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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pming" data-source="post: 6664426" data-attributes="member: 45197">Hiya.  I'd say they need to toss the idea of "Lets do [this/whatever] with D&D! We'll make miiilllllleeeonnnnssss!!!! Muwahahahaha!" right out of their head, out the door, down the street, and into the river.  Unlike, well, pretty much every other 'hobby product' out there, RPG's are not self sustaining. I own the PHB, MM, DMG, and Starter Set for 5e. I also picked up the Fifth Edition Foes and Book of Lost Spells PDF's. This basically means that I have absolutely zero need to buy anything else from WotC ever again with regards to 5e. There is NOTHING that WotC can do that would "require" me to give them money. Ever. This is the true nature of the RPG industry, IMHO.  When the Wicked Witch of the East came into power (re: Lorraine Williams), she basically (with the help of a pair of brothers and a few other's of like mind in the TSR power structure) tried to take RPG's and treat them like any other "product". The idea that they could simply write stuff and people would just outright buy it was flawed from the start... once you have the core rules of a RPG game, you don't need anything else. Period. Full stop. With other hobby industries, say, the Model Railroading crowd, once you finish building a set after a year or two, you can just buy another sheet of 4x8x1 plywood and keep adding on...meaning you 'need' to keep buying stuff to continue your hobby. RPG's are not like that. The "equipment and stuff" you need is in you and your players heads; the equivalent would be being able to just "create" your new track, trees, grass and foliage, buildings, cars, people, cows, rocks, trains, etc without buying anything.Anyway, I think they are actually sort of following my logic. I belive the core 'team' working on D&D is pretty small. This is good. They are keeping product production schedules waaaaay down. This is also good. This shows me that they may, just *may*, be thinking "It's the RPG industry. We aren't going to make millions on D&D like TSR did back in the 80's. Lets settle for 'sustained in-the-black' profit and we'll be fine. We can try and make the millions off of other D&D offshoots like video games, movies, and plastic cereal caddy's".So, what I would do is... lower expectations of profit. Shoot for "good enough to keep us in the black, give everyone who works here a decent wage, three weeks paid vacation every year, and give our writers a LARGE amount of space to stretch their imagination wings". What I would *not* do? See 3.x/4e? Yeah, that. Don't do that.^_^Paul L. Ming</blockquote>

Verification