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Bear in mind they're probably tangled up in non-disclosure / non-defamation agreements and are very restricted in what they CAN say. Even if the players and GM could survive jumping ship, the same can't be said for the dozens of other people involved in the company. No, Step 3: Die of old age...

Down to nothing. They are no longer trustworthy.

Eh, you have facts and sales figures, but I have nostalgia and a desire for this to fail so that the old days are seen as better. Let's call it a draw.

I really wanted to like this setting--I mean, I was hyped about doing a Treasure Planet / Outlaw Star esque campaign. And then the actual reviews and breakdowns of what was in the book started coming in, and it all faded away. Everything I've heard makes it sound...low-effort. People have...

Thing is, I have almost never seen those discussions talk about "magic using" classes. It is always the friggin' wizards. Not sorcerers or warlocks. Barely ever clerics. Only certain specific builds of druid or bard, usually those dipping into the best wizard spells. This suggests that...

I think my favourite solution was the "magic specialist" core classes that 3e introduced--the Beguiler, Dread Necromancer and War Mage (and maybe another one I forgot). Essentially Wizards who were very accomplished in one (or two) highly thematic areas of magic and who had a bundle of thematic...

...and if nobody has that feat, the DM isn't allowed to tell them? Lister: "Why don't we scrape away this mortar here, slide one of these bricks out, then using a rope weaved from strands of this hessian, rig up a kind of a pulley system so that when a guard comes in, using it as a trip wire...

Also, it's not like it requires that much adjustment to make most character concepts fit a given world. You want to play a fearsome, oft-misunderstood big strong guy in Dragonlance? Minotaurs are right there.

Bit of an excluded middle there. RPG settings by definition need to have imperfections and threats--otherwise, what do the PC's do? What springs to mind is Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. The Culture would be a great place to live and is mostly free of conflict with the only endemic problems...

I think it would have happened inevitably in some way. People see a system that lets them play fantasy characters, most of them are going to want to play Conan or the LotR characters, both of whom spent only a fairly small part of their career staging heists in dungeons.

And Theros, Ravnica and Strixhaven, but they don't count because [furious handwaving].

Oh yes, but there's been a definite progression of vampires to the "X-Men With Fangs" / "Hunky Attractively Tormented Romance Hero" state that predominates today, and the cool villains of Lost Boys were one of the marks on the road. In a sense, Vampire was pushing against that tide almost from...

Why does it smell of vinegar?

With regard to Vampire, it's worth comparing it to how vampire fiction at the time (and still today) was steadily moving away from vampirism being a miserable curse and into being something cool. You can see a major change in how Anne Rice (one of the codifiers of the modern vampire) was...

Just a comment that you might find useful in future; I always find it offputting when someone who likes a 3pp book (or indeed, another RPG system) seems unable to talk about why it's so good without an endless string of WotC bashing. If something is actually good, then it can stand by itself...

O FORGOTTEN THREAD LOST TO THE AGES ARISE AND RETURN TO THE FOREMOST PAGES

Just play a halfling. Cuts the chance of randomly chucking your weapon across the room or turning 180 degrees and stabbing an ally to one in 400 rather than 1 in 20.

I think one solution that gets underused (perhaps from a reflex aversion to "special" characters) is simply saying that player characters who are an unusual race will actually be unique in the setting.

Ah cool, so I can summon a half-dozen Pixies and turn all the party into giant apes, with a few save-or-loses left over to throw at the enemy?

It drives me batty when people assert "You must run 6-8 encounters or you're doing it wrong!", when the DMG very clearly just gives that as ONE EXAMPLE of how an adventuring day might go IF the encounters are X difficulty. Further evidence that almost nobody ever reads that section for...