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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6766303" data-attributes="member: 37579">The numbers come from the playtest surveys. They're unlikely to do a survey which would reach more players and have a higher response rate.We also have to assume it was a representational sampling, as otherwise the game we love would have been made on skwed data, and that's sad.This is subject to personal thoughts and philosophy on survey design, who they hired to do that design, and if they're still with the company for one survey a month (or fewer).What would this do? Any data variance could be attributed to the shifting demographic and smaller sampling. You don't learn anything.Two questions: why and how?How would they introduce new players? Especially given making a campaign setting product is a hella lotta work and they haven't been able to get an FR one out.Why? What benefit does that get them? Splitting the audience doesn't do much for sales, as demonstrated by TSR at the end and conformed by Paizo sales numbers on Dragon issues focused on particular settings.True. Thankfully there are a bajillion other fans converting everything if you look hard enough online.But they have unlimited time?I think any setting that is unrelated to a published setting is Homebrew. Your game might be a variant, but it's still Dragonlance at its heart. Everyone customizes settings. Campaign neutral tools are boring, and setting neutral adventures often lack flavour and detail, which makes them harder to run. Think about it: if Tyranny of Dragons had been generic all the cities would have been blanks and the Council of Waterdeep would be much more vague. The whole point of a pre-published adventure is to lighten the workload. Even if you fill in the names, this often isn't generic, but simply a new world with its own assumptions. See Red Hand of Doom or the Nentir Vale stuff. 4e tried the "generic content" route and it didn't work so well. They also want more stories to coordinate with other properties. The video games, a potential movie, and the like. (Their "shared experience of the game" talking point, which actually makes some sense. Talking with people about how your group went through an adventure can be fun.)Or maybe that people only buy one or two campaign settings, so each successive setting book has lower sales money and generates significantly less profit? Their job is not to hold your hand, stroke your hair, and explain all their business decisions to you.  Especially since even if they did come out and say "less tabletop products are better than more, and more profitable" people would shout out a series of "I disagree!" or "but... but... but this exact situation is different!" statements. Which is pretty much exactly what has happened!</blockquote>

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