Does Wizards want Greyhawk to fail?

[Lord Zardoz]

What I think is funny is that if WotC started to release Greyhawk material on the same level as Eberron or Forgetten Realms, a lot of its fans would cry out in defiance of how their setting was being changed or developed in ways they didn't like. I was under the impression that part of the appeal of Greyhawk as a setting was that it just gave a framework where individual groups could fill things in on their own - at least relative to other settings.

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

 

[heirodule]

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.

So you'd rather have nothing, than a cool hardback with greyhawk specific PrCs and feats and setting details from a post from the ashes type setting.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Alternate Theory

This is just wild speculation and probably has no basis in reality. But, it occurs to me that there may be one other reason for Greyhawk to have such minimal support.

Greyhawk / Blackmoor was the original D&D setting. Back in the 80's, there was some falling out between Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson that resulted in a lawsuit that was later settled. The terms of that lawsuit and what exactly happened are still basically sealed. (a 2004 interview with Dave Arneson got the answer "I cannot talk about it" when he was directly asked.

GameSpy: Eventually, the game starts to take off and starts to turn into a real business that's going to move out of Gary's basement. What happened to drive you from the company?

Arneson: I can't talk about that.

http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/540/540395p4.html

Anyway, I would not be surprised if there were some lingering entanglements based on who owns the IP for what from those settings. My assumption is that there are parts of the setting that essentially cannot be used unless Arneson gives the OK, and that simply leaving those sections out would leave some gaps.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[GVDammerung]

No, I believe GVDammerung meant animus. Animus 2 : a usually prejudiced and often spiteful or malevolent ill will. From Merriam-Webster online dictionary.

Yup.

 

[GVDammerung]

Actually, the quote is "The official word from Scott Rouse is that Wizards of the Coast is not currently interested in licensing any of its campaign settings to third-party companies." So, it's not like Greyhawk is being singled out. They aren't interested in licensing any campaign settings.

I was wondering today how exactly Wotc has been approached on the licensing front. Specifically, what money have they been offered? Five figures? Six? Seven? I find in very hard to believe that they do not have a "price" despite their obvious reluctance. I'd be curious what they have been offered specifically.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

...also because I think it has less "fiddly bits" than FR or Eberron, like Spellfire, Warforged, Artificers etc.

To be fair...I always choose FR as my base campaign setting (First got into the idea of a "campaign" after playing the Gold Box Commodore 64 games, so its the one I picked up) and have never introduced or mentioned the idea of spellfire, any characters from the novels, or any of the other "fiddly bits".

Mostly I set my campaigns around plots and characters I develop, and use the prewritten stuff as needed when the PCs go off-course.

It really wouldn't change my game style at all if I had chosen GH way back when instead of FR and know about its story/geography instead of Faerun's.

DS

 

[JiffyPopTart]

And another somewhat-GH related question...

If there is "NO GH" in 4e, will the spells still have GH wizard names attached to them.

Will there only be an Acid Arrow....and no more Melf?

DS

 

[jokamachi]

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.

 

[Doug McCrae]

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.

Mass murderers? Yep, they're in. Publishers who didn't publish quite enough products about an imaginary universe to satisfy some of its more rabid fans? Y'know I'm really not sure that's as bad. If I was Satan I'd be tempted to send them on their way. Possibly with a kick up the backside for wasting my time.

 

[variant]

If anything, I think they tried hard to revive the setting, taking it back to basics by ditching the Carl Seargeant baggage and making Greyhawk the default 3.0 setting. To me, it simply seemed that the first big Greyhawk push (with the core rule integration and Living Greyhawk) simply failed to rake in the money like FR did.

They gave us a nice fully colored FR campaign setting. I curse them for releasing a crappy black and white softback Greyhawk book.

What I think is funny is that if WotC started to release Greyhawk material on the same level as Eberron or Forgetten Realms, a lot of its fans would cry out in defiance of how their setting was being changed or developed in ways they didn't like. I was under the impression that part of the appeal of Greyhawk as a setting was that it just gave a framework where individual groups could fill things in on their own - at least relative to other settings.

Um, no.

I think most Greyhawk fans are not only used to the world changing, but expect it to. The world has always been evolving with every boxset released from both 1st and 2nd edition. It is a very detailed world.