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Message: <blockquote data-quote="drothgery" data-source="post: 2762091" data-attributes="member: 360">My suspicion is that TSR would have declared bankrupcy soon after the WotC buyout happened in real life, and someone would have snapped up the rights to D&D and produced a new edition of D&D a few years later (as it's the obvious way to make some money off the deal, and D&D2 was clearly showing its age). It's difficult to say who ends up with D&D in that scenario; though WotC is probably the most likely (as they probably had the best combination of money and interest in the property at the time), but let's assume they didn't (because WotC would probably do the same thing with D&D whether they owned just D&D or all of TSR).If the game that came out of it was something that connected with D&D players (and the kind of people who become D&D players), odds are that game would quickly blow past WW/Vampire (which was pretty close to overtaking D&D in the final days of TSR) to regain the #1 tabletop RPG spot. But that's not at all certain; WotC had to produce a quality game that was mechanically different enough from AD&D2 to reignite interest in the product and similar enough that most fans still saw it as D&D. And then they needed to sell it to a very skeptical fanbase. And whoever bought the game would almost certainly be influenced by its own RPGs (or RPG-like products); Wizards' experience with Magic led them to like lots of explicit, detailed rules. Odds are White Wolf would bring their experience with Vampire/Storyteller to the table; Steve Jackson Games would be coming from a GURPs background; Interplay would talk about what works in their computer games.So there's a fair chance that a non-WotC 3e would have failed, and taken D&D with it. Or alternatively, that we'd end up with a very different game (probably without anything like the OGL and d20 STL).</blockquote>

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