Christine and I were asked to be on a Roleplaying panel at a small sci-fi convention a few months ago. We weren't sure exactly what we'd be talking about, but the third person on the panel was in charge and would set the discussion going. We were pretty confident that we could keep up with any topic that got started. Then we were informed that the person in charge of the panel wasn't going to be there -- she wanted to attend one of the other panels at the same time, and didn't think that anyone would show up for our panel anyway. It turned out we had about two dozen people waiting for us when we got there. The conversation was lively and we talked about a wide variety of topics.

One of the questions that was asked was "What do you think of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition?"

Christine has never even looked at it, and I had to admit that I had only glanced through the Player's Handbook. But I went on to talk about what I thought it had done to the Gaming Industry. Since then, I've had a chance to think a little more about what I said.

Whatever one might think about the game system or TSR / Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro, you have to admit that in the last year, we have seen the formation of more small game companies then we have seen in a very long time. These companies are cranking out adventures, spell books, and creature beastiaries as fast as they can write them. Naturally, some of them are better than others. Some are excellent and some outright stink.

It all reminds me of the late 1970's and early 1980's. Dozens of small game publishers came into existence. Most of them out of love for gaming than for the money. Companies like Metagaming, Judges Guild, Paranoia Press, Midkemia Press and many more. Their books often were of the lowest production values -- little artwork, non-proportional typefaces that looked like bad typewriters, typos galore, poor quality paper, and horrible illustrations. But gaming was young that and people didn't care what it looked like, as long as the game played well.

Slowly but surely the larger companies, with more money to spend, started looking for a broader audience, and to lure them in they insisted on better production -- Full color, glossy covers, professional layout, quality printing and good interior art. In other words, everything we expect from a game now. TSR was the leader in this with their stable of artists. Soon, gamers came to think of this as the norm. Anything else would have been amateurish.

But this expectation made it more difficult for individual gamers to have much of a chance of publishing his game. Few game distributors or game stores would stock something that looked like it came off a bad photocopier.

The larger game companies also came out with their primary game systems and supported them as much as they could. TSR had D&D, Steve Jackson had GURPS and so on. They went after all of their fans as hard as they could to buy supplements, and came out with fewer and fewer new games. And since the gamers were busy buying supplements for their favorite games, they had less time and money to try out new game systems. We became used to this idea, and more reluctant to give new games a try.

So it became much harder for a small company to spring into existence. Not only did you have to write a set of RPG rules (which is by no means an easy task), you had to playtest it, develop it, print it, market it and get people to buy it. Then you could publish adventures and supplements for it. But the first book is always more difficult -- the writing has to be good, the rules have to be good, the thick book (usually 100 - 200 pages) has to be illustrated, and it has to printed, which is an expensive proposition.

But this all changed with the d20 Open License. Now game designers don't have to write a system, they can go right to scenario design. And so we're seeing the emergence of lots of new companies (as well as a number of established companies) using modern printing technology to quickly produce some very attractive modules.

While this is great and I wish all these new companies the best, I do fear that we will be seeing fewer new RPG systems developed and that is unfortunate.

You may notice a few changes to the magazine. The first shouldn't be noticable: we changed web servers and are getting much better service from the new company, JaguarPC . If you're looking for lost cost web hosting, I can definitely recommend them.

Also, we've added banner ads to the magazine. This was our intention from the beginning, but it took a long time to implement it in a way that we liked. Actually, a free CGI script that came for JaguarPC is handling it all. If you have any interest in advertising with us, the prices are quite reasonable. Our advertising information can be found here.

The comment room is also new, and should work better and be more reliable than the previous one.

--Tim

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