D&D Product Announcements

[Jan van Leyden]

What about new material for older editions? Not a book, probably, but DDi articles such as "Combat Maneuvers for 1e" article, "Prestige Classes as Kits" for a 2e article, and "Paragon Paths as Prestige Classes" for a 3.5e article (or similiar themes, like new feats, spells, monster conversions, etc.)

Why don't they do that!? That can rake in tons of cash and fans.

Tons of fans? You mean older editions' fans are even more overweight than 4e ones?

I presume that gamers still using 1e for example have long since detached themselves from what WotC is doing. They are used to make up their own stuff and band together using the internet.

3e fans have mostly - a wild guess, I know - changed their allegiance over to Paizo and Pathfinder. A look at these and other forums indicates a very emotional stance with WotC being tagged as Evil. Could they be ensnared by the Evil side? I don't think so.

Another point, especially were pre-3e editions are concerned, is the necessary system mastery. Are there WotC employees who could without undue effort produce good stuff for these systems? Stuff which can stand the test of gamers very much invested in their systems?

Next would be the fragmented audience. Gamers have a precise idea of what has to be in the game. Say you put up an article series about Dragonborn in other D&D worlds. Which of the many different areas of Dragonlance would you use? Is it pre- or post-Greyhawk wars? Why can't I use this article to make a FR Dragonborn for my campaign set before the Times of Trouble?

I frankly don't see a reasonable approach for WotC to handle legacy systems supplying those gamers with new material. Perhaps they could open up the magazines for publishers of clone systems, say letting them publishing a Dragon article and a Dungeon adventure for one of those pseudo-legacy systems each month. This might make the affected gamers somewhat happy without overly taxing WotC resources.

 

[delericho]

That would be my guess too. There was a full set of books put out on CDROM along with some software as I recall way back when.

"Core Rules 2.0", or perhaps the Expansion for it. One of the very few good pieces of software ever made for D&D (officially, at least).

They can just slap those files up on DDI and you have access to all the books etc.

Not quite. Those files contained the text of the books only, in RTF format. A better approach would almost certainly be to just dust off the existing PDFs, despite the quality issues in a lot of the files.

Frankly I doubt they're going to put any real huge effort into older editions. It seems more like a "hey, it isn't going to hurt us to do this, it will get us a few happy smiles and won't cost much." kind of thing.

Yep.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Tons of fans? You mean older editions' fans are even more overweight than 4e ones?

I presume that gamers still using 1e for example have long since detached themselves from what WotC is doing. They are used to make up their own stuff and band together using the internet.

3e fans have mostly - a wild guess, I know - changed their allegiance over to Paizo and Pathfinder. A look at these and other forums indicates a very emotional stance with WotC being tagged as Evil. Could they be ensnared by the Evil side? I don't think so.

Another point, especially were pre-3e editions are concerned, is the necessary system mastery. Are there WotC employees who could without undue effort produce good stuff for these systems? Stuff which can stand the test of gamers very much invested in their systems?

Next would be the fragmented audience. Gamers have a precise idea of what has to be in the game. Say you put up an article series about Dragonborn in other D&D worlds. Which of the many different areas of Dragonlance would you use? Is it pre- or post-Greyhawk wars? Why can't I use this article to make a FR Dragonborn for my campaign set before the Times of Trouble?

I frankly don't see a reasonable approach for WotC to handle legacy systems supplying those gamers with new material. Perhaps they could open up the magazines for publishers of clone systems, say letting them publishing a Dragon article and a Dungeon adventure for one of those pseudo-legacy systems each month. This might make the affected gamers somewhat happy without overly taxing WotC resources.

But how many people who subscribe to DDI are interested in older editions? A few perhaps, but since it is basically a 4e resource you won't get 1e fans signing up for DDI to get the one or two articles a year for their system. So it would have to be open material, thus free. It isn't going to HURT if they could get quality material and not have to pay money developing it themselves (or at least an insignificant amount). Hard to say if that is really feasible. Costs can add up in little ways, someone has to keep an eye on it and make sure some material shows up and that it is acceptable. I think at best it is a huge unknown how much that's worth. As I said before, since older editions aren't going to make WotC money outright their main purpose would be PR and drawing eyeballs that might buy 4e products. It is hard to say how many people there really are out there that are playing older editions that have any interest in 4e at this point. Maybe some, but they probably already know about it. It MIGHT work. I'd be very surprised if WotC put anything beyond the very most nominal effort into this though with all the significant questions.