(i get why third party authors want to sell to that market, and I support the hopefully unionized WotC employees who are good people, but there are so. many. other. rpg. systems. that you could make and promote products for...)
@ethanschoonover I’d love to see more content for non-WotC systems. WoTC are like the Apple of RPGs. They don’t sell PDFs. They spastically go on anti-third-party content crusades. They want you to subscribe to D&D Beyond and be on their treadmill (while never owning anything, just licensing it). We can do better.
@ethanschoonover Every so often I see some YouTube video about some brilliant new idea someone's had that they've started to use in D&D, and I'm like, there's an entire genre of games going back twenty years based on that idea. Like, I'm glad you're being more creative with D&D, but do you seriously never look at other games?
@foolishowl it's honestly like if there were people who said they loved film but had only ever watched marvel movies.
@ethanschoonover It's most frustrating when I'll hear people talk about D&D and how it's so much more than dungeon crawls and sword and sorcery fantasy. Because, that's exactly what it is, and it's good at what it does, but it sounds like you really want to do something else and would be happier with one of thousands of other games that help you do what you actually want to do.
I used to follow some authors and podcasts (that I can't remember the names of now...) where they explored different tabletop games and discussed things like how the mechanics of the rules would impact the meta game. What sorts of conflicts naturally emerge. What behaviors are rewarded. How well do the encounters balance between class types. Are there mechanical advantages to encourage solving problems without fighting. What tools are provided to the GM to highlight the kinds of interactions the party likes. It was interesting to really dive into the meta theory of game design and highlight what makes a good game for the types of stuff the party wants to do.
@JessTheUnstill @ethanschoonover There was a sort of first wave of "theory" about TTRPGs in the 90s, sometimes now mocked for being pretentious, but it has led to an ongoing community of discussion about theory and practice that really does influence game design and play styles.
So part of what's strange to me is that it feels like half the TTRPG world has all this discourse going on, and the other half seems completely unaware of it.
@foolishowl @JessTheUnstill @ethanschoonover marketing is more effective than it ought to be :/
@ireneista @JessTheUnstill @ethanschoonover That's part of it. And I think a lot of people do a fair amount of work to make D&D work for them and don't want to make the switch.
Like, you ever find a tool that easily solves a problem you'd been handling in a convoluted way, and you feel disappointed?
Oct 13, 2026, 11:16 PM@JessTheUnstill @foolishowl I produced a ttrpg theory podcast for a while (RPG xray, offline now) and have thought about doing it again for sure.
Oct 13, 2026, 11:17 PM
@ethanschoonover There's lots of problems but the third party thing specifically is that the TTRPG is basically whatever Dungeons and Dragons is doing, and then literally everything else is a footnote on the inventory sheet of your LGS. It was hard to get folks to look at other books. The market gap is insane, I think even for the PF2 release I sold 1 pathfinder book for every 5 5e books.
I wish I had a solution or something more productive to say, but it really doesn't make financial sense.