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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 5302169" data-attributes="member: 9225">Trends seize company cultures all the time, and build up ideologies to defend them. Then there's some kind of regime change and motive for people to look innovative by trashing predecessors. This is understandable because that regime change happens because the current one isn't meeting success standards.For TSR, you have to remember that it built one of the most successful IP collections ever used for fiction from the ground up. There was probably a time when Drizzt Do'Urden -- that single character -- was more valuable then the rest of D&D-related stuff over the same period.People like to make stupid statements that game designers are frustrated fiction writers because that gets plenty of play with fans (though in many cases, it's actually industry folks saying it manipulate fan opinions through social marketing) but for TSR, a model where RPGs served as a place to experiment with properties for fiction and promote them to early adopters probably made a hell of a lot of sense. And while it had its misses, there's a reason a TSR setting got the nod again in Dark Sun.And honestly, WotC seems to lack the institutional talent to bring original, tightly integrated game settings out. By "institutional talent" I mean that something about the culture (and not necessarily individuals, who can be really talented even though they're not always allowed to be) makes the company bad at it. Looking at recent openings in the D&D team, I have the feeling that they don't take settings that seriously and treat "softer" creative aspects pretty cheaply, since the jobs are all about wearing a business development hat as well. Basically, the company doesn't look like it cares enough about settings to have a settings guy. And if they don't care, why should you care?This is not an new problem. I was chatting with a fellow who opined (and was in a position to possibly know) that WotC-Eberron (not Keith Baker's Eberron) as a sort of trash heap for setting ideas from the old days, just as the Realms had previously been able to accept all kinds of odds and ends from other games (like Kara-Tur). This is the kind of thing that people who care about "synergies" develop, instead of creative leads actually interested in the intrinsic values of what they're working on. Certainly, 4e represents system innovations that could never be achieved in TSR's culture. It's awesome stuff. Same with 3e. But 3e also featured the dawn of an empty aesthetic over the idea that D&D was something to be embedded in a definable world -- and ironically, it did this by providing enough of a sketch (a few gods, vague history) to let DMs fake it, instead of guiding them to create worlds as a core part of the game. It feels like this is about as much as the company is interested in, even in its own efforts.Unless WotC understand that the Realms are important as the Realms and its other settings have intrinsic value instead of just being content delivery platforms, they're going to feel weak. And they do. It's time for the company to show gamers that the people in charge of the worlds they like actually like the worlds for themselves, and to find a third way to develop interesting settings again with the idea that the company should see making them as a real part of their business. At the same time, it needs to avoid bloat. I think there's room for balance, though not the will to look for it.</blockquote>

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