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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5427600" data-attributes="member: 58197">My guess would be that book sales are declining steadily. Casual players never bought many books to begin with; hardcore players nowadays are likely to have DDI and thus not bother. Given the overhead of printing and publishing, they've decided to cut their losses.In my group, I am the only one who buys D&D books, ever. It's been that way for about a year now. And even I don't buy very many; I went out and bought Essentials because I was too eager to wait for the DDI release (considering how long that release took, this was clearly the right decision), but I no longer even think about blowing money on Martial Power XVI: The Hackening. Why bother? It's not like I'm going to get any use out of it until it hits the Character Builder, and then I won't need the book.It's a rational decision on my part, and cutting publication of physical books is a rational response on WotC's part. It may well improve the quality of the game down the road. But it's a sad day nonetheless for anyone who grew up devouring loquacious, chart-laden tomes full of bizarre creatures and Larry Elmore's softcore porn.Edit: ...Or, then again, maybe it isn't. Maybe it's actually a really happy day. Y'know why? Because ever since WotC took over D&D back in 2000, there has been a relentless focus on "crunch." Every book had to have a minimum quotient of crunchy mechanics, and this required level took a big leap when 4E was released. This has perhaps increased their utility as gaming manuals, but it has at the same time made them much less fun to read. If WotC now plans to move all their crunch-heavy offerings into DDI, that frees up the published book line to become books again--things to sit down with, page through, be inspired by. Back to the old school. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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