Third-Party's
a Crowd
April 5th, 2010
Hello everyone. Sit down. It’s time we had the talk.
You see, it’s come to my attention that Necromancers of the Northwest is a Third Party Publisher. Well, alright, that’s a lie. I’ve always known that we were a third party publisher. I’m not quite as dense as I look. But I’ve decided to sit down today and talk to you about it.
You see, the ugly truth is that a large portion of the gaming community really doesn’t like third party publishers. They have a reputation for being unbalanced, poorly thought out, and poorly designed. Though a lot of people will have an individual third party publisher or two that they like, and which they claim is better than the rest, the fact is that few third party publishers really stick out that much from the crowd, and even those that have a “pet” third party publisher still feel that third party publishers, as a whole, largely attempt to “sell their house-rules” and simply aren’t worth the time or the money. (Luckily for us, we have a bit of an edge on that last part)
To be perfectly honest, I used to be in the same boat as the lot of you. I think it was mostly because I served primarily as a DM in my gaming group, and so my exposure to third party publishers usually came in the form of one of my players asking if they can use some class, template, or item that looked dubiously overpowered. My knee-jerk reaction to these cases was typically the more conservative one, and the one I expect most DMs took: I more or less disallowed anything not published by Wizards of the Coast, and often disallowed content from Dragon magazine, despite its “official” status.
I would be lying if I said that my opinion on third party publishers had changed very much prior to becoming one myself (more on that below), but I really think the change in my perspective began through some of Wizards’ own material. You see, when you get right down to it, I’m pretty sure that the major reason why most people are so wary of third party material is that it isn’t as “official” as the material that Wizards of the Coast puts out. It’s a wonderful theory, that Wizards of the Coast has these great standards of excellence in material and are so very concerned about their brand that they would never let a poorly-thought-out or half-playtested mechanic make it to print. It’s nice to think that Wizards will infallibly keep all of their content balanced, as far as power is concerned, and keep the game from being ‘corrupted’ in all the ways we imagine that third party publishers, who, really, are just some schmucks with a printing press, would do.
This is a beautiful theory, but it simply isn’t true. Now, let me clarify: I’m sure that Wizards of the Coast and all their employees care a great deal about game balance and game quality, and I in no way mean to imply that they slack off at their jobs or create an inferior product. That’s not what I’m getting at here.
What I’m getting at is, behind the fancy Wizards’ label, all the “official” Dungeons and Dragons products are ultimately being written by some schmucks with a printing press. The company is bigger, and no doubt has a few more safeguards for quality control, but ultimately they’re all still human. They make mistakes, and the fact that their products are “official” is more a result of business acquisitions and licensing than it is a matter of being the most qualified to produce innovative, fun gaming material. In fact, it’s entirely possible that designers at Wizards are at a disadvantage when it comes to making quality content, rather than an advantage, due to corporate pressure and interference from Hasbro (the company that owns Wizards of the Coast).
Indeed, on many occasions I found that a number of these official Wizards supplements were at least as unbalancing to my game as any third party material I had looked at, and Wizards of the Coast has its own reputation for “power creep”, a phenomenon whereby the material they produce becomes more and powerful as time goes on, rendering older material at least somewhat obsolete (a topic for another article).
It wasn’t until the advent of Pathfinder, however, that I really began to have my preconceptions about third party publishers challenged. With the release of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook, paizo claimed themselves as a true successor to the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 legacy. I have nothing against 4th edition, and I think that it is excellent at what it does (again, a topic for another day) but it is clear to me that for all the things it is, the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons is not very closely related with its immediate predecessor. It didn’t take much examination to reveal that paizo had created quality work, something I had not expected to be able to find in a third party publisher. Indeed, if they could do something this great, and in fact, deliver something to an entire area of the market—that which still preferred 3rd edition to 4th—that Wizards of the Coast had proven unable or unwilling to do, it seemed foolish to believe that Wizards of the Coast was in some way an infallible master of fantasy gaming. Good, sure, perhaps even great, but somehow their officiousness, their status as unquestionable, unapproachable, guardians of the game against those hated third party publishers who would peddle any broken, overpowered class or spell to make a buck, had simply faded away.
It is often said to me that, when it comes to third party publishers, you might as well just houserule your own stuff. I think that’s silly. The fact of the matter is, you can houserule absolutely anything you want. You can houserule the content of every single Wizards of the Coast supplement (or “splatbooks” as they are not-so-affectionately called by their detractors), and, if you really wanted, you could houserule the entire core rules. If you’re happy using the rules you (or your DM) just made up and wrote down, you don’t need to buy games at all, you can just play your own. The reason to get sourcebooks, whether they’re from Wizards or otherwise (and I personally think Wizards does an excellent job of making sourcebooks, especially at the rate they produce them) is because you believe that someone else—the people who wrote the book—can produce better, more enjoyable rules than you can sitting at your kitchen table. And for the most part, depending on who you are and who, precisely, was writing that book, that’s the case: people who spend their days making games for a living are just plain better at it than people who don’t. They know how games work, why games work, and understand what they’re doing when they start messing around under the hood, metaphorically speaking.
That said, we wouldn’t be in business here if we didn’t believe that the products we put out were better than what the average person’s houserules would look like. We’ve put thought into our methods, and methods into our madness, and we believe that our products are 100% quality. So go download one today. Right now. They’re free, AND they come with a money-back guarantee.
Until next time, may you not judge a book by its licensing sticker.