5th edition of D&D appears to be dead. There are no splatbooks, not even in project. This can't be good.
No, it is good. That's a deliberate design decision they made. The idea is that the player's handbook is all you need now. Older editions especially 2nd Ed got to the point where you needed dozens of rulebooks to join a game, depending on what everyone else was using. The goal of 5th Ed is to increase eye contact and talking/role-playing, and reduce the amount of leafing through a pile of rulebooks to determine things, but also to avoid the arms-race of optional rulebooks, which can make it very daunting and expensive for new players to play with established players.
It's paid off with chart-topping sales, which is especially noteworthy given that the game is competing with video games. You just need one book now, and can join any regular game. All new optional rules are contained in modules, and they have a deliberate policy of only including what's needed to make that specific module work in a story sense. So, really, only the DM needs to buy the new supplements. That seems to be the goal.
http://www.examiner.com/article/5e-d-d-player-s-handbook-tops-amazon-sales-lists
Remember, that 2nd Ed AD&D sent TSR broke and saw them being bought up by a competitor. More optional books did not equal more profits.
Actually, from what i understand, Gary Gygax left TSR after he found out that the execs he left in charge bought some 20 cars on the compant dime. It was hubris and stupidity.
TSR's failures had many causes - much of the 2nd edition stuff wasn't playtested because Lorraine Williams (a financial planner that wound up with a majority share after the executives who Gygax had purged for incompetence (their attempts to diversify led to massive debts for little gain - most of their acquisitions were moneylosers) sold their stock to her in retaliation, and Gygax sold his stock to her after his attempts to have the execs sale ruled illegal failed - he decided to get what he could from the company he felt to be doomed and use the cash to found another one) refused to tolerate what she saw as "lazy gamers screwing around on company time", as she held all gamers in contempt. Williams also pushed Buck Rogers material heavily at the expense of product lines with greater market appeal (such as the then-new Forgotten Realms setting) because
she owned Buck Rogers and thus collected all royalties on the license. A further problem was their attempts to sell large amounts of product (particularly the collectible dice game
Dragon Dice) through conventional bookstores instead of gaming shops - another product of Williams's anti-game bias - which proved unwise as most of their key audience didn't shop there. The bookstores returned unsold product totalling several million dollars which TSR simply couldn't afford
despite the flagship D&D line (which was in something of a creative golden age -
Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Al Quadim, Spelljammer, and Planescape all date to this period) making money hand-over-fist, due to a combination of the debts from the previous executives and the failure of many of the other product lines.
Regarding Konami,
Silent Hills has been officially cancelled.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14869518 times)