Wizards 2008 releases?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I could be misremembering, but a lot of the 2e material was 'fluff'.

I just reread the Complete Book of Gnomes & Halflings last weekend, and it's almost 100 percent fluff. Beyond introducing the forest gnome and polar halfling, most of the crunch is reprints, at that.

 

[Nepenthe]

Well, there's fluff, and then there's "confessions of a part-time sorceress".

 

[TerraDave]

Ok, 4ed, which is, yes, why the releases or going all soggy, is not relevant.

2nd ed fluff, that is relevant?

But since its come up, its true tsr was releasing that, er, stuff from the start of 2ed, sadly. And would put big dollops of it in books that otherwise might have some good crunch. (As an aside, I don't have a problem with good fluff, but sometimes with so much bad you just can't find the good).

Back to WotC. This is a change of behaviour for them and it is exactly what should happen before a new edition. I am just giving them the benefit of the doubt.

 

[Kheti sa-Menik]

I don't quite get the logic behind that statement. If you are boycotting them, why would you care what they published?

I'm not trying to be snide, I just find your comments confusing.

Olaf the Stout

If WOTC stops publishing "official content" for D20 Modern altogether, they would signal their intention to stop supporting that brand. If that happens, two possibilities can happen: one, that since new players to the hobby see a game that is unsupported, and to them unsupported = suxs, they may not wish to play that game at all, so we get no more D20 Modern players and old ones who decide to jump ship don't have a reason not to. Secondly, if WOTC gives up on D20 Modern, it could push the smaller publishers (whose D20 Modern material I do buy) to give up publishing material for it. Why publish product for an unsupported game after all?

And both of those feed into one another: new players/old players see neither WOTC or other publishers supporting the game with new product so they move on to something else. WOTC and other publishers see gamers turning away from D20 Modern because it appears unsupported and instead of more releases, they give up and walk away from the brand.

So, I was WOTC to keep publishing D20 Modern material and supporting the game so it attracts more players and keeps smaller publishers making D20 Modern product.

 

[Michael Morris]

The WotC 1st-trimester 08 book trade catalog isn't due out for another month. The book trade catalog is the first official announcement of WotC's RPG products. (Amazon requires data to be put in earlier, and due to some flukes in Amazon's systems, sometimes that data goes live before it's supposed to. In a perfect world, the Amazon listings for all of the products in a given trimester would go live the same day as the catalog is released.)

So don't read too much into what does or doesn't appear on Amazon just yet. Come late July or thereabouts, we'll have the whole release schedule for the first four months of 08.

I'm willing to bet Amazon does that on purpose to get extra traffic driven to their site due to the 'spoilers' they have

 

[JoeGKushner]

Ok, 4ed, which is, yes, why the releases or going all soggy, is not relevant.

2nd ed fluff, that is relevant?

But since its come up, its true tsr was releasing that, er, stuff from the start of 2ed, sadly. And would put big dollops of it in books that otherwise might have some good crunch. (As an aside, I don't have a problem with good fluff, but sometimes with so much bad you just can't find the good).

Back to WotC. This is a change of behaviour for them and it is exactly what should happen before a new edition. I am just giving them the benefit of the doubt.

2nd ed is a good comparission point that no, the sky is not falling and that books have been packed with crunch quite a bit prior to 3rd ed.

 

[Brakkart]

The key would be "no more Realms-Shaking Events in the novels", so that game canon doesn't have to change to match novel canon.

Nope sorry, have to disagree with you there. I LIKE that the Realms is a constantly changing, evolving world. It makes it more real to me. Actions and events should have consequences and repercussions and the world should (and currently does) reflect that. It is simple enough to say "such and such event doesn't happen in my Realms". You don't have to incorporate every RSE into your FR campaign, nor do you have to have them occur exactly as they are in the novels.

Lolth's Silence in my campaign for instance didn't result in her creating the Demonweb Pits as a seperate plane, as I don't use the new Realms cosmology, I use the Great Wheel. Instead she simply scrapped and rebuilt her layer, in the process evicting all the other drow deities from it to fully claim the layer as her own. She later let Selvetarm back in... just for him to get killed in Sacrifice of the Widow. Bottom line, it is YOUR Realms.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Nope sorry, have to disagree with you there. I LIKE that the Realms is a constantly changing, evolving world. It makes it more real to me.

Really? Isn't it a little implausible that all the negative consequences of these actions are always prevented/rolled back by the heroes?

Wouldn't it be more realistic if, after one of these events, a country was well and truly wiped out, a race died out or some other fundemental change occured?

The Realms-shaking events provide the illusion of change while still making the world still just as playable for all groups. It's Mister Toad's Wild Ride, not realism.

 

[Sketchpad]

Re: d20 Modern ... I wouldn't be surprised if they're sitting on a d20M revision to see how SWSE does. If it does well, I would almost bet that we'll see a familar concept done to d20M

 

[Nightfall]

*has only one comment about Realms* They need to STOP taking the Archfiends for granted!

Those guys have been around longer than Cyric and certainly nearly as long as Shar. Yet when it comes to the deities it's like "Oh yeah the gods are powerful and thus can just boss the Demon Princes around." kind of deal.

What the heck?! *sighs* Stupid writers need to respect the TRUE powers of the Lower Planes.