D&D 5E 5e most conservative edition yet? (In terms of new settings)

[Aldarc]

I'm still curious why Wildemount doesn't count.
Yeah, it was originally created by a non-WotC employee for their home game. But the exact same could be said about the Forgotten Realms. Does that mean it's not an original D&D world either?

This is puzzling. And maybe I am misremembering, but didn't Ravenloft start as Tracy and Laura Hickman's home game in 1977 that TSR then published in 1983 and adopted into a setting? A lot of settings have their origins in home games.

 

[atanakar]

post 94 TSR was definitely badly hit by the collectable card game craze, but they also made some bad decisions and had been running on the fumes of their late 70s early 80s boom for quite some time. The problem was that they were not that nimble a company, and pretty much all their attempts to diversify outside of D&D and books failed*.

That is correct. MtG and other CCGs monopolized a large portion of gamer's income post 94. I didn't like MtG. I played Middle Earth by I.C.E. (1995) instead. Much more immersive. I totally missed the publication of Altertiny because of CCGs. I was in the card bubble. Normally I would have bought these books. A new store opened that was mostly CCGs with tables to play. I stopped going to the traditional game store, where I bought my TSR products.

TSR responded by making Dragon Dice*. They over estimated, printed way too many dice sets and the game was a dud. Another nail in the coffin.

*Personally I really like Dragon Dice.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

This is puzzling. And maybe I am misremembering, but didn't Ravenloft start as Tracy and Laura Hickman's home game in 1977 that TSR then published in 1983 and adopted into a setting? A lot of settings have their origins in home games.

No, it was never a home game. It was an adventure they wrote after they were hired by TSR. You might be thinking of Pharaoh, which they self published first. That one was literally, no joke, to buy shoes for their children. They were in dire financial situation before Tracy took the TSR job.

EDIT: Looks like it was at least written before Tracy joined TSR - under the name "Vampyr". But they hadn't published it.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

This is puzzling. And maybe I am misremembering, but didn't Ravenloft start as Tracy and Laura Hickman's home game in 1977 that TSR then published in 1983 and adopted into a setting? A lot of settings have their origins in home games.

Of the old settings:

Published Homebrew: Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Mystara
Designed In House: Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, Al Qadim, Kara Tur, Planescape, Ravenloft, Birthright
Contest Winner and then polished in house: Eberron

 

[Jester David]

You shouldn't forget Tal'Dorei was published as setting by Green Ronin. This means Exandria wasn't an original product by WotC.

Now WotC is working for the perfect crunch, but the fluff/lore/background is practically frozen. If something we learn with 3.5 Ed is to add new crunch (feats, classes, spells, PC races, monsters, game mechanics..) is harder to be added to previous settings... I guess WotC will continue the metaplots when they start to make enough money with the multimedia projects (videogames, cartoons, some action-live production, comics..).

Except that Tal'Dorei isn't Wildemount, despite being on the same world.
An element of the world being published elsewhere doesn't make Wildemount unoriginal or unofficial or not published by WotC.

It's selectively defining the terms to get the result desired (most conservative edition) by eliminating options (Wildemount, the MtG settings).

If we're going to do that then 1e was by far the most conservative Edition, with zero original settings.
Because Greyhawk predated it and was introduced in OD&D. And the Realms doesn't count any more than Exandria as it was in Dragon magazines and Greenwood's homegames and novels, so not original or done by TSR. And Dragonlance wasn't really a world but an adventure path with extensive support material, so it doesn't count either.

There's always a way to exclude content for some arbitrary reason...

 

[Jester David]

This is puzzling. And maybe I am misremembering, but didn't Ravenloft start as Tracy and Laura Hickman's home game in 1977 that TSR then published in 1983 and adopted into a setting? A lot of settings have their origins in home games.

Ravenloft started as Hickman's annual Halloween adventure. It might have been set in his homebrew world or just been off to the side. But he ran it a lot. It wasn't a "setting" per se.
And when they did decide to make Ravenloft into a setting, they didn't consult Hickman, who had already left the company at that point.

 

[billd91]

I mean, we're talking like 1992 vs 1998 so six years, yeah that's a difference. Culturally and in terms of what RPGs were being played it was huge, because that's "before the world wide web" to "huge numbers of people have the internet", and RPGers were particularly likely to.

You might want to reconsider those dates. TSR was out of reserves in 1996, purchased by WotC in 1997. And the proliferation of setting lines was only getting in earnest in 1990 with Ravenloft, 1991 with Dark Sun, 1992 Al-Qadim, 1994 Planescape and Council of Wyrms, and 1995 Birthright. Moreover, Magic didn't hit the market until late 1993 and fadded up in 1994.

So I don't really know where the 1992 to 1998 dates could come from.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Dragonlance also started as a homebred adventure.

 

[MGibster]

I mean, all that said, the basic competence of WotC, in so many ways (not least the genius of the OGL) was an incredible contrast, so there is that. I do feel like Dancey hyped the incompetence of TSR a bit - some of what he described in shocked terms was fairly normal for a company in its death throes (warehouses full of unsold stock and so on), and he was always really good at telling a story (probably be a great DM though I dunno if he was into that).

A warehouse full of unsold merchandise is evidence that the company is doing something wrong. I don't think anyone doubts that TSR was unprepared to deal with the changing landscape of the 1990s. The wild success of collectible card games took everyone by surprise but TSR was unable to weather the storm because they had been poorly managed for years.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Dragonlance also started as a homebred adventure.

No it didn't. It was designed entirely in-house.