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Ken Oswald
As we all look toward the release of Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, I personally become a little "philosophical." Hanging out at the local game shop, one can't help being assaulted with the endless chatter. "I can't wait for 4th ed! The updates just make sense." "No way am I falling into that marketing scam. I fell for it once with 3.5, not going there again." "D&D is history – This other RPG is far better!"
How does a gamer go about taking it all in?
With so many considerations and possibilities before us, I decided to get the perspective of someone that's been through it all - The gaming master himself: Monte Cook!
If you don't know who Monte Cook is, let me know where your rock is and I'll come lift it off. A veteran of the industry, he really has done it all. Monte started out in 1988 with Iron Crown Enterprises working with such games as Rolemaster and Champions . From there he joined up with TSR to work on role-playing's defining game Dungeons & Dragons . When Wizards of the Coast bought out TSR, Monte followed D&D to its new home and co-designed the 3rd edition game, which included authorship of the Dungeon Master's Guide . He went on to establish his own gaming company for d20 products, freelanced all kinds of material for others in the business, and has now gone on to writing fiction, including a comic series for Marvel.
The Interview –
Ken: On top of writing the Dungeon Master's Guide and co-designing third edition, you started your own game company making Dungeons & Dragons products that have won an incredible number of prestigious awards. It's been said that your company, Malhavoc Press, has truly set a new standard in the gaming industry. How have you been able to achieve such accomplishments among the maelstrom of competition in RPG publication?
Monte : Well, let's be honest. Having my name on the backs of all the core rulebooks certainly didn't hurt when it comes to putting out d20 products. Coupled with many years of previous design, which in turn leads to more name recognition - and really I probably should have just called it Monte Cook Games. But I didn't want to do that, because I'm really not that self-obsessed, despite what some people may think. (It's interesting that people sometimes develop opinions about a designer's personality based on his work. That's a little like judging someone based on a high school math test, or maybe a term paper.)
Anyway, to really answer your question, I guess it's a lot of factors:
1. Being in touch with how the game is actually played.
2. Playtesting.
3. An attention to detail.
4. Having a great editor.
5. Really caring about each and every product, rather than just churning out a steady stream of stuff and caring about only a handful.
6. Paying attention to what game fans say.
7. Taking chances, blazing new trails, and avoiding cliches.
8. Other stuff I'm forgetting.
Ken: Ptolus: Monte Cook's City by the Spire , a Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting released in 2006 by your company Malhavoc Press, is actually the longest running third edition campaign ever, even over such juggernauts as Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms, as development originally used Ptolus over others. In 2007 this monster product (a nearly 700 page mega-book) cleaned up more RPG awards than practically any other, including Product of the Year, Best Setting, Best Production Values and Best Cartography. Is this the pinnacle of your gaming career?
Monte: I try very hard to avoid words like "pinnacle," or "magnum opus," or anything like that, because that implies that you're never going to get any better. That said, I'm not pursuing game design any further (at least at this time), so maybe I shouldn't care. I don't know. Maybe 3rd Edition is the pinnacle of my career. I'm not really even sure it's for me to judge. Ask me again when I'm 90 years old. (I love the idea, by the way, of a bunch of guys sitting around in an old folks home playing D&D. That will be me in 50 years.)
I'm really proud of Ptolus, though. Now that it's done, I think it is what all gaming sourcebooks should be, just based on its approach and organization alone. (Not that every book needs to be so huge, of course.) Plus, it's just an incredibly beautiful book. It's just a pleasure to page through. If it turns out that it is the pinnacle of my career, that's fine by me.
Ken: I have to say, it is an incredible book and is indeed gorgeous. I can't recommend it enough – for those of you that haven't seen it, find it now!
So, what do you attribute your success to when it comes to game and product design?
Monte: Drinking lots of milk and eating all my vegetables.
Well, lots of things, I suppose. I strongly believe in playtesting. There's a lot of designers out there who think they can do it all by "eyeballing" game mechanics, and sometimes you can, but in a complex system you really can't. Not entirely. I'd also attribute a lot of my recent success to the hard work of my editor, Sue.
It's all the same stuff, mainly, that I said earlier when you asked about the success of Malhavoc Press. Because Malhavoc lived or died based on the quality of the design. That's why I only worked with the very best designers and editors at Malhavoc.
The thing I love most about gaming is the wild flights of imagination and the ability to create really innovative characters and stories. I think that comes through in my design. I hope it does.
Ken: As a player or DM, what makes a supplement well worth the purchase for you?
Monte: For me, first and foremost, it's got to have ideas in it that I wouldn't have thought of myself. There's a lot of people with a certain sort of arrogance out there who say "I only use my own adventures," or "I only use stuff I create."
Ken: I have to admit a hefty guilt here. I have a big gaming library, but practically everything I run in rpg's I've written myself.
Monte: That's great, to a point. It's good, however, to get someone else's point of view. Even the most creative person in the world can't come up with everything.
So I'm intrigued by new ideas much more than anything else. Frankly, if you gave me the choice between two new prestige classes, one really innovative but flawed and one mechanically perfect but run of the mill, I'll take the innovative one every time. I don't think I'm alone in that. I'm not trying to say that mechanics and balance aren't important. But if they're not tied to something interesting, who cares? If I pick up a supplement or adventure and it's full of just what you'd expect it to have in it, I'll put it back on the shelf.
Too much emphasis is placed on the minutiae, I think. If there's a really cool new monster in a book, but it's Spot score is +2 when it should be +3, who really cares? That error isn't going to affect my game in the slightest. RPG design just isn't so precise an endeavor that small things like that actually affect gameplay. When I buy an rpg book, I look for what it can add to my game. I don't check it over like a teacher grading papers.
I'm also happy if I can use even just a part of a book. Lots of times I won't use a whole published adventure (in fact, I almost never do), but I will take out a few cool encounters, NPCs, or whatever. Same with a book of spells or magic items or whatever. If I get a half dozen from a book that add to my game, it was money well spent.
Ken: I wholeheartedly agree. I write a lot of stuff, sure, but I love going through game books I've bought for ideas and portable material. Definitely adds spice to the gaming.
Recently you were invited to Seattle Washington by Wizards of the Coast. A few days later the plan to release Dungeons & Dragons 4.0 was released to the world. What was your reaction while at your old stomping grounds to this news and what impact do you think 4.0 will have?
Monte: Well, I'd pretty much figured out that 4.0 was coming out in 2008 a few years ago. (I told some people I knew at WotC that about a year and a half ago and they were tight-lipped, but clearly unhappy that it was so easy to guess.) So there was no surprise.
But it was interesting. They're doing some interesting things, both with the mechanics of the game, and its presentation with all the online D&D Insider material and tools. Will it all work? I have no idea. And now that the initial announcement has been made, I'm just as much in the dark as anyone else. Probably much more so, at this point, because I understand they've released a lot more information online in blogs and messageboards and things. To be honest, I'm not really paying attention. I'm doing other stuff now, and I don't have time to keep track of it all. I know it seems like I'd be really interested to seeing what they're doing with the game I worked on, but the truth is, it doesn't really affect me. I've got the D&D game that I love. I'm back to running two campaigns at once using 3.0, plus a few things from 3.5. That's not to say anything negative about what they're doing, or that I won't take a look at the books when they come out (I'm sure I will, with great interest). It's just where I am right now.
As for the impact of 4.0, well, I don't know. We'll just have to see. Obviously, there's a lot of potential for success, but they face some very different challenges than we did with 3.0. The biggest difference is that there just wasn't a lot of 2.0 interest or support when 3.0 came along. Now there's still a lot of people who continue to enjoy 3.0 or 3.5, and they've got to convince them to switch. To put it another way, our challenge was to get disaffected people to come back to D&D, or start playing rpgs again, and there's is to get already (at least fairly) satisfied people to switch rules. That's a completely different approach.
Ken: Fans of Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 and even 3.5 are often surprised to find that the original design team, yourself included, is no longer involved with Wizards of the Coast. From your experience, what led to these team changes and at what point did you decide to depart as well?
Monte: Well, yes and no. Jonathan Tweet is still at Wizards, he's just not working on rpgs. Rich Baker did some preliminary work on 3.0, and he's still there. And as far as I know, many of the people who worked on 3.5 are still there (such as Andy Collins) and are likely now shaping 4.0.
But yes, Skip Williams and I are both gone, and like I said, Jonathan's not working on rpgs any more. I can't speak for them, however. I left of my own volition about a year or so after 3.0 came out. Also about a year after Hasbro bought Wizards. I wanted to work for myself rather than a large corporation. I needed to get away from the bureaucracy and what I saw as an over management of game design. Wizards' design philosophy and mine also started to head in different directions around that time. I value a single, uncompromised vision, and they value teamwork. (That's me trying to be fair to their point of view.) So I left to pursue writing projects of my own, and to start Malhavoc Press.
Ken: Do you think marketing and sales goals in the industry have had a negative impact on RPG's?
Monte: They can, but they don't have to. You don't have to go to one extreme or the other. If marketing and sales drives the creative process, that can lead to problems, because it discourages innovation and encourages "safe," "tried-and-true" choices. It can also lead to games and products coming out before they're really ready (or before the audience is ready). But it's just as wrong to believe that the games that sell well must be crap and only the small, "independent" games are good. I've worked for (and been) the little guy and I've worked for the big guy and there's room for creativity and good business sense on both ends.
Ken: White Wolf just released a product billed as your "last book written for role-playing games" this past August. Tell us how that came about and what it was like working for White Wolf as opposed to Wizards of the Coast.
Monte: Well, the experiences were so different that it's hard to compare them. I worked for WotC full time as an in-house designer, going into the office every day. For White Wolf, I worked on a freelance basis from my own home, on my own time. White Wolf and my own company, Malhavoc Press, have a long history of working together, and most of the people at White Wolf are my friends.
Basically, after I'd decided not to do game design anymore, Stewart Wieck and Rich Thomas of White Wolf said, "if you could do whatever you wanted with the World of Darkness, what would you do?" When someone asks you a question like that, you pay attention. It was just too cool of an offer to pass up.
Ken: Now you're venturing into the world of fiction writing. You've already published novels and short stories as well as your own series of comics for Marvel based on your multi-award winning Ptolus campaign setting. What do your fans have to look forward to next?
Monte: I'm currently working on a fairly large fantasy novel (which I suppose is to say, a fantasy novel of average length). If everything goes perfectly, it might be out next year. But I wouldn't be surprised if it was early 2009, either. Or maybe it will suck and it will never come out. That's part of the fun with my job.
Ken: Now the all important question fans want to know: Any chance we'll ever see more Monte Cook RPG Products?
Monte: Only time will tell. I'm not trying to be coy. I really just don't know. I'm not working on any game stuff right now, and it's not in my plans for the future at all, but never say never.
In Closing, I really want to thank Monte Cook for succumbing to my barrage of questions. He was kind enough to agree to a few questions for NBOF only to open up an email from me that might have looked like a novelette. And despite his comments to me that he had to skip some due to time constraints, he answered practically every question.
I hope all you NBOF and D&D fans out there, and all you RPG'ers in general, get a chance to experience Monte's game materials and check out his fiction.
About Ken Oswald –
Ken is the newbie at NBOF, reviewing and contributing game material to the feat mega-site. But he's definitely not a newbie to Dungeons & Dragons: for more than two decades he's journeyed into the darkest abysses of role-playing's defining game. His current campaign has been a consistent source of nightmare to his faithful players for 6 years. In his spare time Ken can be found in his private studio (an important add on to his house) writing game material for D&D, designing board games, plotting some new fiction, or oil painting. He is also a devoted band booster to his two kids and personal secretary to his wife of 15 years. Sometimes he sleeps, but always with his eyes open.
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