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It's always tricky for a DM to play Xanatos Speed Chess with clever and unpredictable players...my suggestion is don't rely on the Batman Gambit. Sometimes you just need to adjust things on the fly and improv a bit.

I've already had to sell off some books a few years back, but I've been lucky with some close calls. My hardcover Iron Kingdoms book got dangerously close to getting water damaged in a storage area that was "safe" from such things. Recently I was looking for my setting notes and had forgotten I...

Lately, mostly DM. I roll in the open, but not for any particular reason. I roll a good 5 d20s at once, though (speeds up combat), and I don't tell them what I'm rolling for until after the roles. Then I narrate the results.

Meh. Fantasy, scifi, steampunk, dieselpunk - it's a matter of what is your favorite window dressing. Fun fact: unless it's a hydro-electric, solar, or a gas-powered generator, your local powerplant is churning out electricity using steam (created by a fossil fuel or nuclear source, but still...

Oh, I've been in plenty of arguments with Mac "cultists" (not the same as a Mac user). While their current batch of stuff is (usually) decent, their image is what really drives sales, as well as many of these high-end pretentious clothing stores found at my nearby mall. Whoo-boy, some of those...

Yeeeaaaahh...no. For you, maybe this is the case, but brand loyalty is a huge part of business for any major product company. Go ask Apple. Or ask Coke what happened when they came out with New Coke in the 80s. Just a few examples. There's a lot more out there.

Point them to Girl Genius. Or you just need some Iron Kingdoms and call it Full Metal Fantasy. Huzzah!

Oh, I've found my direction with elves (here's a hint), including a different take on drow (not so much evil as amoral opportunistic survivalist mongolian inuit ninjas). Dwarves I'm rethinking because the response is going to be "too much like Skyrim (nordic/imperial, not dwemer)" - similar...

Coming up with something interesting isn't the roadblock. Making their interesting something mesh in a world where they are smaller than the other interesting somethings seems to be an issue with me. Easy enough to shunt the bulk of halflings off to another continent, where they have a...

Then they'll eventually end up with a competator that breaks their business model, and they will have to adapt or die.

There are still parallels. From what I've seen, this hobby industry isn't strong enough in the US to support an only Games Workshop store except in very, very specific locations. Many remaining game shops in the US today also double as comic shops. They have no choice but to diversify over here...

Welcome to the comic book industry 15 to 20 years ago.

I'll be honest - I have trouble designing with the shorter races in mind. Oh, kobolds and goblins are easy enough, but halflings, gnomes, etc are always kinda just there. Build their own little world around them and they are just another near-human, with everything built to their scale. In a...

I got to thinking...while Forgotten Realms (FR) isn't nearly as huge as Star Wars (SW) as a franchise, there's a lot in common between the SW Expanded Universe (EU) and the FR novelizations: both have to keep some sort of crisis going in order to sell books, both are subject to editorial...

Hating something that is in a pre-alpha design phase and we know very, very little about is stupid. There, I said it. Might get a mod warning out of it, but oh well. This thread smells of edition war bait, anyways. What Monte is doing is trying to connect with fans instead of alienating...

Numbering an edition doesn't become "cool" again in marketeese until #7 or 8. Marketing peeps seem to like to avoid 5, but especially avoid 6. 10 is a sweet spot, because you can use the roman numeral X and X is always cool. 9 works because it anticipates 10. Why do you think Apple still uses...

True. The Monster Vaults are pretty solid, and I would be happy for a similar 5e version.

I'd say remove the multiple versions of a single creature from core MM. In fact, I'd be fine with a smaller selection of monsters overall with easy, stackable templates that could be added to any monster. Templates would be separate from the monsters instead of mixed in like how 3e had it...

Yeah, but 3e FR got a bit textbooky trying to work in everything. It's fine if you are already a FR fan, but 13-14 setting/splat books on FR (let's face it - Drow of the Underdark was practically FR) gets more than a little intimidating if you are a n00b. Oddly enough, even though there is more...

Personally? I'd prefer a Hard Reboot, like Trek 2.0. We already know what is going to happen, though - WotC already said what they were going to do was make it so that anyone could play any era. My guess is that it'll be split between things exclusive to the FR across all eras and which...