How Wizards of the Coast Could Slay in Profit

[Shemeska]

It's potentially a really good idea, but there are some logistical and some ideological stumbling points I can see looming. Right now it's arguable that they're running pretty tight on having the staff available for the e-zines to put out 4e content on time and in reasonable amount each month for subscriber expectations.

If they start accepting material for 1e/2e/3e/OD&D/BECMI/etc how much more heavily is that going to tax their resources if they want to devote the proper time to editing and playtesting material? And would that cause errors to trickle in due to confusion between related rulesets? Do they have people on staff that are intimately familiar with each of the possible rulesets, and people good enough with the edition specific lore for various campaign settings? That's potentially a lot of extra staff they might need to hire, and a lot of dividing up their time. Wanting to avoid stretched resources away from what they know best is for instance one of the reasons Paizo gave for not being interested in doing 4e material.

Another stumbling block is how to handle articles for various settings. If for instance (completely hypothetical here) I wanted to write an article set in the 3e/1370ish era for FR, even if that article was using 3e rules and set in the 3e era FR timeline, would I be required to assume that everything that happened (or was retconned in) with 4e FR for instance needed to be strictly adhered to? And if I did, what's the point then of trying to do 3.x era support if it's not going to be completely supporting it? Would WotC be willing to let folks write for different eras of campaign setting support and possibly introduce (accidentally, or intentionally) things that conflict with later era/edition continuity?

Allowing true multiple era support could be something of an insane editorial headache given the rather, umm, conflicted (to say it nicely) feelings about some eras versus others (pre and post Spellplague 4e, post Faction War Planescape, etc).

That said, I'd jump through flaming hoops to do some Planescape articles (either pre or post Faction War, I like it all).

 

[Mark CMG]

This essentially speaks to the problem of gutting the institutional memory of a company where on the one hand their branding is tied to tradition and on the other hand their success dependent on leveraging the technology of the present and the future.

Bringing Monte Cook back on board was a good idea in principle (only the final product of 5E will speak to whether they took full advantage of his experience) but they might have gone a bit further, hiring on some of the early designers as consultants. They could have done so if for no other reason then to have those veterans run games using some of the original rulesets for the 5E designers as a form of research.

In a limited way, toward achieving the same goal, they might even make sure that their core designers attend some old school conventions (like Gary Con later this month) and be sure that they are playing in the games being run by the old vanguard. If that is part of the plan, they haven't mentioned it as such and I am unaware of any agenda along these lines but we'll see what the next three weeks bring. Running the old rulesets in-house with the current mindsets and modern gamer sensibilities simply won't yield the same results and is unlikely to capture the sense of wonder and tradition older rulesets engendered.

All of this leads me to believe that tying 5E to the OGL and making the old materials available again via the PDF model are the only viable way to reach out to lapsed players or multi-system players who wish to find any support for the old rulesets from WotC directly or indirectly. They might be able to do so in other ways (producing new materials for old rulesets, tying the old materials to DDI, etc.) but not without fundamentaly changing their approach to addressing how they are anchoring the brand once again in the traditions it originally propagated.

 

[Weregrognard]

...
Bringing Monte Cook back on board was a good idea in principle (only the final product of 5E will speak to whether they took full advantage of his experience) but they might have gone a bit further, hiring on some of the early designers as consultants. They could have done so if for no other reason then to have those veterans run games using some of the original rulesets for the 5E designers as a form of research...

Can't XP you, but I agree with this. Good thing is, it's probably not too late to hire a few of the Old Guard as consultants.