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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 6760841" data-attributes="member: 32740">While I can't quite state this as undeniable fact, it is my impression that GH was sidelined as a setting because two years before work even began on 2E Gygax had been kicked to the curb at TSR and was only a "creative contributor".  He had no ability to champion his own setting to be promoted within the game and TSR certainly had every corporate interest to minimize their dealings with Gygax from that point on.  FR became the setting of choice for 2E because there were no issues to speak of between TSR and Ed Greenwood.  Greyhawk was pretty much left to rot.  When WotC bought up the bankrupt wreckage of TSR they began work on 3E and it seems they were interested in having at least an amicable relationship with Gygax.  Pretty much as just a nod to his contributions in creating the game they made Greyhawk the "default" setting.  As noted that pretty much just meant that deities and some spell names and items were products that came out of the Greyhawk setting.  But they made no real efforts to promote it as a setting over FR (the IP rights for which at some point was bought out entirely from Greenwood.)  One of the things noted by Ryan Dancey in analyzing TSR's downfall for WotC was that pushing multiple settings at once, and re-publishing them frequently only led to lowered sales of any particular setting.  Given the costs involved it made sense to restrict the number of settings and to be VERY careful that releasing a new setting (or revising/re-releasing an older one) would not cut into sales of the existing settings.So - Gygax gets a tip-o-the-hat in the PH, because they're cool guys and want to be nice to him - but they're businessmen too, and the setting they promote for independent sale (rather than give any part of it away with the core rulebooks) is the one THEY completely OWN without question.  The parts of GH that DID appear in the PH were, I'm fairly sure, elements that they did not actually have to pay much for (if anything) having been under TSR's control when they bought it.</blockquote>

Verification