It seems like Pathfinder development is much more transparent than D&D. They have active Facebook and web blogs. They frequently visit their forums. Further, major releases all have a beta period, they release PDFs of all their sourcebooks and they have open submissions for writers. In contrast D&D doesn’t seem to have a face or much of a community liaison. I believe the last Reddit AMA was a year ago. What structure is in place that causes D&D to be so opaque and mired in paper publishing?
Bonus points for mentioning licensing character creation software rights to HeroLab.I don’t agree with your premise – we opened up the development of our core system to an audience that is larger than the audience playing any other RPG on the market.
We have over 600,000 followers on our Facebook page and post there regularly.
The core team is active on Twitter and answers rules questions.
Honestly, I think the better question is why do people think we’re opaque after we spent two years conducting an incredibly open test driven by rigorously collected and analyzed data? I’m really not sure what else we can do.
IMO, a big drawback we face is that when we say we’ll do something, people hold us to it. D&D is an order of magnitude larger than any other tabletop RPG. If we say we’re going to do X and then don’t deliver, we catch far more grief than any other publisher.Comment from discussion AMA: Mike Mearls, Co-Designer of D&D 5, Head of D&D R&D.
Bonus points for mentioning licensing character creation software rights to HeroLab.I don’t agree with your premise – we opened up the development of our core system to an audience that is larger than the audience playing any other RPG on the market.
We have over 600,000 followers on our Facebook page and post there regularly.
The core team is active on Twitter and answers rules questions.
Honestly, I think the better question is why do people think we’re opaque after we spent two years conducting an incredibly open test driven by rigorously collected and analyzed data? I’m really not sure what else we can do.
IMO, a big drawback we face is that when we say we’ll do something, people hold us to it. D&D is an order of magnitude larger than any other tabletop RPG. If we say we’re going to do X and then don’t deliver, we catch far more grief than any other publisher.Comment from discussion AMA: Mike Mearls, Co-Designer of D&D 5, Head of D&D R&D.