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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 6150398" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 323: September 2004part 8/8The D&D Buyers guide: As they've done a few times before, they release a big catalog of upcoming stuff for their various product lines. Another 17 pages of pure self-promotion. They haven't been this blatant about it since 1995, when that was one of the biggest criticisms they had to deal with in trying to revamp themselves. I guess the degree of turnover since then is sufficient that they're starting to forget the lessons they learned in those hard times. But then, the times themselves have changed, so maybe different rules apply now. I'm still pretty bored flipping through this though. Coup de Grace: In a nice mirror to First Watch, we finish off with another look at the wider world surrounding the game. It's pretty safe to say that the process of creating a D&D book has changed quite a bit since WotC took over, with a greater emphasis on design and development by teams, and playtesting as much of the mechanical bits and pieces as possible, rather than letting an individual writer do their thang and then handing it off to editors, who's main priority are spelling mistakes. All of which contributes to 3e books having a very different feel even when the writers are older ones who survived from the TSR era. And that's probably small fry compared to the amount of development and playtesting new M:tG releases get. So this makes it very clear that their books these days are produced to a formula, and roughly what that formula is. Its a good thing that they did let third party publishers in so you could have compatible stuff that's less polished but more imaginative and inventive. 3e really would have been poorer if WotC was left all to it's own devices. This has been an odd issue. Packed with tons of small articles, they've definitely changed the feel quite a bit. In fact, I'd call the changes even more drastic than the switch to 3e ones in terms of format. On the good side, there are some articles that are a genuine departure from what they've been doing recently, and the new format is far easier to read than the previous one, making even the bad articles much quicker to get through and come to a solid conclusion on. On the bad side, there's an annoying uptick in the amount of contentless self-promotion, and some of the new columns seem distinctly half-baked. Still, if they really are continuing to listen to feedback, hopefully they'll shake out those kinks and just stick with the ones that work and get regular submissions.</blockquote>

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