Is WOTC headed for a TSR-ending? :/

darjr · Jan 11, 2016

But which once is the right once? This one?

delericho · Jan 11, 2016

darjr said:
But which once is the right once? This one?

No. I confidently predict that a small band of heroes, against all the odds, will heroically push back doom by a few years. That's usually how it works, anyway.

aramis erak · Jan 13, 2016

Even if WotC were to fail, its end would look very little like TSR's... HasBro shuts down failing subsidiaries, but very seldom sells them off.

And WotC isn't failing. MTG is going strong, D&D is strong, and the spinoff content from both makes a decent amount of profit.

The Internet: Home to Chickens Little since 1976.

haakon1 · Jan 15, 2016

Like Philatomy Jurament, here's my relationship with D&D, which is basically skipped 2e and 4e, didn't try 5e (yet).

1981-1988: Played AD&D (1e), occasionally DM'd Oriental Adventurers. Loved it. Couldn't get enough (couldn't afford it because I was a kid).
.
1989: Played 2nd Edition at release. Didn't like it much, as I was playing a Half-Orc Assassin and both things were "banned". Stopped playing D&D.

1989-1996: Didn't play D&D. Ran Top Secret/SI, Boot Hill (1974 & 2nd Edition), RECON, and Star Wars (West End Games D6). Even tried GURPS.

1996-2002: Ran AD&D (1e) games again. Live campaign from 1996, email from 1998 onwards.

~2002: Converted both games to 3e (2 years after release). Bought a metric bleep ton of stuff. Started playing in a 3e game too.

2003: Converted both of my games to 3.5e at release, with some grumbling from players. Game I was playing in also converted.

2008-2013: Bought 4e PHB on launch day, went to launch event in Seattle and got it signed. Game I was a player in converted to 4e, but I didn't like it, and the game died when the DM moved. Kept running 3.5e. Got preview Pathfinder rules printed copy from a local gaming store and gave my copy to Wolfgang Baur. Bought Pathfinder PBH at launch, and lots of Pathfinder adventures; used Pathfinder adventures converted to 3.5e and stole some rules from it. Attended PaizoCon twice, which is the only times I played by "full" Pathfinder rules.

2014-Present: Running a live and email 3.5e game, though not often for personal reasons. Not buying anything due to lack of time/interest. Bought the 5e PHB and the initial adventure, haven't played it yet.

Philotomy Jurament said:
With TSR, I found myself not being in step with the style/focus/direction of the products in the 2e period (really, that started in the late 1e period, but I soldiered on for a while). Eventually, I quit buying the new D&D stuff, ran other games and editions, and stopped caring about what TSR was doing. When WotC released 3.0, I got interested and started buying (new) D&D stuff, again, and that held true up until shortly after 3.5, when I started finding myself out of step, once more. Took a look at 4e, but it was an even greater departure from my kind of D&D, so again, I'm back to "not buying the new D&D stuff, running other games and editions, and not paying attention to what WotC is doing."

aramis erak · Jan 17, 2016

haakon1 said:
Like Philatomy Jurament, here's my relationship with D&D, which is basically skipped 2e and 4e, didn't try 5e (yet).

For comparison, my relationship

1981-summer 1983: Played a mixture of BX and AD&D.
1984-1988: played little D&D, but did get into BECMI D&D academically (as in, reading, but not really playing)
1989: got 2E core.
1990-92: finally started playing 2E, and doing Retail Play.
1993-1996: continued AD&D only in Retail Play. What D&D I did play was mostly Cyclopedia. Tried, and HATED, the PO line. Also got Original Edition, ran several one-shots.
1998-1999: had a long running BECMI game, playing Wrath of the Immortals... and using all the PC-series races, and the various sourcebooks... When they hit the key PC-side "change event"... we switched/converted to 3E.
by late 2000, I was burned on 3E, having run several short games.
Gave up on D&D. Didn't give up on d20; playtested the T20: Traveller's Handbook
In 2003, bought 3.5, noticed it didn't fix what I felt needed fixing, and broke what I liked best...
In 2008, ran another BECMI game... had fun. Tried 4E; didn't feel like D&D, didn't feel like worth the effort, and didn't evince enough fun for the time (and writing) needed, and wasn't about to buy a subscription to get the e-tools...
In 2012, ran another 2E game; about 4 months. Meh.
2013, got into the playtest files. Ran a couple one-session one-shots to try things. Was impressed.
2014... got asked by my FLGS if I would consider running D&D 5E... compensated with store credit. I read it, and realized I could, in fact, cope. Wound up running 5E from release... until present (and for the next several months) - both D&D AL and a home game. Compensation ended this summer... but I was at a different store (uncompensated) for almost 3 months, due to a family medical required trip out-of-town.
Early 2016 - am starting to feel the burnout of long campaigns of nothing but D&D for over a year and a half.

D&D 5 is my favorite edition to date... BECMI/Cyclopedia is a very close second. But they aren't the same style of game. Similar, but not the same. I am considering writing some OGL materials derived from/released under the SRD...

Mistwell · Jan 17, 2016

This was my favorite prediction of doom, from Jan 2014. I've removed the posters name because I am not trying to pick on him/her specifically I just thought it was interesting from a historical perspecitve:

D&DN has been in trouble for a lot longer than this.

I said in like March of last year that the product might not even see the light of day, and if it does, it probably will only be in a close out sell for the brand. It's vaporware. It's the 'Duke Nuke'em' of PnP RPGs. Even if it ever does come out, by the time it does no one will care.

D&D as a brand is dead. They killed it. They designed 4E around the twin goals of appealing to people who didn't like D&D (sacred cows must be slain!) and in not being compatible with their prior work (to kill the OGL). I have no idea what they are designing 5E around, but the point is it's too late for that. It's like trying to cast brand necromancy at this point. They fragmented their base, and lost the talent from their company. They created competitors for themselves that were better at creating content than they were. They simply lost their market - alienating it, offending it, and dismissing it. It's like they told their customers to "get lost", and well, they did. They acted like we needed them instead of the other way around.

Fortunately, the OGL was designed exactly for this situation by people who actually liked the game.

Now all the Wizard's horses and all the Wizard's men aren't going to be able to put the brand back together again no matter what they say or do. What's done is done. Nobody _needs_ what they've got to sell. They'll sell a few copies to people who _want_ it, but no one is going to open up a 5E book and say, "Yeah, I _need_ this. This is what my table is missing." The potential demand just isn't out there. The game will go on without them, but it's not likely to be called 'D&D'. At this point, I'm not even sure the brand name has a lot of value. How many kids these days are going to have nostalgia for something called 'Dungeons and Dragons'. When is the last really great D&D branded video game? Does anyone even remember the cartoon? For that matter, what's the last really great WotC adventure, of the sort that 25 or 30 years from now we'll say, "That's a classic. Let's do that again!"