usability. Yes, we have a long ways to go, but progress HAS been made on that front.