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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nevin" data-source="post: 9091521" data-attributes="member: 7024481">It wasn't just Gygax or Lorraine.  It was a company riding the waves.  It had no focus.   It was really just a group of gamers that got lucky and were able to make money on the game they invented. TSR had a terrible marketing department. The company was poorly organized,  when sales dropped,  they paid people to scan BBS boards and then the fledgling internet and spent money on lawyers, sending out cease and desist letters because they thought if they beat down the bad people posting stuff sales would come back.  They turned a lot of players into enemies.   It was a company that had no focus other than make stuff, sell stuff.  I'm not even sure they knew who their most profitable customers were.  Dragon lance destroyed TSR,  It became so popular that nothing else mattered, (probably driven by the fact they were in thier 2nd or 3rd bankruptcy) and when everyone had played the game and the modules that followed the book they just stopped buying dragon lance and there was nothing else out there from TSR.   The released a failed box set of Taladas, the other side of Krynn. Great boxed set by the way but it had nothing to bring back the Dragonlance fans. Now WOTC didn't do much better for the first 4 years.  They destroyed Gamma World by rushing the launch to beat Star Frontiers and it had so much errata and quality problems that people couldn't understand the rule and were pissed off they wasted their money.  It had a 32 page erratta booklet that you had to send a letter in and wait 3 months in my case to get.    I think the system in Gamma World 2nd edition was fantastic.   But I doubt even 1 percent of the people that bought it ever ran even one game.  The rules were nearly unusable without the erratta.  WOTC also drove off the RPGA association because they couldn't control them.  Even TSR realized that the RPGA association was doing what no one else was and teaching new DM's how to run games.  WOTC wanted everyone out of thier little garden and they made a lot of enemies and a lot of money went to other companies.  On top of that they decided that modules (remember this is before you could just buy them on the internet) were too much trouble and that they just wanted to sell books.   Going to the local game shop went from  browsing through dozens of modules to a see what  the 3 they sent out this month were.  Then just as the ecosystem was stabilizing and WOTC started to become a company selling stuff their players wanted Magic the gathering came out. It was so profitable that dnd became a secondary product.    I remember some gameshops back then just stopped stocking anything but magic the gathering cards and a few sets of rule books from WOTC.   MOTG is what killed 3rd edition it makes so much money WOTC just didn't care that DND 3rd edition wasn't selling as expected.   Or if they did care they couldn't convince game stores to care about their lower profit books when they could make bank on small overpriced cards.    It's easy to forget taaht even in it's 5e incarnation dnd is an niche game.  Everytime something really profitable, like Dragonlance, Matt Mercer, Magic the Gathering it overshadows the reality that the game is a large niche in gaming and unlikely to ever become any more than that.   And being Niche anything big that touches it or lands near it has a disproportionate effect.</blockquote>

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