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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 6298499" data-attributes="member: 58197">Say what? D&D was on the brink of bankruptcy when Wizards picked it up. Part of the reason 4E made such radical changes was that Hasbro was threatening to mothball the D&D brand. Now they're going all-out to woo back the players who left over 4E, because they really need that player base back; when they left, new players didn't come to replace them in sufficient numbers. MMOs have been eating D&D's lunch for the last decade. And that's for the 800-pound gorilla (before Pathfinder, at least) of the tabletop world.Meanwhile, Magic has been a cash cow for Wizards for the last 20 years. Magic revenues were what enabled Wizards to rescue D&D when TSR collapsed. It's had ups and downs, but at no point did it flirt with the kind of disasters that have threatened D&D. It's got no problem pulling in new players and keeping old ones engaged.No, they're not. The number of variables may be technically finite, but practically it's unlimited. Chess has nowhere near as many variables as Magic does, and we aren't running out of chess games. The design team is always experimenting with new mechanics, because sometimes they hit on an idea that really improves the game, but the vast bulk of the cards printed in Magic are using the same design space* they've had from the start: Instants, sorceries, creatures, enchantments, artifacts, and lands. I came back to the game after a 10-year hiatus and had no trouble with the new cards.Coming back to the topic at hand, though... I think there is potential for awesome movies to be made out of D&D properties, as long as they focus on the specific property instead of trying to make it "generic D&D." Epic fantasy demands a fleshed-out world. With a hugely popular novel series, a well-defined world-spanning conflict, and some really vivid characters, Dragonlance is the obvious choice. (Yes, they already made some animated films which were by all accounts awful, but that wasn't the fault of the source material. The animated "Lord of the Rings" was atrocious; didn't stop Peter Jackson from turning it into a blockbuster live-action hit.)[SIZE=-2]*In fact, the original design space had a number of elements that have since been removed. It used to be that artifacts came in "poly," "mono," and "continuous" varieties. That's not a thing any more. There used to be a seventh card type called "interrupt," and at one point they added an eighth for "mana source." Both of those were later folded into instants. Ante was removed from the rules once they realized nobody wanted to play for ante, which meant they could no longer print cards that messed with the ante. Et cetera, et cetera.[/SIZE]</blockquote>

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