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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercule" data-source="post: 6986521" data-attributes="member: 5100">It's not necessarily a poor decision, economically. If it makes them money, it makes business sense. It's more akin to a die-hard comic book fan being concerned that the MCU means that the print version is going away.My concern is that of a consumer who wants to see D&D continue to be a cornerstone of the TTRPG market. While I play video games, watch movies, and read books, I don't see those as core aspects of the D&D brand (which is, to me, about a pen-and-paper TTRPG). Actually, despite having started play on most of the D&D video games, I've never found any of them interesting enough to complete and the best of the books are still atrocious assaults on literature -- at least as far as I was willing to subject myself to them -- and probably play a certain role in my feelings about the Realms. If they help drive support the TTRPG, then I have no objection. If they interfere with the quality of D&D as a TTRPG, then I'd actually rather they not be made.Similarly, I'm not interested, as a consumer, in the viability of the FR brand, except as it helps the D&D TTRPG support multiple settings and/or home brewing. In this regard, one of the benefits D&D has over, say, Fantasy Hero or Fate (yeah, two ends of the complexity scale) is that the core game has a sort of very loose, but shared, mythology/lore. I have all the tools at my disposal to craft my own setting, whether that's pure Realms, "Greyhawk except XXX is stupid", or full on home brew with half the classes rewritten. Again, if the support for the Realms benefits this sort of setting sandbox, even indirectly, then awesome. If it starts to calcify things around too strong of setting assumptions, then it's a problem. This is one reason why I don't play Pathfinder -- it's too focused around Golarian, even if it's theoretically non-setting specific.As a consumer, I have interest in the financial success of WotC only so far as it benefits the products I want. I explicitly do not want the D&D and Forgotten Realms brands to merge. Obviously, my dislike of the Realms setting, specifically, makes the merging of the brands a bit more of an issue than it otherwise might be. I don't really want any specific setting to be synonymous with the D&D TTRPG, though.Ultimately, as a consumer, I'd rather see D&D end production than morph into the Forgotten Realms brand. A better scenario would be to see the 5E system end up as "open source" with the Realms held by WotC and spanning multiple media, including a FRRPG as well as movies, etc. Something like Freeport, that doesn't require a specific system. Actually, I'd probably be really happy to see all the D&D setting opened up, like that. A Fate of Eberron conversion would be awesome.That doesn't mean that I expect WotC to cater to my specific desires. It does mean that I'm going to voice my desires and act in my own interests (which include not dealing with the Realms). At a certain point, it may also mean that I'm no longer a D&D fan. Such is life. The reality is, though, that, other than the core books, WotC has only put out three products for 5E that I'm in the market for: LMoP, PotA, and CoS. Tyranny of Dragons was functionally inseparable from the Realms without essentially rewriting or just pretending (I tried). Ditto for OotA. I'm not sure about SKT, but my understanding is that it has heavy ties. SCAG obviously has a high Realms content. Volo's Guide may or may not be interesting, but I don't feel like I need a monster book, since I enjoy making my own lore around ecologies. So, from a certain perspective, WotC may abandon me before I abandon them.</blockquote>

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