NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7716054" data-attributes="member: 37579">The context of my statement was a response to the claim that WotC needed to produce new settings otherwise new players would only be familiar with the Realms, potentially not realising they have options in settings. You are not a new player. You already know of settings other than the Realms. Therefore the context of my quoted statement doesn't apply to you. Okay, that aside, should the burden of reprinting classic settings fall on WotC? Are they obligated to update and reprint?That's tricky. And I say that as a Ravenloft fanboy who has every printed Ravenloft book by TSR, WotC, and White Wolf (and a handful that were never printed). And as a fan of Dragonlance who believes it needs a comprehensive setting updated since events happened in the novels following the final setting product. The thing is, there's a fan for every campaign setting, no matter how obscure. Red Steel. Ghostwalk. Council of Wyrms. Pelinore. Taladus. Savage Coast. Masque of the Red Death.Even going with the "big" names and assuming Kara-Tur and Al-Qadim count as the Realms, there are almost a dozen worlds. Even if WotC dumped APs and just focused on campaign settings for every product it would take four years to detail every single world. That's ignoring the fact releasing three campaign settings each year wouldn't actually be possible with current staffing levels, as a decent campaign setting product takes up more pages than an adventure and involve far more work, so getting three out in a year would involve some truly ridiculous levels of overtime. Plus it would be throwing money away. All the money. The thing is, you don't run games in more than one campaign setting at a time. And you can run multiple campaigns in the same setting. So you only need one or two campaign settings ever. Almost no one is going to end up buying a campaign setting they'll never, every run, and absolutely no one is going to buy all ten books. Sales will be lost. After the first couple campaign settings are released, people will quickly stop buying. Instead, the books will only sell a small number to the truly ardent fans of the setting, which are likely pretty small in number. Especially since, being fans, they already own the settings! The target audience is people who already own the material and you just have to hope they want to pay $60 for a repackaged book. Looking at the results of Mike "Sly Flourish" Shea's DM survey for a second:<a href="http://slyflourish.com/2016_dm_survey_results.html" target="_blank">http://slyflourish.com/2016_dm_survey_results.html</a>From that data of over 6000 people, 5% play in a non-FR D&D world, 38% play in the Realms, and 55% play in a homebrew world. (With only 38% of people playing in FR, it's hard to even justify a Realms campaign setting product... )Assuming an even split, releasing any of the 9 non-FR settings as a book will only appeal to 0.5% of DMs. Every if we assume that half the people playing in the Realms are fans of other settings only playing in the Realms because of the published adventures, that's still only 24% of DMs, of which only 2.4% will be interested in any given setting. Even if you really stretch credulity, and assume that half the people playing FR will buy another setting and half the people playing a homebrew world will buy another setting for ideas and people who non-FR are equally interested in two different settings that's *still* only 32% of DMs. For the first one. Numbers will drop for the second, and again for the third. Let alone the tenth. If WotC could justify a FR book they could maybe, maybe justify releasing one other campaign setting. But which one? Whatever they choose will infuriate fans of other 8 settings. Or they won't buy that setting. Or they'll assume it's the first of regular setting updates and instead wait until theirs was released. It's a losing strategy.</blockquote>

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