D&D 5E Mike Mearls interview - states that they may be getting off of the 2 AP/year train.

[FitzTheRuke]

I didn't play 2e when it was out, and I was under the impression initially that it was broken or not well done. However since then I've bought a bunch of 2e books for the story elements, and found them to be exceptionally well done. Not that my tastes are universal, but it's a lot more difficult now for me to believe 2e failed because of the content. I am sure there were some duds in there, but so far everything I've bought has been really quite good.

2e was generally awesome for it's first 8 years or so, but everyone here is right, it was horribly mismanaged, which became more and more obvious the longer it went on.

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[Staffan]

I believe that your analysis is incorrect - a company does not survive for 10 years with a product that is not financially successful no matter how much fancy accounting it does.

As TSR discovered, printers require payment in cash.

Except they didn't survive for 10 years. 2e was published in 1989, and TSR became insolvent in late 1996/early 1997.

And printers usually don't require payment in cash. Most business-to-business, well, business is handled via invoices. TSR orders the printer to print a book, the printer does so and then sends TSR an invoice. What happened in early 1997 was that the printer told TSR "Hey, we haven't gotten paid for the last few invoices. If you want us to print more books for you, you'd better pay up." And TSR couldn't, which they at the time reported to their customers as "a problem at the printer."

You'll note that one of the first things Wizards did once they took over was to slow things down. Dark Sun got cancelled entirely, Birthright and Planescape had some stuff in the pipeline that got published but then that was over too (with planar adventuring moving into the core product line and other settings, e.g. For Duty & Deity for FR and A Paladin in Hell for core).

There were three things that combined to bring TSR down. I guess you could chalk all three up as different flavors of "bad management", but that's a fairly useless designation.

1. Splitting up the customer base too many ways with different settings and too much stuff for those settings. In 1995, TSR published about 75 RPG products across its different product lines, including multiple boxed sets. That's 6 per month. It's much better, business-wise, to publish one book that sells 50,000 copies than six books that sell 10,000 each, even if the latter leads to more sales overall.

2. Too much crap, like Dragon Dice or Spellfire.

3. Over-reliance on novels. Back in the 80s, the Dragonlance novels had saved TSR, so now they were pumping out novels like there was no tomorrow. But it turned out that novels sold through the book trade were less of a sure bet than RPGs sold through hobby stores - book stores buy things with a right to return unsold goods - not only that, but they don't have to return the whole books either (in which case you could try to hawk them elsewhere). No, they only need to return the cover pages, and then send the rest for destruction/recycling. For a while, Random House (TSR's book distributor) let them slide and allowed them to cover their debt for unsold books with credit (that is, instead of TSR paying Random House back in cash, they could pay them back in new books). But in 1996 Random House told TSR they wouldn't take credit any longer, and wanted actual money in return for their, well, returns. And that's what pushed TSR into insolvency.

 

[Zardnaar]

I didn't play 2e when it was out, and I was under the impression initially that it was broken or not well done. However since then I've bought a bunch of 2e books for the story elements, and found them to be exceptionally well done. Not that my tastes are universal, but it's a lot more difficult now for me to believe 2e failed because of the content. I am sure there were some duds in there, but so far everything I've bought has been really quite good.

2E I think has been started to be viewed a lot more positively in recent years. There was some crap in there but I think its one of the better D&Ds (2E, B/X, 5E top 3IMHO). Alot of 2E concepts snuck into 5E.

2E was also one of the better selling D&Ds outselling all of them it seems except for 1E and the red box (PHB sales). The big things that sunk it were.

1. Novel line returns.
2. Silly products like Dragon Dice (ordered 1 million sets sold 70k)
3. Selling stuff at a loss (Planescape boxed set)
4. Splitting the fanbase with campaign worlds and then supporting them via novels.

1st thing WotC did was kill off the campaign worlds except for FR. If you want to hack D&D in all sorts of ways 2E is your system and it is the 1 edition you can't really clone via the OGL as the settings defined it IMHO.

 

[Charles Rampant]

I'm forever delving into 2e books when writing my games - Forgotten Realms setting stuff, Planescape Guides for planar adventures - and I agree that the quality of writing and ideas could be very high indeed. Like 3e it also tended to have a lot of really tedious rules stuff sprinkled in, down to telling you which magical items the owner of the Way Inn had on his person. However, there is also this unbelievable quantity of stuff as well, including two separate lines for describing the same places in Faerun (The Savage North, Volo's Guide to the North).

All in, it makes a wonderful resource to selectively dip into for 5e purposes, since the quantity of system crunch is lower than in 3e (laden with prestige classes and feeling the need to stat up every NPC) and 4e (battlemaps). (I can't speak to 1e, as the only stuff I've looked at is Tales from the Yawning Portal adventures, and Waterdeep and the North, a book that managed to not be invalidated by subsequent releases on the same subject.) It might have been a disaster for TSR and retailers at the time, as they flooded the market with stuff, in what looks now like a company attempting to provide every conceivable option for fantasy roleplaying simultaneously, but great for bolstering 5e releases.

You can also tell that Wizards can afford to be very light with their current Faerun setting stuff because of that prior deluge. Not much in Storm King's Thunder, Murder in Baldur's Gate, or Princes of the Apocalypse outright contradicts prior material; it updates the names of humans, but strives to ensure that a prominent shop or tavern named in a previous edition still exists and still sells the same sort of things, that villages are still in the same place and have the same character, and that no dramatic shifts in the power balance of the setting have taken place. In other words, if you want to know more, you can very easily pick up a 2e book and use it in your game. I can usually use 5e stuff and 2e stuff simultaneously without too much trouble, only needing to choose which Duke of Daggerford is currently ruling, who the Open Lord of Waterdeep is, and which bartender is behind the bar of the Three Kegs. Those institutions all still exist, and very few major changes can be observed between the two editions. Happily players never remember names anyway, so inconsistencies are no worries

 

[DEFCON 1]

You can also tell that Wizards can afford to be very light with their current Faerun setting stuff because of that prior deluge. Not much in Storm King's Thunder, Murder in Baldur's Gate, or Princes of the Apocalypse outright contradicts prior material; it updates the names of humans, but strives to ensure that a prominent shop or tavern named in a previous edition still exists and still sells the same sort of things, that villages are still in the same place and have the same character, and that no dramatic shifts in the power balance of the setting have taken place. In other words, if you want to know more, you can very easily pick up a 2e book and use it in your game. I can usually use 5e stuff and 2e stuff simultaneously without too much trouble, only needing to choose which Duke of Daggerford is currently ruling, who the Open Lord of Waterdeep is, and which bartender is behind the bar of the Three Kegs. Those institutions all still exist, and very few major changes can be observed between the two editions. Happily players never remember names anyway, so inconsistencies are no worries

And yet some people still insist WotC needs to make a Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book for 5E, because apparently they need a new book that reprints almost all of the same exact material from all of these previous books from all the previous editions.

I mean it's really important that we find out what's happening currently in Turmish in the 1490s and WotC's doing us a disservice by not writing two paragraphs of sparse details and a trio of adventure hooks and then printing it in an entirely new book for us.

 

[Charles Rampant]

And yet some people still insist WotC needs to make a Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book for 5E, because apparently they need a new book that reprints almost all of the same exact material from all of these previous books from all the previous editions.

I mean it's really important that we find out what's happening currently in Turmish in the 1490s and WotC's doing us a disservice by not writing two paragraphs of sparse details and a trio of adventure hooks and then printing it in an entirely new book for us.

I guess it comes from the heavy metaplot that used to exist, and which they are apparently not doing anymore. The fans were used to a constantly updating story of the setting; to that mindset, a century jump demands a whole lot of metaplot to explain!

 

[bmfrosty]

And yet some people still insist WotC needs to make a Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book for 5E, because apparently they need a new book that reprints almost all of the same exact material from all of these previous books from all the previous editions.

I mean it's really important that we find out what's happening currently in Turmish in the 1490s and WotC's doing us a disservice by not writing two paragraphs of sparse details and a trio of adventure hooks and then printing it in an entirely new book for us.

I actually hope that they give another company some license to update and publish some of the campaign settings books and boxes. If for no other reason than to put that particular bug to rest.

As for WotC, I don't think we'll see support past Forgotten Realms (Really just NW Faerun), Ravenloft, Eberron, and Dark Sun. And for the last two, it will probably be another adventure book like curse of strahd.

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[FitzTheRuke]

I actually hope that they give another company some license to update and publish some of the campaign settings books and boxes. If for no other reason than to put that particular bug to rest.

As for WotC, I don't think we'll see support past Forgotten Realms (Really just NW Faerun), Ravenloft, Eberron, and Dark Sun. And for the last two, it will probably be another adventure book like curse of strahd.

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I think that is how they will do it, too. At least for the foreseeable future. They may do more books much, much later.

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[Charles Rampant]

I'm really hoping for a Dark Sun adventure, myself; not because I am all that excited for the setting, but because some of my players are desperate for it. I read the first book in the Prism Pentand, and looked at a map of the setting, and it seemed like a sufficiently small setting that an AP could cover all the high notes (Halfling forest, human city, deep desert, etc) easily enough.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

I actually hope that they give another company some license to update and publish some of the campaign settings books and boxes. If for no other reason than to put that particular bug to rest.

This happened already, but instead of licensing it to a single company, they've given anyone the chance of doing it through DM's Guild. I believe I've seen a Ravenloft Gazetteer floating around there some time ago, and the same could be done with Forgotten Realms, if people wanted to. In time, I expect some publisher to arise as the go-to third party resource for setting material released through DM's Guild, much like we learned to sort gold from garbage in rulebooks from the d20 era.