Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orius" data-source="post: 4847554" data-attributes="member: 8863">Huh?  They even bother with marital rites?Normally, I would complain about linking to TV Tropes because of my lack of willpower, but I was going to go to that page anyway.  Now I don't have to bother searching for it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />Yup.  And there goes three more hours of my time.  *flush* <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I'd say the problem is Dragonlance. Before DL, there was just Greyhawk, the bits and pieces of the Known World that existed at the time, and prehaps the people playing Empire of the Petal Throne.  Gary set up Greyhawk as a kind of sandbox where DMs culd build their own campaigns.  Then came Dragonlance, and it was a huge success.And since this was right around the time when Gary lost control of TSR, management felt the Dragonlance approach was the best way to make money.  So that's why they bought the Realms from Ed, and why 2e saw the mushrooming of settings.  They wanted to make money selling modules, campaign sets, books, calendars and whatnot all tied into these different worlds.  The Realms ended up being successful, while the others not so much, even if they gained their fanbases.  The problem is, unlike other big shared universes like say Star Trek, various comic book universes, Star Wars and so on, is that an RPG setting needs to be a bit more open-ended.  It's hard to do that with tons of continuity porn flying around, because each DM will have his or her own inpirations for developing a campaign, and because the nature of an RPG requires things to be open ended, otherwise you have to set things on rails. I'd say WotC's current strategy seems to be an updated version of the one behind the old World of Grewhawk box.  Release the basic setting itself, and let the DMs develop it on their own, excpet now they have official fan websites to offer new material since they know players interested in the setting are going to look for material on the web.</blockquote>

Verification