Plaag wrote:Your Judges Guild pass is revoked!
Bill Owen wrote:Has anyone here talked to Bob Jr. about this? And if so, did you get the impression that he was not interested?
FormCritic wrote:It's pretty clear that the clip art was driven by finances and not artistic tastes.SNIPThis is also (or even especially) true with maps. The computer mapping programs I see in use in so many publications were intended to produce color maps for private use. When these color maps are slugged down into black and white, they look sloppy, dark and second-rate. I'd much prefer a hand-drawn map created by a non-artist...especially for town maps, where the CGI sins are magnified. These sins make a product seem ill-conceived and poorly produced.
Bill Owen wrote:I kept everything that I won from Bob's dungeon. He would draw these great maps, spells etc. Typically they were made to look olden by either some sort tempura paint I think but mostly tea bags (very into reuse/recycle then!) and the piece de resistance the toasted edges of these made with cigarettes or stove burners. And he did occasionally burn up his lovely artwork. These were labors of love long before we ever talked about doing a little service business for game judges.So I totally understand the appeal of the "starter" (in your case) though ours were desserts! If we had been clever, we should have provided something from the beginning... ambiguous like what you described that the refs could xerox. I think it would have added even more value and I would have paid for that art if Bob couldn't keep pace.
FormCritic wrote:As far as I can tell, the collapse of Judges Guild in 1982 or so had much more to do with changes in the game market, TSR's revocation of the game license and the national economy than it did with business decisions by Bob.WOTC made similar decisions about staffing and headquarters before they sold out to Hasbro. Anyone who visited their gamers' paradise world headquarters in Seattle (as I did) would have seen the minds of gamers at work rather than the minds of businessmen. Yet, WOTC was wildly profitable at that time. The gamers' paradise they made was hardly breaking the bank.
Bill Owen wrote:I also realized that I implied that Gary Gygax was "biggest, fattest capitalist" but in my universe that is high praise not a criticism. If an entrepreneur can ethically stay in business that seems like a roll of 11-12 on two six-sided dice, so I really salute them. Nowadays it's fashionable to either minimize a businessman's achievement or actively loot it...