Quote from: Anglachel;946999@ Cruxador - Well let me know when your finished with your high-powered fantasy game. I'd be interested to take a look.

Quote from: Anglachel;946999Yes, yes, the old "tastes may vary" sure. BUT...not being a fan of old school DnD and not liking old school DnD is not the same. At least in my reading of it. There are very very few mechanics that i am fan of, and i play a lot of other games nonetheless. So you could say i am playing a lot of games that i am not a fan of. But i am not playing games that i actively dislike. So yes, big difference in my book.

Quote from: SineNomine;947033Therefore, acquiring the license for Exalted is essentially a matter of signing up to be shat on continuously for several years in order to build someone else's IP for the inevitable day when you lose the license and can no longer sell what you've spent the past X years being shat on in order to make.

Quote from: SineNomine;947033Speaking purely for myself, if White Wolf were to offer me God-Kingship of Exalted with complete carte blanche to design a new edition and royalty terms as generous as anyone could expect, I'd still take a pass on it, because Exalted is a man-killing game to design for.

To produce anything like a system that the existing Exalted fanbase would embrace as "Exalted" requires an absolutely savage amount of design and testing, and it will still fail to satisfy a significant chunk of the fanbase. Which, for a game as popular as Exalted is and given the type of superfans it attracts, will most certainly result in deranged jeremiads against the designers, their pets, and their favorite colors. Any attempt to evade this issue by redesigning Exalted to fit a different kind of relationship between the players and the mechanics will just infuriate a different section of the fanbase and alienate a good deal more of them, as the flaws of Exalted are inextricable from the exact things that make it so fun for many people.

Therefore, acquiring the license for Exalted is essentially a matter of signing up to be shat on continuously for several years in order to build someone else's IP for the inevitable day when you lose the license and can no longer sell what you've spent the past X years being shat on in order to make. For this you will be paid wages that a junior IT drone would find unappealing, and acquire domain-specific expertise that is almost entirely useless outside of the license. And when the license does end your odds of translating that achievement into an equal or better new deal with another game are, shall we say, not great.

That's not a good deal.

Until game publishing is able to shell out some real money to designers and producers, a competent game designer is almost always better off building their own IP and collecting 100% of the profits on modest evergreen products. Licensing IP simply cannot pay off adequately on the time and effort sunk into products that will inevitably become unsalable within a few years.

In the old days, when POD and online sales weren't practical, a line was effectively dead in 4-5 years anyway, because all the books were out of the retail channel by then and it probably wasn't worth the money to reprint it. Even if it was still kicking, another cycle was usually plenty to exhaust interest in the game, and the residual fandom wasn't sufficient economic prompting to run a third printing. If your license died in five years, it was annoying, but you could expect to have already sucked most of the juice out of the market by then. Even back then it was an iffy proposition, but you had a chance.

Now? Now there's no reason why your latest magnum opus shouldn't be continuously available on Amazon/DTRPG from now until the heat death of the universe. That residual fanbase no longer requires a full-dress print run to service, and sales can flare back up at any time since you've got your entire back catalog available with a few clicks. Volunteering to turn off those products after a few years now makes for a real, painful cost, and it's not one I can recommend for any IP I can currently think of.

Quote from: san dee jota;947047I wonder how much Onyx Path is prepping for this, and not just with Exalted.  I know I'm tempted to go out and buy those last few POD products I've been eyeballing.

Quote from: Anglachel;946999Yes, yes, the old "tastes may vary" sure. BUT...not being a fan of old school DnD and not liking old school DnD is not the same. At least in my reading of it. There are very very few mechanics that i am fan of, and i play a lot of other games nonetheless. So you could say i am playing a lot of games that i am not a fan of. But i am not playing games that i actively dislike. So yes, big difference in my book.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;947064Doesn't Qwixalted address most of the problems with the rules? What flaws does it have and how could those be addressed?

Quote from: Snowman0147;947153Now what if some one buys off the IP and becomes the new owner?

Quote from: AsenRG;947052They did send Exalted 1e to the Bundle of Holding, so obviously they realize it.

Quote from: san dee jota;947209True, but I meant more in the sense of "how much do we want to spend developed Exalted 3ed and our two WoD lines, when we have to pay nuWhite Wolf for them and... aw crap, there's a witch hunt going on over this Zak S. shit.  'No, we have not now nor have we ever been affiliated with Zak S., and effective immediately we will sever ties with anyone who has employed him, sold him goods or services, or would consider doing so.'"

Seriously though, -eventually-, for one set of reasons or another, Onyx Path will either buy those licenses (unlikely, or they'd already have done so) or stop bothering with them.

Quote from: AsenRG;947210Well, it would be funny if that was to happen due to a witch hunt.

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper;947211The question is... does Zak S weigh more than a duck?

Quote from: AsenRG;947214Judging by pictures, probably yes, but I'm not sure I understand the context.

Quote from: AsenRG;947210Well, it would be funny if that was to happen due to a witch hunt.