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If you recall, Ms. Linae Foster was laid off by Wizards of the Coast late last year, along with many other talented people. Now, Wizards of the Coast is planning to hire an Associate Brand Manager for D&D, and Linae would do an excellent job. She's smart. She's talented. She's articulate. She...

Hmm, it's been a while. I'm pretty sure it sold out its print run, but I honestly don't remember how many copies that was or how long it took (longer than a year, I'm pretty sure). And it's still selling a few PDF copies every quarter, even now (I think it came out in 2004). But I don't have...

The printing companies (hereafter called "the printer" or "the printers") that Paizo and Wizards work with (at least, they did when I worked at Wizards) actually have you create a high-res PDF rather than a print prototype. The printers make the book from this PDF. So, cost to produce high-res...

Very mature of you, aboyd. :) And I'd like to applaud everyone in this thread, everyone's been level-headed on all sides of the discussion.

It's December 1997. TSR's just had another round of layoffs right before Christmas. The company owes the printing company some money, due to an earlier arrangement TSR's president made to get some books out the door. Printer says, "cough up some money." TSR says, "we don't have any cash right...

I'm not sure what you mean by "take over" TSR's copyrights, but TSR was a subentity within Wizards until about 1998 when they stopped using the TSR name and logo (IIRC an Alternity book was the first RPG book produced by the formerly-TSR staff that used the Wizards logo rather than the TSR logo).

I hear that. "Problems with the printers" may be familiar to some people online circa January 1997....

I may be a bit muddled from my many cross-country moves, but I don't believe Charles works for Wizards any more, and hasn't for a couple years.

So we're in agreement that the timing is poor, as well as stupid. ;)

1) Ignoring the human cost of a decision merely for the sake of the numbers is shortsighted and irresponsible. 2) Just because everyone is doing it doesn't mean it's okay. 3) Changing their fiscal year to something other that Jan-Dec means that having these annual layoffs wouldn't happen 3...

No, it was inevitable because Wizards does this every year around this time They lay off people, switch to using more freelancers, realize that they need more in-house people to help things run smoothly, hire more in-house people, then have a layoff when your projected budget starts looking...

It depends on what you mean by "have to." If your RPG division expected to make $10,000,000 dollars this year, and it now looks like it's "only" going to make $8,000,000 dollars this year, does that mean you "have to" lay off people so your numbers are better? If your company expected to make...

I don't recall the specifics of my non-compete, but: * The day after I was laid off in 2003, Monte asked me to write a book for him, and Wizards didn't bat an eye. * To the best of my recollection, the elements of the non-compete relate only to things the employee was working on or had...

John, you could always self-publish this. It's easy to get a Word doc looking the way you want and turn it into a PDF. It's your work, and if you finished it there's no reason why you shouldn't publish it (on your own or with another company). And given that the series' name is based on your...

I worked on that book and I don't remember any ability like that, nor could I find it in my turnover.

I agree. Yes, that's what I mean. Remember that as "Greyhawk guy" and then "Forgotten Realms guy," I got tons and tons and tons of feedback (particularly about FR NPCs) from players & DMs who thought it was very cheesy that when official TSR people statted out official TSR novel characters...

Thank you, Mercule and AltF4, for nicely summing up my position on this issue. Yes, building NPCs with the PC rules is time consuming. (And I'm specifically saying NPCs rather than monsters, as players are more likely to give you leeway when New Monster X has a weird ability than when Clearly A...

Just throwing this into the ring .... I don't know how much influence Scott and Linae had over the GSL (and I doubt anyone outside the company will really ever know). But I've been a person who's been in the bad position of enforcing an unpopular policy while working like mad to change that...

Folks, I'm not here to address salt in the eyes, or whether 3e is better than 4e, or whether we didn't have enough information to make an appropriate judgement on the limited 4e rules, or whether I'm qualified to make that judgement, or any of the other side topics that have popped up in this...

There are approximately 500 playtesters listed in the 3e PH. How many are going to be listed in the 4e PH?