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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 5330671" data-attributes="member: 9225">I say "OSR." You lose. No, that was because of the intersection of Moore's Law and software development.This is restating the problem as a solution, so it merits no consideration.The term "financial research" is meaningless. Do you mean accounting? Market research? Are you talking about anything factual, or merely stringing together words that sound impressive to you?Many things destroyed TSR, above and beyond what was described by someone looking at the books with an eye toward brokering its acquisition for as little as possible.As I've noted elsewhere, the "get off the supplement treadmill!" effort lasted exactly as long as it took to get an FY's worth of returns. WotC dropped the core and floppy brown books really fast and eventually poached idea from third parties. These lessons probably consisted less of the ideology impressed onto you by 3e's marketing and more on boring accounting stuff, and advice like "Don't steal from yourself."The game that's being redone to appeal to people who like linear fighter/quadratic wizard no matter how much you declare they shouldn't? Mike Mearls explicitly says otherwise.I'm glad a game finally does justice to something written in 1991. Boy, y'all must feel like *trendsetters.*It does, and Dark Sun came out in 1991.Yeah, TSR sure made some good settings. This is kind of my point. WotC cannot outdo a rickety, nearly dead company whose leadership hated RPGs when it comes to developing worlds.Keith Baker's Eberron was pretty good too, I heard. Eberron as WotC does it is ass, though. But that's because it was designed as a dumping ground for various conceptual leftovers. (Thanks for the racist Drow guys!). My buddy paints better than Michealangelo, but I can't show you, because he's in Canada with your girlfriend!A vanity project if it has no hope of creating a valuable intellectual property. To create valuable intellectual property, a company must be willing to take minor risks and experiment. For a decade now, WotC has failed to do any significant development here except to create Eberron -- and Eberron is a failure. Eberron is a failure *because* of WotC's setting development style. See, you keep talking as if I advocate what TSR did (and as if your reading of WotC's marketing-driven history of the acquisition is wholly representative of that, which is unwise of you). The problem isn't that WotC has failed to stay the course according to  market verbiage you heard a decade ago. The problem is that WotC is institutionally bad at this stuff and makes excuses for being bad at it.See, I've been on the other side of this, in offices arguing whether some visual doodad/model/name works to represent a faction or region. There are good and bad ways to do this and they always raise the issue of reconciling worlds and functional media (gameplay, storytelling, scripting) objectives. For 10 years, WotC has focused on practices that obviously don't work when it comes to creating engaging world-based IP. And the worst thing you can do is make the media objective (in this case RPG play) the entire focus of setting development.For an example of good practices, go to your local comic store. Marvel makes a fraction of its income from comic books, but understands that comics are the fertile field that good ideas come from. This was in dispute for a short time as one could argue that classic Marvel deserved all the credit, but contributions from more recent projects like the Ultimates to other media demonstrate the soundness of the concept. If something doesn't work, Marvel doesn't waste much more time on it. Easy.WotC does not get (and you don't seem to get) that worlds and characters are *about* things  other than the ability to demonstrate and support Daily Powers and crap. This is no insult to the genius of people like Mike Mearls, who has not only written great game systems, but wrote one of my favourite Scarred Lands setting books. WotC's problem is systemic. It is obvious that the company has long been without any channel for creative development that isn't subservient to a system design or marketing process. Like I said before: It's sad.</blockquote>

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