Letter to Decipher

Well, I finally decided to go to the source concerning the Decipher RPG situation. I general, I've thought the criticisms of the company were a bit harsh, but after 6 months of delays for something 'at the printers', I figured I'd pop a line to Decipher's big boy...

Dear Mr. Holland,

I was surprised and pleased when Decipher decided to get into roleplaying games this past year. I've purchased your products for both Lord of the Rings and Star Trek. However, long delays in the production schedule seem to be plaguing your RPG division. I've noticed increasing ire from other members of the Decipher RPG community over the delays of items that are "at the printer".

Though I am not in this category, I believe your company is about to slice it's own throat in the RPG area unless you get your product out closer to schedule. "At the printers" does not take 6 months; I'm in the publishing business and know this. You might send a rocket down to the marketing department to get word out to the customers via your website or through a site like trekrpg.net to placate your customers...particularly the Star Trek ones, who are not known for their patience.

I hope you don't find my comments impertinent, but I'd like to see an RPG company other than Wizards of the Coast stay around for a while.

Scott Rhymer
Albuquerque, NM

...and the response...

Scott,

Not at all. I appreciate your thoughts.

One of the issues here is that our RPG division is in L.A. so
bringing them into the Decipher process has been hard. Still, they
do great work and all the issues you raise are on our radar for
actions. Hopefully, you will see the results of this in 2003.
That's our goal anyway. ;-)

All the best,

Warren

...so this seems to be a 'we know we've got problems and we promise we'll think about getting around to solving it sometime in the future, should it affect our bottom line' kinda answer.

Apparently, we're expected to just hang out and wait for them to get around to us. I'm continuing to use CODA, but this kind of "it's not us it's the printer" -- "it's not us, it's the RPG guys not getting into the Decipher process" leads me to believe that we CODA people should get on with coming up with our own stuff for the game. I would be shocked to see any real movement in product; I think the interest in the RPG group's pretty lackluster.

it appears to me that they are aware of the problem.. but if it truely is a problem at the printer is there really anything that can be done about it. Other than change printer.

Uh oh.

"you will see the results of this in 2003"... do they mean, March 2003, August 2003, or "Fall 2003" ? < /sarcasm >

Well, thanks for sharing this letter and its answer, qerlin (and thanks for writing it in the first place).

I'm now officially switching to "waiting for Blizzard games" mode (for those who aren't into computer games, Blizzard Entertainment has become famous to release their games - usually excellent BTW - something like 2 years after they've been announced).

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Originally posted by C5

I'm now officially switching to "waiting for Blizzard games" mode

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As long as it's not FTL Games mode, we're all safe I guess. ;)

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Or we could just have Liz smite them

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* shakes corporate magic 8 ball *

Cost-benefit analysis projections indicate a high probability of success with this procedure :D

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Yeah. thats right a tonne of junk mail and spam email will of course get Decipher up and running, because in opening all that extra mail, and having their inbox inundated with all these emails wont take up any business time at all, and most certainly wont piss anyone off...

Jeez, thats a low suggestion Styro.

But back to the point in hand.

1 - The core rule books are available.

2 - A significant portion of us still have access to the LUG rules (which I notice the most voiciferous on this subject seemed to drop like a hot potato..>)

3 - We have imagination and creativity (a given in this particular hobby)...

4 - the issue of delayed products has been repeated over and over.

5 - The tone of the Decipher guys has been civil, but I tell you, reading the same shit over and over is getting my goat, and i neither work for Decipher nor is all this shit aimed at me... I can only imagine how pissed off or frustrated Doug, Don, and all the Decipher guys must be getting.

So the solution from this situation, from just that mediochre evidence seems so simple and clear...

1 - As players we can still use the LUG stuff, of (GASP) write our own stuff... Just as has been done on these very boards this last 6 months...

2 - We can sit tight knowing that as valuable customers (and not wanting to be irritating problems) that Decipher plans to operate like a business and will get product out sooner or later. After all, no product= no business= no Trek licenced RPG= We will have to write our own stuff anyway... Maths seems simple enough to me...

3 - Well there is no three, we should just let the guys get on with it. After all dealing with the same shit every couple of days really DOES get irritating after a while. (For Example, surely you guys are getting tired of all these 'sit tight and leave them alone' responses... I know I am, it was just my turn...)

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Quote:

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Originally posted by qerlin
...leads me to believe that we CODA people should get on with coming up with our own stuff for the game.

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Join the club; some of us have been doing that since the books first came out. ;)

Heaven forbid a GM comes up with his own stuff for his game.

In related news, you could hop over to Decipher's LOTR message board and read Matt Colville's post about Decipher looking for playtesters for their new RPG products, then contact him to apply your group.

edit: link to playtest info

I don't know. Is it safe to visit the Decipher's messageboards? The last time I visit there I felt a sense of emnity directed toward role-players.

Did they finally use a much better board software program?

Can't help you on the first question, REG. Other than a couple bad apples, I haven't had issues with the Decipher boards.

And they're still using the same crappy software.

As I said somewhere eles, what bugs me is less the fact that I have to wait for Decipher products than how little information Decipher is giving away. Even to a personal letter, all they can answer is "yeah we have trouble, but it'll be okay, just wait next year".
Wich for me means that either Decipher doesn't care a sh*t about its customer base, or that nobody there really knows what causes the delay. I don't know wich one'd be the worst.

Warren Holland takes the time to write a personal response to someone, and all people do is excoriate the man. If the grognards here spent as much time playing CODA as they did writing inane, whining, doom-saying drivel, there would be no complaints... everyone would be having too much f*cking FUN to bother.

Next you'll all be complaining about the quality of the books when they actually do arrive. That's all you seem to want to do anyway: complain. Give it a rest... it's boring as hell for the rest of us. Or better yet, ask Don to create a separate board just for complaints. That way those of us who actually play the game, rather than just complain about the releasr schedule, can converse in peace.

Haven't you noticed that we just like to complain ? Be it about Decipher schedule or books quality, Enterprise quality, channels programming, lack of personal IBG, world leaders actions, or other posters behaviour.
What would we be talking about if not for the complaining ? Ah, yes, RPG. Well, talking about RPG, I'm waiting for Decipher to release the Narrator Screen because it's easier to play and I was wondering when it would be... :p

Post 1071... wasn't that the registration number of the USS Constitution ?

This reminds me of a book my 3 yr. old nephew has, called something like "If you invite a pig to breakfast."

If you invite a pig to breakfast, he'll ask for flapjacks. If you give him flapjacks, he'll ask for butter. If you give him butter, he'll ask for syrup. If you give him syrup, he'll ask for eggs. And on and on and on.

Moral of the story--the pig is never satisfied.

(Note that I'm not using "pig" as an insult. It's just the character in the book.)

[rant]
Quit yer bellyaching and play the damn game. The products will come out when they come out. Either support the company or don't.
[/rant]

What kind of low, hateful person would serve anyone (pig or not) flapjacks without AT LEAST butter and syrup?

I want to see the books that haven't been released yet too, and I am frustrated by the communications black out. I think when people are upset about something, they'll grumble and complain. It's a fairly common reaction I think.

And, I think if someone waits and waits and waits for something, and then it doesn't live up to their expectations when they FINALLY get it, of course the reaction will be, "I've been waiting for this?"

For those that are complaining about the complaints, just stop reading the thread. For those complaining, it probably don't do any good as far as the Decipher situation goes...but I hope you feel better.

Sheesh...

Marc/TheDuck

I like bacon with my pancakes. :D

Seriously, I can't see any problem with a letter to Decipher. Seems more productive then venting understandable frustration on a message board.

I myself wish I knew what the situation was - at the very least I want to know which printer they are using in case I ever need to publish something. ;)

Hypothetical question... Is it possible for something to be at the printers without the printer being told to print?

(C5, USS Constitution was NCC-1700 according to the Franz Joseph blueprints. I think the USS Constellation from The Doomsday Machine was NCC-1017.)

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Originally posted by Sarge
(C5, USS Constitution was NCC-1700 according to the Franz Joseph blueprints. I think the USS Constellation from The Doomsday Machine was NCC-1017.)

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yup

Hallo,

What is frusterating to me as a player/ref/fan is that this is exactly the kind of waiting game that went on before and some of us (at least me) may be tired of the wait and see game.

LUG is good and so is CODA, but for those of us who are fans of a games that are long gone, you will lose customers/players if new product does not come out as promised.

I am not slamming anybody just trying to figure out what is making the patient so...upset.

Ronin84

I will finally comment on this situation.


Okay I am not going to wait for Decipher to do anything. Let's see I have made two complete alien sourcebooks whether people care or not! I have made around 100 different starship classes whether they are canon or not. I made several planets and several systems.

We have the rulebooks so use them. Maybe I am old school but you can play using just the core books and still have a good time.

I am sick of seeing thread titles that put down Decipher. Just play with what you got.

To guote AslanC: "The corebooks are the potatoes and the rest is just gravy!"

Get over it and create stuff or is our society to lazy to do that!?

Edit: Grammar

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Sheras, my Andorian security chief of the USS Titan (or the Endurance...I can't remember if we're the USS Endurance, a Titan-class starship or the USS Titan, an Endurance-class starship), is actually doing quite well with only the Players and Narrator's guides to keep him alive. Actually, the GM hasn't seemed impaired at all by the lack of narrator's screen. The players in general seems to be handling the life of Starfleet officers without using the Starfleet Ops book. We've got a unique alien species in our current episode that didn't need to come out of any alien book.

The game is actually quite viable with only the books on the market right now. The rest would be nice, but you can run the game without it.

If you just can't manage to play the game without the other sourcebooks, then...well...there are plenty of books out for the D20 system. If you really need a game with lots of books...

Quack!

Thanks for the correction, Sarge and qerlin. I'm always mixing Constellation and Constitution :o

I don't think it's a matter of whether or not we already have enough materials to have a good game. Of course we do.

It's just that the "we know we/L.A./the printer has problems" responses are getting old. We, as consumers, are already aware that somewhere in Decipher's production chain, there is a problem. What we are looking for now is some sort of confidence building measure.

Sure, the last thing they want to do now is to let another release date slip by. That's why they're not going to give us anything hard and fast. Decreasing our expectations seems to be the plan.

What Decipher failed to account for, is that by decreasing our expectations, they are frustrating their own market.

I have faith that the company will eventually release a high quality product. If they say that it'll be out in a month, I won't believe them. If they say that it'll be out in six months, I won't believe them. Their credibility is long gone as far as forecasting release dates, and I don't really care if that is Decipher's fault or the printer's fault.

The thing is, when they have further 'hiccups' in their production queue, someone will forecast doom because of this current problem. Decipher just won't have the street cred to pull another "the problem is at the printer" in the future, even if that's the solid truth.

The bottom line is this: Decipher is a company. They almost certainly don't care what we think of how they handle their business. They do care about how many units they sell, and this whole fiasco probably hasn't affected their long term sales too much. They know that when new products roll off the production line, we'll buy them, end of story.

After all, giving us a plain explanation, without room for misunderstanding, couldn't possibly be a good idea. ; )

The book is "If you give a pig a pancake."

Interestingly enough, it's the sequel to "If you give a mouse a cookie." There's also "If you give a moose a muffin" and "If you take a mouse to the movies."

It's point it not never being satisfied, however. Everything in the book is a natural, logical progression from the thing before -- in a humorous manner, of course.

I mean, really. If you give a pig a pancake, you should EXPECT him to ask for syrup, or butter, or something similar. It's a foregone conclusion. Who eats pancakes without syrup?

Yes, I've heard "You can play with the books already out." entirely too much.

To be frank, that's not the point. The point is that something was promised, and that promise has not been kept.

Promises must be kept, or damned good reasons must be given for not keeping them.

SIX MONTH "printer delays" are not a damned good reason.

If you want an appropriate children's literature correlation, try "The Boy Who Cried 'It's the Printer's Fault!'" :D

or maybe Hillaire Belloc's "Matilda, who promised RPG products and was burned to death." :D

If there was no complaining this board would have no posts ;)

On a real note I have to agree with first of two. When I first asked about the delay back in early Sept and heard it was a printer delay I was fine with it and waited patiently till the end of the month. Then I was a ltttle frustated, but still waiting. By the end of the next month came I got annoyed.

Why you ask, even many printer errors and mistakes could have been corrected in two months, or even pulled from original printer and sent to another for printing in that time. So I started thinking (yes I know that is scary) that the reason I was given even if sincere by the messenger was not true to some point.

I used to be a rolltender on printing presses (did it for a year). I did not print books often but I know what the process is and how long it takes to do it. Even a small press should even with major problems be able to get Deciphers order out in a month if not, another press would love to jump on it and steal the business from the inept printer to get it out in a rush.

If I could print 20,000-40,000 multipage (12-24 pages) glues salepapers booklets completely done in one hour on one of the presses I worked on. Even on the slower sheetfeed presses and with the higher quality needed for books,you should be able to get out deciphers order easily in less than a week once all problems are corrected as long as it is under 10,000-20,000 copies (press and bindery speed dependant)

I also know you can play with what you have and don't "really" need the other stuff. I agree to a point. First I have a busy life and don't have time to create everything myself so having these "extras" give me more time to play with my friends, instead of spending the time by myself creating things that should have been put out by now.

So I am annoyed and my gaming group decided to play a game that has more support out. I will still most likely buy deciphers stuff because I like the game and feel it is a quality game but my plyers will not be and that has cost decipher some sales they would have had. It also make me a lot mor cautous and unsure if i should layout the big bucks for the limited adition if or when it comes out.

I want decipher to do well with both ST and LOTR ( like both) but these long delays have shaken my confidence of do they really want to support thses games and even if Decipher is on real solid ground , it makes me wonder how the company on a whole is doing. It is decipher that needs to convince me that buying its books will be a worthwhile investment on my part. To do that support is necessary. Especially when you give release date, you got to do your best to make them and if you don't give a decent reason why not, even if it makes you look slighly bad, because a poor reason that doesn't satify your customer base will have them looking elsewhere in a short time. You may keep most of the diehards (which most on this board maybe classified) but the new or possible buyers will leave.

First off I long for the days when something just showed up on the shelf and surprised me, the days before mass trade magazines and the internet, :(

Business has to run a certain way usually its product + Purchase = profit = more production and so on. How can a division of any company continue when it produces no product on the shelf for nearly two straight quarters? Someone has to pay to keep the lights on don't they? Deciphers RPG division is not some government sponsored think tank like RAND who pays its employees to sit around and come up with great ideas. At the same time Decipher is not being fair to its writers and creative people who put great effort in their product to make sure its the best to only see it be at the wprinters for six months or more and deny them the extra sells profit off their work.

To those who say the core rule books are enough I will only mention the books so long waited for are additional rules for Starship, alien and planet creation. I am sorry but after about four weeks the basic systems in the core book wore out on me and I want more depth. The Core books are not the Potatos they are the meat, the creation books are the Potatos and anything else is the gravy.

... mind you, I haven't read in depth all of the posts in this thread, so if this has been covered, my apologies.

That being said: The answer here is US!, the readers and participants of TrekRPG.net.

What's missing from CODA Trek? Narrator's screen? Okay, somebody design one, put it on a PDF and send it to the Webmaster so we can download it and print it to card stock for ourselves.

Anyone at Decipher gonna say we can't do it? Well, they may not like it, but then it's not like we're making money off of it, and probably won't decrease any sales that would come from it.

What else is missing? Adventures/missions? There were lots of then designed for LUG Trek. Why did y'all stop writing and submitting them? Were we told by LUG to stop? As if we were cutting into their market? I don't really think so. We won't be cutting into Decipher's non-existing market of adventures that are on the shelves right now.

Come on, stop complaining about Decipher's printer problem. To paraphrase Animal House: Face it, we screwed up, we trusted them. They haven't produced anything since the Core Books were released. Now it's our turn.

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Originally posted by Sawyer II
Come on, stop complaining about Decipher's printer problem. To paraphrase Animal House: Face it, we screwed up, we trusted them. They haven't produced anything since the Core Books were released. Now it's our turn.

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Amen Sawyer II (and we are still looking for Sawyer I, so don't get any dieas about leaving town anytime soon). I couldn't agree with you more. :)

Regarding First of Two and his cries over allegedly broken promises, the words of comedian Mike Myers, in his role as Dr. Evil, come to mind: "Why must I be surrounded by frickin' idiots?"

A release date is not a contract, neither is it a bond of surety. It is a projection of a pending product's earliest availablity and choosing one is far from an exact science.

People should bloody well get that through their thick skulls...

It's not that they 'broke their promise', it's the sense of disconnect between them and the rest of the community that seems to be the problem to me.

I'm not talking about Doug, Don, and the rest of the crew. I mean the company as an entity. PR wise, the "problem at the printer's" / "L.A. needs to Decipherize their processes" responses may be doing more damage than good. Tell us something meaningful.

Obviously they've met with unforseen difficulties. No problem. Just stop patronizing us.

On the other hand, if the "problem at the printer's" really is the cause of the delays, let us believe it. Spend twenty minutes to write a little message giving us some details. They have a good net rep, he can do the job.

I'm not angry over what they haven't done (released materials in a timely manner), I'm angry because it feels like they're yankin' my chain.

"Call not First of Two a 'frickin idiot,' for he is unsubtle and quick to remove one's pulmonary organs without benefit of anasthesia." -- Volani of the Technomages

True, it's not so much the "promise" not being filled (although "sometime in the fall" is a pretty goddamned wide estimation range and it takes some effort not to be at least CLOSE) as it is the near total lack of communication with the gaming community (and apparently, with their own Net Reps).

It doesn't take backbreaking labor to update your site once you know there's going to be an extension in the delay, either. I'm sure there are folks here who could do it in less than 5 minutes.

We're not talking about anything that requires any real effort, here.

If the problem, as some have supposed, is that the delay caused the orders to be moved to a lower priority for the printer, how damned much effort is it to tell the netreps to type "We got bumped, we're at the end of a three-month queue now, barring other problems.", hm?

Low effort, high reward. This is a Good Thing.

At least the delays allow my wallet time to recover after other graduate student puchases (i.e. a new television, text books, lots of eating out, etc.) Which reminds me... I still need to purchase the Narrator's Guide.

Better than the "reproductive organs"... ouch. :)

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Originally posted by First of Two
"Call not First of Two a 'frickin idiot,' for he is unsubtle and quick to remove one's pulmonary organs without benefit of anasthesia." -- Volani of the Technomages

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