William Ronald said:
I think Epic rules, in addition to being a niche market, also require a fair amount of effort. (For all we know, this is what is being worked on as a future release.)
We should also pay attention to
Power of Faerun, I think.
Boy, the things I miss. Here's a post from
Charles Ryan on new Epic material:
http://boards.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=446831
Thanks for the notes, guys, and for the continued enthusiasm for epic-level play!
I've read over your petition thread and called it to the attention of our R&D folk.
We take a lot of factors into consideration as we decide what sort of D&D products to produce. Certainly, hearing from 100 or so fans of a particular topic is a factor to be reckoned with, and we'll take it into consideration!
As for simply having freelancers do the work: Unfortunately, it's not really that simple. For starters, freelancers contribute to nearly every D&D title, so it's not like having freelancers work on an ELH would save us a lot of time or effort. Even if we were to have freelancers write the entire book, we never publish a product until our development team have gone over it with a fine-toothed comb. In other words, we can't simply throw this book on the schedule: We either have to release a dodgy book with little oversight from our design, development, and editing team (not an acceptable option) or take some other product off the schedule to make room for this one (also problematic). Freelancing is not a shortcut.
As for Greyhawk, I think part of the reason for no new Greyhawk book is that there is some disagreement in Greyhawk fandom on what should and should be canon based on previous products.
I agree.
Well, here's a few quotes from Charles Ryan on Greyhawk:
Charles Ryan: http://boards.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=395908
We are not currently interested in supporting additional material for Greyhawk, either with inhouse products or through a licensee.
We believe our audience is best served by a very limited number of well-supported campaign settings, and we've chosen to support Forgotten Realms and Eberron, and, through a licensee, Dragonlance. As someone else has already pointed out, the audience for Greyhawk (and other old TSR settings) may be fiercely loyal, but they aren't numerous enough to support the line. If we diverted resources toward those settings, we may make a few thousand (or few tens of thousands of) fans happy, but we'd be pulling resources away from settings that have hundreds of thousands of fans.
My apologies to the Greyhawk fans out there, but that's the way it is!
Charles Ryan: http://boards.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=395908&page=2&pp=30
Thanks for the feedback everyone. As a good friend of mine commented recently of Greyhawk fans, "Nobody is more dedicated and faithful than you." I knew this was going to be a rough thread when I answered the question.
A few years back, WotC purchased TSR, a company that was on the rocks and no longer able to publish D&D products. There were a number of factors that led to TSR's state, but in the analysis of the business team at the time, one of the single largest factors was a fragmentation of the market base through the development and support of too many campaign settings.
In light of that and other observations, a strategy was developed for 3rd edition, and a major part of that stategy was to support only a very limited selection of campaign settings. The factors that went into that strategy continue to be completely valid, and are vindicated by D&D's current level of success--the highest level of playership, sales, and public recognition in the game's history.
There were a number of factors that went into the decision of which campaign settings to support--factors that go well beyond commercial viability of RPG products. Greyhawk simply didn't make the cut, but it did provide a great basis for D&D's baseline, so that's how we made use of it.
Over the years, D&D has seen a number of really great campaign settings. It would be terrific if we could support them all forever, but we simply can't. Sometimes campaign settings simply need to retire. Sorry.
Charles Ryan:
Thanks for all the cogent responses. I really appreciate the great dedication you bring to D&D!
In my last post I mentioned that there are number of factors that play into the choices we made between campaign settings. Not surprisingly, I'll bet many of them are similar to the criteria you would use if you had to limit your life to just a couple of settings. (Imagine yourself marooned on a desert island, and you could only choose two or three campaign settings to bring with you. . . .)
One of these factors is differentiation. There's a huge spectrum of potential fantasy worlds out there--TSR's experimentation with worlds as varied as Planescape, Al Quadim, Ravenloft, and Spelljammer demonstrate that. To you and I, with our very nuanced understanding of these settings, the differences between Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Mystara may be great--but in the grand scheme of things, they're shades of very similar color. If we only get two or three settings on our desert island, we might be better off with campaigns that represent a much greater selection of play styles and options.
Another factor is the breadth of the setting--and by that I don't mean the width of the map. I mean the selection of stuff you get, including novels, computer games, and other sources of entertainment. Man cannot survive on roleplaying alone--if I'm stuck on a desert island, I want to take a few books along too!
I could go on, but I have tickets to Carbon Leaf tonight, so I have to run. There are many more factors, and, sadly, few of them favor Greyhawk.
So why don't we license Greyhawk, when we've been willing to license one or two other settings? Well, the factors above play into licensing decisions as well as our own publications. And even though we're willing to allow a couple more settings to continue through licensing, we still don't want to saturate the market with licensed stuff any more than we do with stuff that we publish. (In other words, licensing may allow us to expand the list of settings that go along to the desert island to, say, four or five, but it still doesn't mean that the floodgates are open.) Finally, Greyhawk has a special strategic place in the D&D universe--it's the source of all the IP content in core D&D (the names of gods, spells, and other elements that aren't strictly rules material). Even in a tightly-controlled license, we're not willing to cede control of that material to an outside party.
I know it's not the same thing as seeing the campaign setting supported, but I hope that helps clarify things a little.
