Venting. If this sorta thing annoys you, move along. Nothing to see here.
Over on EN World (one of the largest RPG forums out there), somebody just started a thread (that link you just passed), asking one of my freelance writers to submit Hot Pursuit –rules for chases in d20-based games which we published in PDF last year — to Dragon magazine….because, and I quote:
“There really needs to be an officially published set of rules for chases.”
Never mind the fact that we ALREADY HAVE PUBLISHED IT. It’s only PDF, after all. Doesn’t count.
Of course, it’s also coming out in print, next month. (Part of the reason why I’m going to Vegas next week….to pimp the book (among others we’re releasing) to retailers.)
No, that doesn’t count either…..because it’s not “Official.”
There’s a depressingly large segment of the gaming consumer market that will not touch a product, even if it’s exactly what they’re fucking looking for, if it doesn’t have the super-secret-decoder-ring-membership-sigil of WotC upon it.
I swear, some days it’s just not even worth gouging out my own brain with a spoon.
EDIT: And it gets worse. The chucklehead in question is actually an employee of another small “non-Official” d20 publisher….so he should fucking know better.
I just got told by a WotC freelancer that slaving for a penny a word is supercool. What’cha gonna do?
Yep, seemed ignorant to me.
Snakes on a plane mang. I saw that post as well. What gets me is that, and no disparagement to Hot Pursuit but aren’t there several other chase rule sets out there for D20 as well. Why must there even be an ‘official’ one?
Seems that the response has been well-handled in the thread, actually, with most people saying “Um, it is published already” and so forth.
But yes, I’d imagine that sort of thing can be depressing.
Does anyone making this suggestion ever consider that it is the same as saying “Adamant shouldn’t make money off this, a bigger company that had nothing to do with it should instead steal all the sales for no good damn reasons” ?
No?
Frak ’em.