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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 6210971" data-attributes="member: 59082">All of which makes me think that crunch for PCs should be focused on D&D Insider and not countless Complete This or That books. Or perhaps they can come out with new content on the website, then compilations at the end of the year.But I think you could argue that D&D Insider has been more successful from the player's side in that the best tool has been, by and large, the Character Builder (although I never switched over to the online-only version). I'd like to see WotC provide better tools for DMs, as I've described above.This is where I think we need to look at a broader picture. The economic value of settings is not "primary" - that is, it isn't about how much campaign setting books are sold, but how it impacts and affects the overall health of the game. Look at Pathfinder. On one and we can say that the setting it successful only because the campaign books are part of the subscription plan, and that individual books like Magnimar probably don't sell a lot outside of the subscription plan.But if we stopped there, we'd miss the overall impact that Golarion has on the Pathfinder game. It is a unifying factor for the fan-base. Even if one doesn't play in Golarion, Golarion sets the tone. It is the "Pathfinder archetype" - in a similar way that Greyhawk was for AD&D 1e and the Forgotten Realms was for 2e (and 3e).In a similar way, I think it was a mistake to do away with the print-version of Dragon. Obviously they discontinued it because it was either losing money or not profitable enough. But Dragon had been a unifying factor for the D&D community for 30 years - a place where D&D players felt like they are part of a larger community.Now perhaps we can say that Dragon as a community builder is less necessary in the Internet Age. I think that's true to some extent. And perhaps D&D Insider somewhat fulfills that need. But the point is that Dragon was cancelled because it wasn't profitable in a clear and direct way, but I think it damaged the game overall.(Actually, as an aside, it is interesting to note that Dragon was cancelled about a year before 4E came out; it might have "softened the blow" of 4E if it had still been around in that people would have had a better sense of how different 4E was from 3.5E)I go back to the idea of a loss leader. Campaign settings are loss leaders, but they are necessary - or at least quite beneficial if done well. They bring the game to life. They provide a shared language of myth and story. Adventures for a similar function, but have the added benefit of providing practical value for a wider number of campaigns. And of course they have to be well-written - they have to evoke wonder, magic, and, well, adventure. </blockquote>

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