Ampersand: 2011 releases officially gutted

[AntlerDruid]

Honestly i am so tired of reading endless posts that 5E is coming for the past 2 years....yes it eventually will come but SO WHAT!?

It doesn't mean I am going to immediately dump 4E and jump to 5E. For a solid year, I played both Pathfinder and 4E. There is enough books to play 4E.

They say there will be possible news at the Con coming up.....so lets wait and see before yelling "the sky is falling!".

Personally I don't mind if books go digital if it means we gets book faster instead of having to wait for the books to be printed and they are high quality like the 4E books have been so far.

For those who do like the printed book version, they could make an option like other companies have where you can order a Print version or just do the downloaded version earlier or both.

Now I am VERY disappointed in the new CB.....they should not have released it as they did.....to alot of groups it is worthless since House Rules can not be implemented. I am still using the "classic" CB because of this.

I am also disappointed in Dragon delays.....but I am giving them January to improve this.....if it doesn't then I will cancel my DDI because right now I only have it for the "crunch" articles since the new CB is worthless to my group.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Something about this strikes me as indescribably sad.

I understand...

Silver lining: the value of your 1Ed, 2Ed and 3Ed books just went up!

 

[DEFCON 1]

You seriously just tossed that stuff out? In the trash?

I mean, even in good condition, I know they don't get top dollar on ebay, so well-used will be nigh unsalable, but I mean... I just can't imagine doing that.

Give them to a young relative to learn with. See if a FLGS would put them in their used books for sale pile. Give them to a second hand store. Give them to some educational institution. Hell, even recycle them.

I understand moving, as I've done it many times in my life, but the trash? That's harsh.

Don't take this rant personally; it's not intended as such. It's mostly rhetorical venting.

I can certainly understand your venting and don't discount it in the slightest. But as far as your suggestions, I didn't have any relatives / young friends who wanted them... and my nearest FLGS already had copies of all these books on their shelves. I also didn't want to go through the hassle of selling them, because at the time (we're talking late 80s for my 1E stuff, mid '90s for my 2E) Ebay / Craigslist were either not invented or not a 'first-thought' idea like they would be now.

But I think the biggest reason why I was able to toss them without really worrying about it was just simply that they were just... things. Objects. And it's not the physical objects that hold any deep meaning or feeling for me, but the memories I have of playing them. So the same way I might toss out an old shirt, or dump a heap of VHS cassette tapes, or purge my filing cabinet of old written material like bad song lyrics I wrote years ago to pass the time... at some point they just become 'stuff'. And once you realize you haven't touched (let alone looked at) something for over 7 - 10 years... the need to keep it (at least for me) has slipped away.

I know it's an anathema to some people and I don't blame them for not sharing my thoughts on the matter in the slightest... but for me... at a certain point what was once a 'memento' turns into 'junk'. The memory is important. The object no longer is.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

I can certainly understand your venting and don't discount it in the slightest. But as far as your suggestions, I didn't have any relatives / young friends who wanted them... and my nearest FLGS already had copies of all these books on their shelves. I also didn't want to go through the hassle of selling them, because at the time (we're talking late 80s for my 1E stuff, mid '90s for my 2E) Ebay / Craigslist were either not invented or not a 'first-thought' idea like they would be now.

But I think the biggest reason why I was able to toss them without really worrying about it was just simply that they were just... things. Objects. And it's not the physical objects that hold any deep meaning or feeling for me, but the memories I have of playing them. So the same way I might toss out an old shirt, or dump a heap of VHS cassette tapes, or purge my filing cabinet of old written material like bad song lyrics I wrote years ago to pass the time... at some point they just become 'stuff'. And once you realize you haven't touched (let alone looked at) something for over 7 - 10 years... the need to keep it (at least for me) has slipped away.

I know it's an anathema to some people and I don't blame them for not sharing my thoughts on the matter in the slightest... but for me... at a certain point what was once a 'memento' turns into 'junk'. The memory is important. The object no longer is.

I see your angle, I sort of get it.

Maybe I am just weird though, but I do occasionally go flipping through my old books from time to time. If nothing else, it reminds me of why I respect the OSR movement, but have ZERO interest in joining it.

Cheers to memories of games (long) past.

 

[Mapache]

I know it's an anathema to some people and I don't blame them for not sharing my thoughts on the matter in the slightest... but for me... at a certain point what was once a 'memento' turns into 'junk'. The memory is important. The object no longer is.

For me, it has nothing to do with what you wanted to hang on to or not. It's that destroying books is morally repugnant to me.

 

[shadzar]

For me, it has nothing to do with what you wanted to hang on to or not. It's that destroying books is morally repugnant to me.

Not just books for me, but anybody being wasteful with something that still has a use but is thrown away, like books, children's clothes that could be donated to someone else, etc.

Sell em all to someone for $1 total if you dont feel like giving them away, but don't be wasteful.

 

[chernann]

Now, D&D pre-paints going out the door, that's pretty surprising. I can understand why 4th edition was made miniature centric, kind of a table top combat oriented MMO rules focussed on balance. I'm guessing 3.5 sales hit a plateau and being part of publicly listed entity meant generating new growth, especially when compared against the success of Magic. If they released 4th edition in the vein of 3.5, they wouldn't see any growth because to play an RPG you basically need 3 rulebooks shared amongst 4 to 6 people ($100 / 6 = $16+ per participant for the product lifecycle, not so hot). So forcing miniatures play makes sense because then accessories would be required.

Since TSR's revenues were about $30 million at their peak, it probably wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that Hasbro would expect that as a base to grow from. The only other model to emulate would be GW, which has revenues of $150 million mostly due to miniatures sales (with some royalties from game deals). They picked miniature gaming as a way to generate growth while still keeping their RPG identity.

This is all sensible from Habro's point of view, a public company needs to constantly demonstrate growth to justify a large multiple in their share price. Unfortunately, it's not so great if you're a subsidiary in a market with demonstrated saturation and difficulty in opening new territorial markets (China, Japan etc may be good opportunities but with no history of table top gaming, let alone RPGs, a tough sell). In the end, the decision was made to give it a go with miniatures apparently.

What's super surprising is that WotC has abandoned this strategy completely. Unfortunately, WotC can't go back to non-miniature style play since Paizo has gobbled up the market they left behind with Pathfinder. I suspect D&D may undergo a few more strange mutations as Hasbro insists on growth before either pigeon holing it as a stable product (unlikely, since it will require an R&D budget to compete with Pathfinder and other RPGs; Monopoly doesn't require R&D and sells just fine), or being jettisoned and sold off.

This isn't that far fetched, it isn't simply about whether a subsidiary or division is profitable, but how profitable it is compared to other parts of the same company; a $6 billion company obviously has a lot of talented management. An hour spent managing D&D is an hour not spent on something that could be far more profitable. Any executive tasked to look after D&D will look like an underperforming tool compared to whoever is looking after Star Wars or Transformers toys, or even Magic the Gathering. Niche subdivisions in huge mass market companies tend not to last very long (Apple server division just got killed by Apple, for instance. And why not? If you can't make iPads and iPhones fast enough, being told to manage the XServe division must seem like career hell).

 

[DEFCON 1]

For me, it has nothing to do with what you wanted to hang on to or not. It's that destroying books is morally repugnant to me.

Not just books for me, but anybody being wasteful with something that still has a use but is thrown away, like books, children's clothes that could be donated to someone else, etc.

Sell em all to someone for $1 total if you dont feel like giving them away, but don't be wasteful.

Believe me, I understand your ways of thinking and I'm right there with you much of the time. A large changeover of my clothes usually means I bag up my old stuff and then drop them off at the Goodwill bins down the street... now that there's a used book store a mile or so away I'll dump off my old paperbacks when I clear my shelves... and I set out my recycling bins each Wednesday night like a good doobie.

But I also know that I'm not so angelic a person that I also won't go way out of my way to see that everything I own that I don't use anymore is going to "go to a new home". Like most of us... there are just certain inconveniences that I just won't go much further on. Because at some point... there will be always be something that you could be thriftful on, but you end up not being. How many people waste food? All the time. Go to a restaurant and not bother bringing home a doggie bag... or leave leftovers in the fridge, not eat them, and then throw them out when they go bad. How much trash do we throw out that we could have put in the recycle bin if we took a couple extra seconds to remove the plastic from the cardboard for instance? Do you take old socks and wash them, cut them up, and use them as rags when you're cleaning the house? There are thousands of things (which the Green movement has highlighted on quite extensively) we could do that wouldn't be wasteful. The question is... how far are we willing to go?

Everyone will have that one thing that they just couldn't imagine just "tossing out". I realize it, which is why I do not take any offense to anything any of you have said. Because in many ways you are absolutely right... I could have done more if I hadn't wanted to be inconvenienced at the time. And that's just something I'll have to accept.

 

[Solvarn]

D&D Stuff

It does seem very odd that Wizards have been so supportive of FLGS by giving them books early, the in store encounters programs and such. Then they turn around and gut their physical book release schedule. I still want to believe Wizards is planning something and this isn't as bad as it looks like, but that is far too optimistic for me.

Proper planning and business analysis would have led to them not being in where they are in the first place.

I think at this point they are flailing and have some serious management issues.

The great thing about America is that if people are willing to spend money there will be someone ready to make something for them to spend their hard earned dollars on. That's the dream anyway. I'm sure that even if WotC can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again, there will be gaming products for us to buy and the sun will continue to rise and set.

I think they're on to something with this electronic tabletop, there is definitely an untapped market that will use that product. I just don't know that anyone at WotC has heard the term "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater."

 

[DEFCON 1]

But where are they?

That's the thing that no one can ever answer sufficiently. All that gets generated is that WotC has cancelled some books, and thus the only possible explanation is that the company is failing and are being mismanaged.

Can you think of NO OTHER possible explanation as to why WotC decided to stop production on these three hardcover books? Now I certainly can... as can quite a number of other people on all these threads who have given any number of possible reasons why it has happened. Some of them are reasons that imply WotC might be struggling, but some are reasons that imply that WotC has come into more knowledge about how their company is doing business and is "following the money" and doing the same, if not better. But the fact is... we don't know who is right.