Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
Notably, the attempt to tightly control TSR Intellectual Property (whence TSR for "They Sue Regularly") didnt help the business financially. The OGL/CC proves to be the wiser business path.
D&D 5E I feel like the surveys gaslit WotC about """"Backwards Compatibility""""
- Thread starter Shardstone
- Start date
5.5e or the DM side to me was a great success.
5.5e on the player side needed a whole new class skeleton reshifting.
But 5.0e was too successful and had too much 3PP and 3rd party support and sales that the community did want to ditch their books and apps.
It was basically a 4e Scare incoming.
Fans wanted X but didn't want to lose Y to get X.
5.5e on the player side needed a whole new class skeleton reshifting.
But 5.0e was too successful and had too much 3PP and 3rd party support and sales that the community did want to ditch their books and apps.
It was basically a 4e Scare incoming.
Fans wanted X but didn't want to lose Y to get X.
IMO, releasing 2E was a successful decision, it was the splat overload, too many settings lines, etc, that was the bad decision.
I.e. overloading the demand for product to the extent that "average" players had to choose what to buy out of the multitudes of choices.
Stormonu
NeoGrognard
I agree - the 2E edition itself wasn't the problem, it was all the things going on behind the scenes (and unrelated to the published game) at TSR that was a problem.
Now, I'd be willing to agree that the rerelease of the 2E core books in the black-book format was probably a bad idea; in hindsight that was probably when a new edition, rather than a redress would have been more beneficial as by then the system was getting long in the tooth and getting abandoned in favor of more "modern" RPGs, like the World of Darkness (and people flocking from RPGs to MTG for that quick fantasy combat fix).
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
Thing is though, when the black books came out, there was a lot of consternation that it might be a new edition- the loudest voices among the playerbase didn't want that, and if you check, there's a section early on in the PHB saying "relax, this isn't 3rd edition!".
And then when the Option books came out, which were full of the kinds of ideas that you'd expect in a new edition- I don't have any data, but I rarely saw those books in use anywhere. Maybe they were super popular and I just didn't know it, but as far as I could see, the people who were still playing 2e at that point didn't seem to want a sea change- if they did, they'd jumped ship to other games like Vampire or Shadowrun (I want to say Earthdawn, but alas, it was too ahead of it's time).
Now I'm not saying that you're wrong- the actual 3e did a lot to revive the brand, even if some still shake their fists about "that horrible WotC edition" to this very day. If they made a 3rd edition in the mid-90's, maybe it would have saved TSR. There's a lot of factors involved here, including the gobs of books that existed for just 2e alone, let alone the more or less compatible ones for 1e and "non-Advanced" D&D. If they released a new edition that wasn't highly backwards-compatible at that time, maybe the player base would have rioted.
As near as I can tell, whether or not a new edition will be successful seems to come down to "right place, right time". We've seen new editions that barely change the status quo get lambasted for not being progressive enough, and seen editions that radically alter the status quo get vilified for being too progressive.
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It's also true that the fan base is too Balkanized. Any ideological difference seems to instantly create new factions (kind of why the town I used to live in with a population of 1300 had six churches- one disagreement and a new denomination was born overnight!) who want very different things. I'm afraid at this point that it's impossible to have a D&D that everyone will love. But since there's still an itch for a fantasy TTRPG, there'll always be a plethora of games adjacent to D&D that will have a hard time competing for sunlight in a dense forest. Some of these games will stand the test of time (Call of Cthulhu is an institution at this point). Others will show up, generate some hype, and quickly be reduced to a small, yet dedicated fanbase who cannot comprehend why any other games exist.
Or worse, just end up collecting dust on the Shelf of Misfit Games (looks at my Shelf of Misfit Games sadly).
In this day and age, I don't see how a game company could serve multiple masters. Some people want more fantasy, more epic play- mighty heroes saving the universe! Others want less fantasy, more gritty play- seedy mercenaries struggling to make a few coin in a bleak world. How on Oerth you could square the circle between these competing ideologies escapes me. Some say "modular/universal" game, but then you have less experienced GM's struggling to figure out which options are best for their game.
Ok, that still does not explain the logic regarding why releasing 2E was a "successful business tactic"
There is absolutely no evidence to back up that claim. You are defending the idea of it being good business to release a new edition when you can't point to that universally being a good business decision. You are avoiding the topic with claims that it is not what caused them to fail and other stuff, but that does not support the actual claim.
All things which were part of 2E.
You are saying 2E was a failure because of how they rolled out the new edition, not because they rolled out a new edition. That is fundamentally different than saying it was successful or the broader claim about rolling out a new edition being a "successful business tactic" for WOTC.
Being "not a bad business tactic" (and that is debatable) is not the same as being a "successful business tactic"
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