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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6222404" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'm not entirely sure the right conclusion has been drawn from the most relevant aspects of TSR's demise. The fact is that TSR was a VERY badly run company on almost all levels in that time period. Their market research was poor, their product development was pretty haphazard and capricious, and they certainly did create FAR too many SKUs. Whether it was 'too many settings' per-se, or just too many products that they produced far too many of and didn't manage their stock properly is the real question. DS, FR, WoG, Planescape, Ravenloft, and SpellJammer were all very well-received settings that had good support and are all still highly regarded by their various fans (not to mention DL). Of course it might have served them better to have trimmed one or two, and they certainly did invent a lot of minor settings in the course of things, but how much did they really invest in things like Birthright and Hollow World? IMHO maintaining 2 separate lines of D&D rules was less wise than maintaining 5 or 6 good settings. If they'd planned effectively as a business I don't think the number of settings would have been a problem.  [MENTION=23937]James Jacobs[/MENTION]I'd call Golarion a 'kitchen sink' in much the way that FR is one too. There is of course a lot of scope in a large world to explore some different settings, but then there is also some certain unifying world-concept that all of Golarion or Faerun shares across all its bits and pieces. That was one of the real attractions of Eberron for instance, that it has different conceits. DS particularly shows a sort of genre that is hard to just attach to an existing game world. Nothing against Golarion of course. At some point though doesn't it get hard to really provide some level of distinctness to this kind of setting? I mean in essence Golarion, Greyhawk, FR, Midgaard, there's a sort of fantasy soup, it can be hard to really say that anything sets them apart much beyond the moderately arbitrary turns and squiggles of one map vs another. You can invent specific plots, characters, and elements, but in essence wouldn't most anything that can fit into Golarion also fit into say Faerun equally well, albeit some details would change. In a sense you WANT that, as the whole idea is to allow material to be reused as people see fit. In some sense 4e's appeal was that there was at least SOME difference in basic assumed world concepts relative to previous editions.</blockquote>

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