There is a difference between "making money" and "making money" depending on the context. I'm sure it made enough to cover the overhead but beyond that we will never know.
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D&D 5E Does this seem to be the edition that was made for splatbooks?
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There is a difference between "making money" and "making money" depending on the context. I'm sure it made enough to cover the overhead but beyond that we will never know.
Imaro
Legend
Citation please? I know he said it sold well initially but I'm not sure I've ever seen a comment on the entire run of 4e...
Mercurius
Legend
Well either it didn't make enough money or they had reason to believe that it soon wouldn't make enough money. I mean, the bottom line with for-profit businesses is, well, profit.
Oddly enough, although I am as old as you, and go as far back....this was the first time I knew "splat" meant asterisk.
Just goes to show perceptions are funny things.
That's probably more a matter of which groups you associated with than anything else.
Splat is one of the common nicknames for the asterisk character in hacker (by which I mean the older, not confined to breaking security use) culture - mostly for the simple reason that short, one syllable names are highly preferable to complex polysyllabic ones when your discussions include frequent references to them. Of course, since this was before the internet existed, you ended up with a load of groups coming up with their own independent names for common symbols. Normalisation happened after everything became interconnected, but even so it's 50-60 years ago, now... and not all jargon stays current to the same degree everywhere
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/splat.html may interest some.
The fact that hacker culture and rpg culture might have a sizeable overlap is, I believe, unsurprising to most of us.
Iosue
Legend
It may have to do how much one was involved with the White Wolf scene, as well. A search for "splatbook" in rec.games.frp.dnd doesn't turn up any hits before 2001. A review of the rec.games.frp.dnd FAQ since 1998 shows that the following was added to the Glossary in November of 2003:
rec.games.frp.dnd FAQ said:
Funny thing, when I did my searches of rec.games.frp.dnd, it seemed like there were "What is a splatbook?" threads in 2003 and 2008. Perhaps suggesting that when 3.5 and 4e came out, lapsed players would get back into the game, go on newsgroups, and be confounded by the unfamiliar term. That certainly squares with my experience, as I do not recall "splatbook" being common parlance in D&D discussions from 1992-1997, when I was active on Usenet, but coming back to the game after a long hiatus, I found it very common. Perhaps an influx of WW players with the release of 3e brought the term into the D&D sphere.
prosfilaes
Adventurer
On the flip side, a book with material for everyone may well have no choices that interest a certain player, whereas a fighter book is likely to have something to interest any player of a fighter. Also, if you're building a character, a splatbook limits the must-search books. And if you take a class from Complete Wizard, Complete Mage may have expansion material for it; if you take a class from Red Wizards of Thay, neither Neverwinter Nights nor nothing else is likely to have expansion material for it.
Henrix
Explorer
What do you think sells the most copies; a book aimed at a sole class, or a book aimed at several, or all, classes as well as DMs?
The cost to develop and make them is the same.
I think the PF booklets with options for a specific campaign is great. In D&D5 you could have some suitable backgrounds, and feats for everybody, as well as subclasses for a bunch of classes.
prosfilaes
Adventurer
What do you think sells the most copies; a book that every player and DM might use at some point, or a book that's aimed at a single campaign? Historically, the 2E Complete Books were some of the best sellers for TSR, and their successors for 3E likewise--at least, it was a long series that everyone seemed to have. For Pathfinder, I believe the hardbacked books dominate the booklets for sales, and while they're a little less focused then the 3E Complete books (which in turn were a little less focused then the 2E books), they're not campaign books. There's a case to be made that stuff like Advanced Player's Guide, that targets everyone is the most effective (though that burns out fairly quickly), and that campaign books that sell best are going to be nigh that generic.
