Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorhook" data-source="post: 5925044" data-attributes="member: 58401">I think WotC is Sisyphus trying to push D&D back up to an unreachable height of popularity. Considering the era from which it arose, I believe D&D (as a game) was always doomed to be eclipsed by technological advances in consumer entertainment, and that it was really only D&D's relative mechanical novelty in the 1970s that allowed it to achieve the level of popularity that it did.D&D was mechanically inspirational because it provided probably the first good example of how to represent a complex fantasy-adventure story algorithmically. Perhaps coincidentally, D&D emerged on the eve of personal computing and the information age, when the combination of technology and algorithmic representations like D&D resulted in the invention of video games that directly compete with D&D for consumers' time and money. Each decade since has seen D&D's digital competition become stiffer: the 80s brought rich storytelling to video games; the 90s made those stories extremely visually attractive; the 2000s turned computer gaming into a highly social activity. Every decade, technological advancement steals another advantage D&D once had over digital fantasy gaming; D&D's gradual replacement by digital games has always been inevitable, due to the inherent limits of the pen and paper format. (Don't forget that digital gaming also has its own substantial advantages over pen and paper gaming, as well.)With this in mind, I believe WotC has done a "good" job stewarding the D&D brand--I'd grade them a B. WotC certainly didn't manage D&D "perfectly", but that's an unrealistic expectation of any company. WotC was much, much more effective at managing D&D than TSR was--TSR broke the bank and broke its own products. I don't know that WotC being a part of Hasbro been good or bad for D&D; without Hasbro, perhaps WotC would have made the same mistakes as TSR. Non-digital pen-and-paper gaming is doomed to be increasingly unprofitable, and D&D is no exception. WotC deserves all due credit for repeatedly trying to bring D&D to the digital age, because in the long run I believe that's the only future D&D has.</blockquote>

Verification