[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]See, I'm going to let you in on a little secret, which might make you mad: 3.5 was planned from the beginning.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Even before 3.0 went to the printer, the business team overseeing D&D was talking about 3.5. Not surprisingly, most of the designers -- particularly the actual 3.0 team (Jonathan Tweet, Skip Williams, and I) thought this was a poor idea. Also not surprisingly, our concerns were not enough to affect the plan. The idea, they assured us, was to make a revised edition that was nothing but a cleanup of any errata that might have been found after the book's release, a clarification of issues that seemed to confuse large numbers of players, and, most likely, all new art. It was slated to come out in 2004 or 2005, to give a boost to sales at a point where -- judging historically from the sales trends of previous editions -- they probably would be slumping a bit. It wasn't to replace everyone's books, and it wouldn't raise any compatibility or conversion issues.
[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Here I sit, in 2003, with my reviewer's copies of the 3.5 books next to my computer, and that's not what I see. It's not difficult to see how that could have happened, however. The business team for 3.0 (and I'm talking about Ryan Dancey and Keith Strohm here) are gone. Skip's gone. Jonathan's working on miniatures games. I'm gone. It's an interesting truism that in the corporate world, where long-term planning is a must but the length of time an employee stays in any one position is short, business teams and design teams rarely last long enough to see their plans come to fruition. Thus the people to propose something are almost never the people who implement it.[/FONT]
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[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]So, one has to surmise that the new business team determined that sales were slumping slightly earlier than predicted and needed 3.5 to come out earlier. One also has to surmise that someone -- at some level -- decided that it was to be a much, much more thorough revision than previously planned. Some of this is probably just human nature (two of the 3.0 designers were out of the way, and one would only work at Wizards of the Coast for about half the design time) and some of it is probably the belief that more revenue would be generated with more drastic changes. The philosophy of 3.5 has changed from being a financial "shot in the arm" into something with significant enough changes to make it a "must-buy." Perhaps they thought to strive for the sales levels of 2000. Perhaps there was corporate pressure to reach those sales levels again.[/FONT]
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