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I love Ars Magica, and I've been playing it in various campaigns almost continuously for 10 or 12 years. My current campaign is nearly three years in. That said, I've never played it as written. Never in troupe style. Almost never with the game's intended level of downtime lab activity. In...

The Wealth system was designed to account for a modern financial world, where credit is commonly used and people's assets and resources go far beyond the cash in their wallets. (This isn't speculation--I'm the guy who created d20 Modern's Wealth system.) Based on how you're describing the...

I'm not sure I grant all your premises, but just out of curiousity, why do you assume it would be anybody but WotC? If your shop wasn't performing to your satisfaction, would you require some sort of overlord to tell you to try some new strategies?

This is awesome and is exactly what we'd most like to see. To be clear, I'm definitely NOT advocating fees. What I am pointing out is that even in the above scenario, it's conceivable the shop is picking up considerable cost without a significant uplift in sales. (How many gamers do you know...

As one of the posters who brought the staffing cost issue into the debate, I'll point out that I wasn't talking about the DMs. Few shops are willing to simply hand the keys to a bunch of gamers and leave for the night. So even if the staff has nothing to do with the actual event, running OP in...

Ah, yes. Flogging the old "Magic/D&D are inconsequential to Hasbro, but at the same time Hasbro suits are obsessed with micromanaging them" horse again. One of the net's most enduring myths. Hasbro operates a constellation of brands, the vast majority of which "only" generate tens of millions...

Everything you say is true, across the UK and especially in London. Despite that, a fair number of shops feel that despite the cost, they can't afford NOT to have OP space. In this day and age, a shop needs to offer something the internet can't: in gaming, that's community and an opportunity to...

Hi, all-- I think we can all agree that the golden ideal is that all OP events are run for free, and lots of people turn out for them, and then they all spend a lot of money in the shop and make the effort worthwhile for the retailer. Everyone has fun, the retailer makes a living, and we all...

Like other posters, I agree that it totally depends on the nature of your campaign and what's going on in it. Building a crenellated wall around a town may be useless when it's assaulted by dragons and high-level spellcasters. But is that the common threat, or are the townspeople really more...

Or that one of them might be rolled by Kate.

I voted yes, but the real answer is "sometimes" (and, frankly, not that often). I keep journals for my favourite types of games: Long (or longish) running campaigns with significant arc stories and invested characters. It doesn't hurt if the game or GM provide some sort of incentive for...

I don't know much about how the Ravenloft game will play, but if you're looking for dungeon crawl, there's another D&D board game in the works: Dungeons of Dragonfire Mountain, releasing 16 November. It does appear, from the brief catalogue description, to be a dungeon-crawly game along the...

Actually, there are tens of millions of people who used to play D&D, but don't anymore. Most of those have positive memories of D&D--probably even still think of themselves as "gamers"--but have been out of touch with the game and the community for a decade or two. They haven't made up their...

I have no special insight on this, but my guess is although the decision was announced recently, it was probably made several months ago. Staffing realignments were probably handled toward the end of last year (as is typical at WotC). This fits with the fact that the last new products come out...

Buddhafrog, that's an awesome observation and makes me even more excited about playing with my kids soon.

This is a really important point, one that became really clear to me in my days of designing and focus testing entry-level games at WotC. Kids (especially around the age they're most likely to be ready for RPGs) are really into rules. In a way, their entire life is about learning rules--rules...

D&D is not the biggest brand in Hasbro's portfolio, nor in WotC's, but I'd hardly call any brand that pulls in double-digit millions "small potatoes." D&D is a major WotC brand, and I'd hate to be the WotC manager who has to explain to the Hasbro board or shareholders why I didn't take it...

My 6-year-old daughter loves fantasy and storytelling. She's aware of the "grownup" games her parents play with their friends, and vaguely aware of the format and nature of those games. She can read, do basic math, and keep her attention focused long enough to play Kids of Carcassonne for two...

Google "Reynard the Fox." You won't get jokes per se, but you can come up with a handful of short tales, generally humorous, vulgar, and/or gruesome, that might fit the bill.

Don't be too dismissive of things like this. In the mid-90s, WotC went from being a garage operation to a 700 MILLION dollar company in the space of a few years. From three or four people to over 700. Can you imagine trying to ride that bronco? I've long felt that the company's single most...