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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 5428769" data-attributes="member: 9225">Listen, I'm just some schmuck with about 10 years of writing and content development experience who has been hired outside of the RPG field specifically because story worlds and settings are believed to be critical to intellectual property development. You read some press releases and a company rep posts on this board, so you probably have every reason to be snarkily credulous of everything the salespeople say. I'm sure they fed you the arguments somewhere. Meanwhile, I think any reasonable person can see that D&D is a rudderless shambles right now, between its confused marketing, the turnover of its entire management staff, and a sorta-new edition. As usual, I really don't care what people have been doing over the past two years, because in my experience they're typically doing it badly. Nothing has benefited my 1e or 4e games (yes, I like both, even though the Internet thinks this is Not Allowed) quite so much as ignoring the idiotic communities attached to both. So whoever you believe my comrades are, you're pretty much wrong -- and in your vehemence, I sense that this will not be the end of your wrongness.Neither you nor I know exactly why TSR went bankrupt. What you think you know is what a broker of TSR's sale told you while he was attempting to calculate the *lowest* possible goodwill value for acquisition as part of his campaign to sell you a different approach to the D&D business. Now let's improve your reading comprehension. As I said in a passage you obviously missed despite it, well, being in the post, I am not advocating a return to the 1990s, because the 90s features a particular type of story world design that doesn't fit current trends. As I said, this was hardly exclusive to RPGs. *All* of the big, multi-contributor properties featured event-driven story arcs that were very "closed" -- where it was difficult to get past what a small set of characters were doing to expand the story world in a nonlinear fashion. We're talking about the era of Shadows of the Empire, speculation madness in comics and Voyager. This stuff was *all over the place* -- and it worked. It was even useful for the development of those properties.Nowadays, worlds are developed in a much more sensible fashion. The Star Wars IP is a great example because there are multiple eras to explore, and plenty of room to move around without disrupting its core premises and motifs. This is in no small part because Lucasfilm stopped looking at the Star Wars universe as a nucleus of films surrounded by spinoff and secondary business, but as a story world worth management as a whole, where it can be organized to suit all creative interests.  You're right about the grip of terrible old people like me (and probably you) though. They should listen to us less. We laugh at guys like Drizzt, at JRPGs and anime, and following world canon and stories, but the kids think all of those are totally awesome. Basically, there's a better way out there, but we went "back to the dungeon."</blockquote>

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