Why We Should Work With WotC

[Remathilis]

On the flipside I think a revived and slightly edgy Dark Sun, preferably lead by a minority/PoC author who loved the original, but understood the problematic elements and wants to reclaim it, could have been a pretty big hit. Especially if it was in a more conventional format.

I absolutely think there is room for a reinvisioned Dark Sun that touches on the tropes with fresh eyes, but it's not going to appease any diehards of the 2e setting. It will look like 4e's but moreso.

(assuming there are any diehards who would even look at it left at this point)

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't know how "niche" you want to define it, but 5e still has a few holes in its library. We never got a desert-based AP, anything resembling a non-western fantasy setting, proper psionics, Dark Sun and Greyhawk, any alternative magic systems, the "big book of spells and magic items", plenty of archetypes that weren't explored for classes and subclasses, and a usual "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" books like Tome of Battle or Player's Options. Hell, there was a whole continent of Faerun east of the Sword Coast they could have explored, not to mention Calimshan and anything south of Baldur's Gate.

I think a big challenge of resurrecting old properties for D&D is using the name recognition of a setting to bring in old fans, but also bring in new fans with something interesting they might not be familiar with (or have only heard the name of). I think that is probably getting harder because the tastes of the old fans and the tastes of the new fans are just different, so that is a real challenge: make a new version of a setting that works for gamers who started fairly recently but doesn't drive off the long time fans of the setting. That gets especially hard too when there have been staggered iterations of a setting and each one has its own fanbase. Unifying people around a setting that has variations to suit different tastes, and that needs to reach a younger audience, while preserving the old, seems especially difficult. And I think the presence of the internet probably makes that even harder. Back in the day, if a setting came out and you didn't like it, the bad word of mouth was literally word of mouth----now the discussions around any new setting will erupt online and it seems like opinions crystalize faster, and extreme likes or dislikes tend to drive the conversation more. Many of the things that are now famously issues people take with some of the better known settings, are complaints I was completely unaware of until I got online.

On the other hand, maybe those more feisty discussions around new settings help attract attention to them.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I absolutely think there is room for a reinvisioned Dark Sun that touches on the tropes with fresh eyes, but it's not going to appease any diehards of the 2e setting. It will look like 4e's but moreso.

(assuming there are any diehards who would even look at it left at this point)

Diehards aren't your market, I agree.

Even I realized that a while back. And I kind of was a 2E diehard for Dark Sun.

People who "like the idea" are. And the concept of Dark Sun? It literally gets more relevant every year lol (unfortunately). The two biggest themes - "environmental destruction" and "individual greed and the hoarding/centralization of wealth/power" are absolutely 150% 2020s themes, way more than in the 1990s! Add in the "ultrawealthy transhumanist" angles and you're probably talking a 2030s-relevant setting lol.

Ironically the relevance might be what scared WotC away from doing it, but that's just not how you win this game, I'd suggest. You need people talking about stuff - and that means taking some risks, not always playing it completely MoR.

I think another big hole 5E has is the lack of an actual "new-new" setting, which seems like a no-brainer honestly. Even if it wasn't immediately a huge hit, the amount of discussion an in-depth and novel setting would have created, especially if something about it was even mildly controversial (and it doesn't need to be a social thing), could have been a big asset.

 

[Remathilis]

Hopefully it brings the whole Hasbro edifice crashing down, but that would probably require Magic to go wrong too (and oh look, they're antagonizing them too).

Schadenfreude aside, I don't see any reason to take joy in this. Both games are the elder statesmen of their respective type (RPG and CCG) and if both die, you are going to see a noticeable contraction in the market. This will be bigger than "they stop selling boosters and d20s at Target", it's more akin to "whole LGSs are gone". I don't think Pokemon or Pathfinder are going to be able to float the ecosystems of their game-type, and if you think it's hard-to-find games now, the loss of either (or both) would be an apocalyptic scenario.

I hope WotC survives for no other reason than the crater of its destruction would take so many people out with it that the table-top gaming sphere might never recover.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Schadenfreude aside, I don't see any reason to take joy in this. Both games are the elder statesmen of their respective type (RPG and CCG) and if both die, you are going to see a noticeable contraction in the market. This will be bigger than "they stop selling boosters and d20s at Target), it's more akin to "whole LGSs are gone". I don't think Pokemon or Pathfinder are going to be able to float the ecosystems of their game-type, and if you think it's hard-to-find games now, the loss of either (or both) would be an apocalyptic scenario.

I hope WotC survives for no other reason than the crater of its destruction would take so many people out with it that the table-top gaming sphere might never recover.

I mean, this is the really the reason we need to defend OGL 1.0a. At this point, it might be one of the best ways to actually keep D&D going into the future (if recent revelations about their business plans are accurate).

 

[Remathilis]

I mean, this is the really the reason we need to defend OGL 1.0a. At this point, it might be one of the best ways to actually keep D&D going into the future (if recent revelations about their business plans are accurate).

I don't know if 1.0a saves it at this point. Yeah, there would be some publishers or publishers that pick up the torch (Paizo, KP, etc) but in a world where D&D as a brand is dead, I can't see any of those games filling its shoes. You're not going to get Stranger Things using Pathfinder, for example. The market ends up back to your early 2000's era of niche hobby.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I absolutely think there is room for a reinvisioned Dark Sun that touches on the tropes with fresh eyes, but it's not going to appease any diehards of the 2e setting. It will look like 4e's but moreso.

(assuming there are any diehards who would even look at it left at this point)

There are definitely still Die Hard fans from what I see in my own circles (most of my friends were in highschool during the early 90s period of TSR). I think you are right though, the media sensibilities are just too different and the expectations too different from these generations (we were grew up with plenty of 80s fair, but a lot of more gritty 70s style movies----a vibe that tended to remain influential in fantasy in particular). And for dystopian, post-apocalyptic stuff, we were influenced by things like the first two Mad Max movies, A Clock Work Orange, etc. A lot of these were very blunt explorations of humanity's dark side.

 

[Bedrockgames]

People who "like the idea" are. And the concept of Dark Sun? It literally gets more relevant every year lol (unfortunately). The two biggest themes - "environmental destruction" and "individual greed and the hoarding/centralization of wealth/power" are absolutely 150% 2020s themes, way more than in the 1990s! Add in the "ultrawealthy transhumanist" angles and you're probably talking a 2030s-relevant setting lol.

To me this stuff was at the heart of Dark Sun. I think where the difficulty lies in bridging the audiences is around how they expect these things to be expressed in media. But I would say of all the settings, Dark Sun probably is the one the present generation might find most relevant to present day concerns

 

[raniE]

Schadenfreude aside, I don't see any reason to take joy in this. Both games are the elder statesmen of their respective type (RPG and CCG) and if both die, you are going to see a noticeable contraction in the market. This will be bigger than "they stop selling boosters and d20s at Target", it's more akin to "whole LGSs are gone". I don't think Pokemon or Pathfinder are going to be able to float the ecosystems of their game-type, and if you think it's hard-to-find games now, the loss of either (or both) would be an apocalyptic scenario.

I hope WotC survives for no other reason than the crater of its destruction would take so many people out with it that the table-top gaming sphere might never recover.

For Magic? Absolutely. For rpgs? No. For several reasons. first, someone could buy out D&D from the corpse of Hasbro, just like WotC once bought it from the corpse of TSR (this of course applies to Magic too, but that one would be much more expensive and so could only be bought by some other giant corporation). But let's say that doesn't happen. There are a lot of rpgs. What we'll be left with is a much more reasonable spread with no single company dominating to the point Hasbro did. And If Hasbro dies, the OGL 1.0a lives on. There's not going to be anyone pushing that it's been deauthorized because no one other than Hasbro believes they have the legal ability to do that. As for finding games? I've never found that hard. I've had times when I felt I didn't have the time or the energy to play, but if I've wanted to play, no problem. I have lots of friends who play lots of different games, and I've introduced people who have never played rpgs before to the hobby. I've done it several times. And the last time I used D&D to do it was in the 90s.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I don't know if 1.0a saves it at this point. Yeah, there would be some publishers or publishers that pick up the torch (Paizo, KP, etc) but in a world where D&D as a brand is dead, I can't see any of those games filling its shoes. You're not going to get Stranger Things using Pathfinder, for example. The market ends up back to your early 2000's era of niche hobby.

I feel like the D&D brand itself is not holding up the RPG industry, it's just the first name people look for. The industry has been expanded simply by people trying the game, and I suspect that you could get a 5E "Pathfinder" that continues the legacy.

At the end of the day, the biggest thing for the hobby was to get people actually trying it. I think that hurdle has been cleared now. I can see some contraction, but I don't see it being nearly that big.