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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6995566" data-attributes="member: 996">RPGs in general and D&D in particular tend to sell core books much more strongly than later supplements.  PF's launch of core books came in 2nd to the crop of 4e supplements released at the same time.  The WotC announced Essentials....  it was downhill from there, but even then it was a bumpy down hill.  The actual Essentials core books did out-sell (or was it tie?  Someone has the IcV2 numbers, I'm sure - and of course, those numbers didn't include DDI, which doesn't invalidate them in the eyes of PF boosters, while current IcV2 numbers showing D&D way out ahead are invalid in their eyes because they don't show PFs on-line sales) PF, but after that D&D went into a very slow publication cycle of supplements and trailed off heading into the playtest.  I can agree with you there, I remember there was a fear, when Essentials came out, that if it wasn't successful it'd be the end of D&D (so support it or else!), that fear just proved to be overblown.  I'd call that being shelved... but I was actually wrong (yeah, mark your calendars, someone on-line is admitting a mistake), a couple of modules got actually published & actually sold for actual money during the playtest, though they were more or less edition agnostic, they were still D&D.  So I guess I have to take back the 'shelved' bit.  ;(IDK.  I understand the appeal, and it's not like putting them out there makes piracy appreciably easier (pirates, do have scanners, y'know), but it seemed like on-line options may have hurt book sales (of course there was a lot more to DDI than just some pdfs), and being able to point to a book selling well is clearer good PR than explaining combined book-and-pdf-and-subscription revenue and whether there's devoted fans buying both or whatever (which, again, is working for WotC, they can point to Amazon & IcV2 and be all 'D&D's #1, while Paizo is left hemming and hawing over the non-in-store-book revenue streams of PF).Nod.  Sometimes it can work to overhaul a product and make it better.  Sometimes the customer base rejects the changes.  In the case of D&D, the product had been little-changed for a quarter-century, then gotten a modest overhaul and dramatically gone Open-Source (sorta).  Between spending 25 years purging their player base of anyone with the least distaste for D&D's myriad flaws, and giving anyone who cared to the tools to dig in and provide entrenched support the core rules of d20 in perpetuity, WotC pushed the pendulum over to the 'innovation' side pretty hard.  That they tried to push it further with a more radical overhaul, addressing the games most persistent (even treasured, by those fans who'd stuck with it for 30+ years!) perennial failiings was, in retrospect, foolish.  The market - as attested by the OSR craze that materialized - was ready for the pendulum to swing back toward tradition.5e, belatedly, did just that.Of course, that's all easy to see in hindsight.  :shrug:  Nod.  It wouldn't make sense, but it does make the 'betrayal' of 4e fans much more practical and real than the metaphorical 'betrayal' of earlier-edition fans, who had ready access to d20 OGL alternatives.  And if it could be said they should've realized what they were doing in 2008, there's even less of an excuse for it now.All in all, Hasbro's* custodianship of D&D has not been exemplary, in that sense.  They've kinda got their act together at this point, but they've inflicted some damage that can never be repaired, and missed some opportunities that won't come along again while the original crop of D&D fans remains a meaningful factor in the community.  *as opposed to WotCs, the wrapping-up of 2e, launch of 3.0 and d20 with the SRD & OGL by WotC before it was acquired by Hasbro, even if it set the stage for disasters that followed, were, I think, laudable, at least from this long-time fan(atic)'s biased perspective. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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