To be fair, other than the unfortunate (for multiple reasons) cancellation of the VTT, they had their act together pretty well for about two years, from 2008 until early 2010. The double bomb of the Essentials reboot and the move from a functional desktop application to a comically inept web application was when you really saw the flailing start.
The flailing about and wailing and gnashing of teeth actually started when lots of people dropped the D&D brand for Pathfinder, because they didn't like the way 4E played. About 2 weeks after the preview books hit shelves...
Truth is, most of the people who played 3.5E didn't make the switch to 4E. It was still a financial success (if it wasn't, it wouldn't have lasted 4+ years as an edition, nor have gotten a reboot in the form of a minor edition), but it appealed to a different demographic than 3.5.
And Paizo made big bucks on the legacy fanbase. Not me — I got off the boat at 3.5, and D&D has never been my "identity game"† — and Paizo knew right off that they had to do several things to keep the legacy and build a fanbase:
- both dead tree and electronic versions of the same rulebook, including art;
- get legacy players to read the rules;
- keep it close enough to use 3.X modules with PF rules and PF modules with 3.X rules;
- cure a few of the more outré issues with 3.X;
- get new players to meet and play with old players;
- Keep the module quality high.
1 was easy cheap in PDF, cheap+Costs in dead tree.
2 was easy - free low-art beta. It got me to give it a read-through, and I wasn't even playing D&D by that point.
3 was tricky due to 4. According to most of my friends who loved 3.5, Pathfinder succeeded. My friends who didn't like 3.X don't like PF, either.
5 was handled by a robust Organized Play system.
6 was done, by all accounts I've heard, but I've never bothered to check myself, because the rules were too 3.X for my tastes.
So far, WotC is doing some of that...
1 - not yet/kind-of, depending upon view of the Basic Rules PDFs. DDEX and DDEN modules in electronic only. Core dead tree only, except for multiple really good pirate scans. But and OEM PDF would be better, both for searching and for use with Text-To-Speech. (One of my current players is visually impaired enough to have trouble, and another who games at the store for special events is functionally blind (uncorrectable vision which requires images at 128pt or bigger fonts to read, focus range about 7" for that limited ability). PDF means many blind gamers don't have to have braille transcriptions done.
2. Being done with the Basic Rules PDFs. Got me through the door. Now,
I haz ded treezzz...
3. Not a big priority, thanks to 4e... and to #4.
4. Yep, and then some. Cured way more of the 3.X issues than PF did.
5. Organized play to the rescue as well.
6. We'll see. Too soon to tell, but DDEX14 doesn't really hold much promise. That map
SUCKED.
PDF users aren't all just being self-entitled.
- For some, it's about portability. I'd rather have legal PDF than dead tree, because ink on wood pulp and rag is heavy.
- For some, it's about searchability. As I age, my ability to skim for a rule is impaired more, even as my ability to interpret what I do read improves further.
- For some, it's about disabled gamer accessibility. I've known 4 blind gamers. 3 of them went PDF. The fourth is a non-purchaser, using a braille character sheet, and beads on a string for hit points in session.
- For some, it's a matter of price. They have the laptop or phone or tablet anyway, and PDF prices save money over dead tree.
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† The game with which I identify as a "fan". I'm a general RPG geek who plays D&D, not a D&D geek. Outside the D&D boards, I almost never use the term DM, except with the meaning "die modifier", as in "DM+2"... most of my adult life, I identified as a "Traveller GM".
