Does Wizards want Greyhawk to fail?

[Mortellan]

If Greyhawk did get a new setting book, in what time period would it be set? I don't particularly like the From The Ashes universe where Evil has conquered much of the map, I prefer Gygax's original version with Evil gathering, hovering on the edge of some big disaster, that yet may be averted.

In fact that's generally true of campaign settings, the original version is usually the prelude to a big war or confrontation, so there's a sense of rising tension, followed by a denoument. This makes for a better story.

When the timeline is moved on, you lose that. So I prefer either sticking with the original, or creating an entirely new setting.

If you ever have the opportunity, read Gygax's old Greyhawk campaign articles from Dragon Magazine. He was leading the political story of the Flanaess right into the direction Sargent took it with Greyhawk Wars. Then alot of the advances evil made on the map as you mention were reversed in Greyhawk the Adventure Begins (i.e. the Flight of Fiends, the Great North Crusade, etc.) By the time you get to the LGG, things are pretty much back to the balance they were in 1st edition's set.

 

[Odhanan]

The Forgotten Realms, "the new generation taking over".

Giving the (exceptional) longevity of the setting, this is funny to read.

 

[Lurks-no-More]

I think that this alone explains much of the way that WotC thinks regarding Greyhawk.

- It and Forgotten Realms (And Dragonlance and Birthright) are too similar to one another for marketing purposes to fully support all 3.
- Greyhawk is too integral to D&D to simply license it off. If it became successful on the scale of FR under license, they could lose a non trivial portion of their customer base to a company working under license with their own IP.
- If they did support it they run the risk of alienating the old fan base, who are a very vocal minority.
- With Forgotten Realms having been continuously supported since its launch, it is pretty easy to keep their customers buying 'official' material. With Greyhawk, the player base that exists has been running homebrew variants for a long time. Even if they did take a stab at supporting it again, there is no way they can please an entire fan base that by now has a very different idea of what Greyhawk is.

To put it another way, there is not much Wizards could do to Forgotten Realms that would alienate that fan base. But alienating the Greyhawk base would be catasrophic. And there is just not enough of a customer base for Wizards to justify sustaining both (to their thinking).

I'm in complete agreement with you. As I see it, the biggest hurdle with using Greyhawk as an active setting again is the splintering of the fanbase into innumerable groups with their own interpretations of canon and own additions to it.

The fact that a good number of said fans seem to have become entrenched grognards, suspicious of or hostile to all change for whatever reason, and unable to distinguish their own (perfectly legitimate) enjoyment of the setting from its general viability, doesn't help a bit.

(The latter sometimes leads to unfortunate conspiratorial thinking: "Greyhawk's so good, but WotC concentrates on different things, like FR and Eberron; this is only possible if the people at WotC somehow hate Greyhawk and wish it to fail!").

Traveller, another long-standing game/setting with multiple versions and out-of-print periods, suffers from the exact same problems, I think.

 

[Ravellion]

I think that this alone explains much of the way that WotC thinks regarding Greyhawk.

- It and Forgotten Realms (And Dragonlance and Birthright) are too similar to one another for marketing purposes to fully support all 3.
- Greyhawk is too integral to D&D to simply license it off. If it became successful on the scale of FR under license, they could lose a non trivial portion of their customer base to a company working under license with their own IP.
- If they did support it they run the risk of alienating the old fan base, who are a very vocal minority.
- With Forgotten Realms having been continuously supported since its launch, it is pretty easy to keep their customers buying 'official' material. With Greyhawk, the player base that exists has been running homebrew variants for a long time. Even if they did take a stab at supporting it again, there is no way they can please an entire fan base that by now has a very different idea of what Greyhawk is.

To put it another way, there is not much Wizards could do to Forgotten Realms that would alienate that fan base. But alienating the Greyhawk base would be catasrophic. And there is just not enough of a customer base for Wizards to justify sustaining both (to their thinking).

The safest way for them to sustain Greyhawk is to keep running adventures that are setting agnostic and make it easy for people to drop them into Greyhawk.

That situation may change with the Digital Initiative, but I suspect that any ideas they want to tie to a traditional fantasy setting are going to continue to get dropped on the Forgotten Realms rather than in Greyhawk.

END COMMUNICATION

Wow. I think you've just won the thread

 

[Maggan]

(The latter sometimes leads to unfortunate conspiratorial thinking: "Greyhawk's so good, but WotC concentrates on different things, like FR and Eberron; this is only possible if the people at WotC somehow hate Greyhawk and wish it to fail!").

I've seen it extended to "WotC hates Gygax, and thus wants everything he created to fail".

/M

 

[hong]

Lisa Stevens, former Wotc insider, revealed some time ago that before Greyhawk got dissed by the haters, sales for FR and Greyhawk were no different from one another. Which is to say, there was no reason to dump Greyhawk, other than for personal reasons... which is exactly what happened.

Face it: the big wigs at Wizards dislike Greyhawk. They can dance around it as much as they want, but they're doing a great disservice to an even greater setting. There's a special place in hell for such people.

If you guys had any balls, you'd sell Greyhawk to Paizo. But something tells me you're afraid of what it would do to your precious Realms... and even lamer Eberron.

 

[Eridanis]

This thread has been open for four days, and doesn't seem to be going anywhere other than into the realm of bitterness. Let's let it rest for a while.