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I agree. There's a dearth of fey opponents in D&D while there's an overabundance of undead. Plus, having an evil fey hanging out with the undead makes for a nice encounter mix as they aren't susceptible to being turned.

In Eberron, there's an entire continent under a curse intended to all but guarantee travelers will become lost. Although, in general, one challenge with "you get lost" as an adventure design trope is that it falls under the category of "forced fails". All you need is a ranger who can roll a 30...

I've noticed the fog of war coming back in VTTs. It's been handled low-tech by DMs forever by slowly revealing the map as the party progresses, but with VTTs allowing for enforced lines of sight I see fog of war becoming more of an expected element of the game.

Don't forget about the cost of acting lessons. You need to learn how to really sell those dives if you want to win soccer games.

Fair. But keep in mind that Hasbro has been public since 1968 and has owned D&D since 1999. That's respectively 54 and 23 years of history. If serving the wants and needs of shareholders was such a death knell to the products, I'm sure we would all have abandoned D&D long ago.

Funnily enough, I was thinking of Monopoly too. But do we get to write it off as a terrible game? Lots of people love it. I love it, even though objectively I can't defend it mechanically, thematically, or in any other way. Soccer is the same. An awful game that seems to generate enormous...

My favourite game is still the original Pool of Radiance, 1988 IIRC. All the goldbox games are on gog now, so the temptation is always there to sink a few hundred hours more playtime into them. On the subject of value per hour, while it's hard for a TTRPG to compete with a video game, one thing...

I'm not seeing why. Financial success = success. Is there a game out there you're thinking of that's financially unsuccessful but is successful in some other way? Or the reverse, financially successful games that fail in other ways? I'd be very curious to see this game that's wildly financially...

With DMsGuild, you have to hope the exposure more than doubles your sales. If it does, it's still a net win after you cough up 50% of the revenues. If not, you'd be better off under the OGL either on DriveThru or doing your own thing.

I thought this was interesting. It's not news - I think they announced this a few months back. But I was reading this and thinking of the assorted suppositions that DDBVTT will be a closed system. The fact that WOTC, through DMs Guild, which is sort of OGL+ with increased access to product...

Please tell us your players appreciate your work ethic.

Sorry, but they aren't. Executives of successful companies think long term.

It's difficult to have a meaningful debate against concepts like "all of them" and "it's pretty rare" without any concrete examples. I run four companies, and none of them overcharges customers or underpays workers. The notion that someone should be paid "as much the value their labor is...

That seems like a bit of an extreme extrapolation on my argument. I'm sure there are endless instances of companies acting unethically. I never said otherwise. I simply said that it isn't an effective strategy for generating and maximizing profits in the long term. How are Enron's profits...

Generally, no. Or at least, those strategies only work for brief periods. If you overcharge customers, you're inviting competition and profits will shrink. If you underpay workers, you're inviting a disengaged workforce who deliver poor-quality results, again damaging profits in the long term...

Let's agree to disagree. Companies that ignore the wants and needs of their customers are simply inviting their competitors to steal their business. The existence of Pathfinder is a pretty good testament to that fact. A basic concept in corporate strategy is that the only path to profitability...

Do we need to use pejoratives like labeling shareholders as "greedy"? I wish we could move away from the notion that being a profitable company somehow makes you evil. D&D used to be owned by an unprofitable company. That was not a better scenario. I'd need to double check the composition of my...

For sure, but only in terms of magnitude. If we're using videogame analogies, what's the difference between DLC and microtransaction? Size, basically, but otherwise it's the same thing in the sense that it's an optional expense. One of the cool things about microtransactions is that it can make...

Would this be much different than it's ever been? Since '74, D&D players have been given the option of buying the core rules and stopping there. OR, they could keep spending money on additional rulebooks, adventures, miniatures, dice, novels, et cetera ad infinitum. But nothing beyond the core...