If WotC decided to revitalize and support AD&D, would you play/buy it?

[Tewligan]

Nope, wouldn't buy or play it. I've been running a 1e campaign for a couple of years now, and I have all the materials I would ever need for it. Plus - and this isn't a slight against them, just personal taste - I'm not a fan of WotC's "flavor" of D&D, and I can't imagine that their vision wouldn't influence a version of AD&D that they produced.

 

[Orius]

I don't know whether this is true, or how much influence Hasbro exerts over WotC, but I do know this: d20 core mechanic aside, 3.0 did indeed feel like an evolution of AD&D. I don't like all the changes, but in those first couple years, 3.0 was as D&D as AD&D was.

Somewhere around the time 3.5 came around, that seemed to change.

I agree. I think I said this above, but early 3e didn't feel too different from late 2e. But the flavor was noticably shitfing after the introduction to 3.5. It might be partially Hasbro trying to protect IP, which led to portmaneaus and other naming conventions some of us find irritating, or maybe it's just natural for editions to start changing as they mature. I mean 1e stasrted shifting toward more storytelling with Dragonlance and Ravenloft, 2e had some shifts later on as the writers started to drop the family friendly approach, and 3e felt like it changed with the revision and stuff like the introduction of Eberron. Maybe as the rules get more familiar the designers start pushing the envelope or something. I wouldn't be too surprised if something like this happens in a year or two with 4e.

 

[jmucchiello]

TSR didn't have that kind of marketing savvy. Read the stories of Ryan Dancey's due diligence before WotC bought TSR. TSR didn't do marketing surveys so how could they have been test-marketing. They put out whatever they wanted and expected the masses to buy because it was gospel from on high.

This is demonstrably wrong, or at least misleading. Numerous surveys were run in DRAGON Magazine, and survey forms were included in many TSR products. They may not have been the marketing research Dancey would have liked to have done, but to say that there was no surveying or market research was inaccurate.

In all my research into TSR's business, across all the ledgers, notebooks, computer files, and other sources of data, there was one thing I never found - one gaping hole in the mass of data we had available.

No customer profiling information. No feedback. No surveys. No "voice of the customer". TSR, it seems, knew nothing about the people who kept it alive. The management of the company made decisions based on instinct and gut feelings; not data. They didn't know how to listen - as an institution, listening to customers was considered something that other companies had to do - TSR lead, everyone else followed.
...
I know now what killed TSR. It wasn't trading card games. It wasn't Dragon Dice. It wasn't the success of other companies. It was a near total inability to listen to its customers, hear what they were saying, and make changes to make those customers happy. TSR died because it was deaf.

They may have included the surveys in places you mentioned but apparently they did do anything with the results. My summary may be harsh but I don't think it misrepresents what Ryan wrote.

Tough to say, really, but I would have expected to see more PO support than one module if it was really meant to be pushed as the way forward for D&D.

First, how many non-"return to", non-boxset, non-campaign specific modules did TSR release after PO was released? It's not that many. From the wikipedia page, it looks like at most a dozen. I think they were already slipping down hill at that point.

Second, what support would there be? 2e modules did not have complex monster stats. So a 5th level fighter was a 5th level fighter and his point buy specifics from PO aren't really important. Or, they were left for the DM to fiddle with as he choose to or not to.

Third, I didn't say "it was meant to be pushed forward". I said it was a direction they were headed. I'm assuming that a 3rd edition was not really in TSR's collective mind. So PO could have been an experiment or just a reaction to the popularity of point buy systems at the time. Heck, if they'd been around in 2002 we'd probably have seen DM option books about adding narrative elements to D&D (in reaction to the Forge) with no real push to create a new edition. PO hangs off of 2e without need for a new edition. Adding subsystems to 2e (kits, PO, wild magic, etc) is part of the whole history of 2e. You only need a 3rd edition if you want to do something radical.