There are other ways of fostering third-party support, aside from the strawman examples you listed. One great way would be to open up the program’s extensibility to third-party plug-ins. They could even monetize this process; in several ways that I can think of, and probably many more that I haven’t considered yet. It wouldn’t even be that hard to implement, assuming they cleaned up the XML output files a bit first (which they should probably get around to doing anyway).

As Phil pointed out though, they wouldn’t want to do that. They tried third-party-friendly last time around, and they didn’t find it to their liking. This time out, they’re making things decidedly harder for third-party content providers to compete. And that’s only “insidious” if you ignore the fact that WotC is a subsidiary of Hasbro, and their primary goal in releasing and promoting D&D is to turn as large of a profit as possible, not to foster a big, happy gaming community or to help their competitors get a leg up. I don’t blame them for acting like a corporation, even if their interests in D&D don’t always run parallel to mine.

I do however take some pleasure (however sardonic it may be) in the irony of their having to pay lip-service to the idea of a big, happy gaming community and a thriving third-party market in order to promote D&D and turn their profit. Unfortunately for them, the two things aren’t as divorced as they’d like them to be. I chuckle a bit whenever they’re reminded of this, but not out of any particular malice on my part. I’m a 4E player. I own every 4E book currently out (minus Manual of the Planes and all the adventures after H1). I want D&D to remain profitable and I want WotC to thrive and continue to produce content for this system. But I also want the third-party market to succeed, because I realize that 4E’s success hinges at least partially on third-party support. I may not buy every adventure that Goodman Games puts out (for instance), but the fact that they’re out there making adventures and splat books means the pressure is on WotC to maintain the quality and value of their own content. It also means more people playing 4E, which means more 4E. And to me, that’s a good thing.

Technically you can add anything in it but… It’s only a name and it description. So your new power you create for monk in your home brew adventure does not follow the power templates for power and is not limited to the monk.

To use this customization feature you go in the campaign management tab add the element and save it to your campaign setting file which you can send to all of your players after ward. Then the player can load the campaign setting and add the feat/power/etc… by selecting the show custom “item” on the little H in the appropriate tab.

This concept is cool but give me a better editor for the custom material beside the name + description and it would be great. Add an easy way to import/export these custom item and it would be awesome. The last part might be tricky because of the potential abuse. (read somebody entering all the official material and redistributing it.)

I think you’re going a bit overboard, Phil and Xero, to suggest that this was some cunning business trick. They gave you the ability to include custom content. I don’t really see what more they could do.

My girl friend as an hard time with English. Currently each time I reprint her character for leveling up I must re-write the French clue I had written on the previous version. I would like to be able to tag notes on these power that could get printed in addition or instead of the power card text. In that way you could write your own power description and replace an existing one or write the translation of the power, etc…

The customizing capability are somewhat limited but they are existing in the campaign management section of the character builder you can create new feat and powers that will appear in the list. I have not use it thoroughly though maybe I could do something that comes close to what I want. But I’m sure that you could use it to add most of the 3rd party feats without their restriction. (only for bard would probably be available for all)

I’ll check on that tonight.

I got contacted by someone at goodman games about a specific type of adventure.

I pitched the adventure, including a summary description of each scene. They answered ‘go for it’ and I since delivered that, based on the 4e style guide (which was at an early draft back in November of 2008).

So my experience is very limited.

For the DCC, I’m sure they doit like WotC and ask for detailed outlines and expect people to deliver an outline that respects the tagline appearing on all modules. I’ll ask Harley Stroh for sure.

However, Goodman Games is giving a ‘Write adventure that don’t suck’ seminar based on a Gen Con Exclusive book they’ll sell over there. I’d like to attend thatseminar and maybe I’ll get the info you seek. At the very least, I’ll get the book.

@Noumenon: The Style guide is just that: Style. Not content. So iot describes the structure of writing the adventure, proper Stat blocks and so forth. But absolutely no info on what to write. To write a good adventure you need to know 4e in and out and be a good writer… IMHO.

If so, the player/DM just needs to create those 3p products in the builder.

I’ve recently been smacked in the face by an outcome of DDI that I completely didn’t foresee: as the Character Builder’s popularity increases, peoples’ interest in third-party content seems to decrease considerably. The Character Builder is nice (despite its many flaws), and in my experience has a tendency to completely replace manual character sheet maintenance… but because it doesn’t support third-party content, neither do my games. New feats, classes, races, house rules, weapons, powers, etc. become an inconvenience in any campaign where the CB is used more than as just another way to verify builds.

I wonder how much of that effect was deliberate. If it wasn’t, I wonder what WotC is doing to increase 3p support.

Of course I’m looking forward to eating breakfast with one of the celebrated Gnomes… I’ll capture you, drug you and try to extirpate the Stew’s recipe!

If the WotC guys shake your hand, are they going to throw splatbooks at me?

@D_Luck: Oh I’ll write a few posts about my experiences for sure!

Have fun!