More dramas for Wizards Of The Coast?

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Baulderstone said:
I'm of the opinion that Stone is exactly the kind of self-indulgent, not-half-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is director that people accuse Tarantino of being. He is an excellent stylist, but most of his movies are dragged down by his simplistic ideas.
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The Doors was an unholy chaotic mess, which meant that as a biography of Jim Morrison, it was PERFECT.

JG
 
Gringnr said:
What drama haven't they gotten themselves into lately. They're stepping on rakes left and right these days.
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iu
 
I dunno, I think OP of this thread was wondering if Critical Role switching to a proprietary system would be bad for WotC. If there's anything new since then I haven't heard about it.
 
I thought “The Blood of Prokopius” had an interesting, Orthodox (YMMV), take on why WotC will continue to walk into palm trees.

On the Importance of Fandom

[I ask] that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe t...
bloodofprokopius.blogspot.com bloodofprokopius.blogspot.com
 
SJB said:
I thought “The Blood of Prokopius” had an interesting, Orthodox (YMMV), take on why WotC will continue to walk into palm trees.

On the Importance of Fandom

[I ask] that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe t...
bloodofprokopius.blogspot.com bloodofprokopius.blogspot.com
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Anyone who believes that fandom is unifying has clearly never met one…
 
Gringnr said:
I dunno, I think OP of this thread was wondering if Critical Role switching to a proprietary system would be bad for WotC. If there's anything new since then I haven't heard about it.
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i think it's fairly certain that Daggerheart will be the system for the next campaign, and Ha$bros will lose all that free marketing. Of course, Stranger Things was a magnitude greater impact, but my understanding is that the writers are well versed in the hobby. We might get a 'TSR gets greedy' storyline next season, which would be a) historically accurate and b) timely.
 
Being as honest and unbiased as I can (disclaimer: I gave up D&D in 1987) I think that Hasbro/WotC’s current stumbles are more-or-less inevitable. As a company reaches a certain size (think T$R in the 90s or WotC now) the concerns of the people running the company become more and more out of sync with both their customers and the hobby as a whole.

I‘d say that WotC started out doing a better job for D&D than T$R did. But as they’ve got bigger (and more important to Hasbro) they’ve lost that connection to their customer base. The people making decisions aren’t gamers any more, they’re professional managers, with (apparently) very little understanding of the people who buy their product, or even the market they’re selling into.
 
CRKrueger said:
See, here I disagree with the “tired topic”. Social commentary shouldn’t be considered a tired topic, if it’s commentary is not only still topical, but in hindsight proven correct.

Some, for example, today say Cyberpunk is quaint and outdated because they laugh at the predictions of computer capability and the size of phones. Cyberpunk is more vital and necessary than ever considering we’re on the cusp of Designer Genetics, corporate missions to Mars and keep slowly slouching toward Global Corporate Hegemony.
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...slouching toward?

We're there. We have been since probably the 00's.
 
Ladybird said:
...slouching toward?

We're there. We have been since probably the 00's.
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Well, with ISDS, we do have Corporate Courts that sue countries that enact legislation voted on by their democratically elected representatives that interferes with what the corporation wants. But ISDS, WTO, IMF, WEF and all the other global organizations that do similar things are not all united and sometimes even conflict. We haven’t yet reached a true “Corporate Court” yet, with the power to enforce its will. There’s still Government State control instead of Corporate control of a lot of trade entities.

For example, due to banking and payment systems putting the strongarm to Putin, BRICS is becoming a major competitor to the G7, and coming up with their own banks to be immune to western influence. Soon will be the BRICS currency, which will give the dollar a punch in the nuts when it least needs it.

That’s why I argue that Cyberpunk is more relevant than ever, we’re in the “How it Came to Pass” chapter of every Cyberpunk RPG. With no clear winner yet, we’re not locked in to reaching a dystopia, but people have to acknowledge we’re on the path to one if we’re going to avoid it.
 
malc said:
Anyone who believes that fandom is unifying has clearly never met one…
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Well no matter how unifying an idea is, unless the idea that unifies is Homo Sapiens, we're gonna have problems.

However I would argue that the only thing worth unifying around is a way of life - a system of ethics, morals and laws. Without one of those, we're just talking apes, and no corporation is ever going to give us one of those.
 
malc said:
Being as honest and unbiased as I can (disclaimer: I gave up D&D in 1987) I think that Hasbro/WotC’s current stumbles are more-or-less inevitable. As a company reaches a certain size (think T$R in the 90s or WotC now) the concerns of the people running the company become more and more out of sync with both their customers and the hobby as a whole.

I‘d say that WotC started out doing a better job for D&D than T$R did. But as they’ve got bigger (and more important to Hasbro) they’ve lost that connection to their customer base. The people making decisions aren’t gamers any more, they’re professional managers, with (apparently) very little understanding of the people who buy their product, or even the market they’re selling into.
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Pretty much this. I think most grogs find the "salad days" to be pre-2e (a milestone I chose simply because of the removal of demons, devils and assassins brought on by the Satanic Panic). I certainly do. You simply can't have that underground feel (and to me D&D/AD&D very much had underground "comix" sensibilities) when you have a high-profile product that a huge corp is trying to get into as many hands as possible. So, D&D 'proper", i.e., official WotC/Hasbro stuff, is unlikely ever to have that same feel again. The OGL allows for it in a kind of sideways manner, but the days of official D&D releases with naked breasts and gruesome drawings are over. . Planescape will be coming out, and grogs will complain about it, but WotC's not gonna change their direction.

It's that thing I keep going back to about seeing a band in a club when they're young and hungry, vs. seeing them phone it in for the millionth time in a giant arena. They've been changed by success. It's most likely permanent. And expecting them to produce anything with the same feel and quality of their old stuff is a fool's errand.
 
CRKrueger said:
Hasbro really does nothing except manage existing brands. Nothing creatively good could come out of that environment, just like...oh, all of media.
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Don't truly have an issue with them managing a product line, so that it remains in print. I do mind overly greedy actions, overt manipulation and general asshattery.
 
CRKrueger said:
Hasbro really does nothing except manage existing brands. Nothing creatively good could come out of that environment, just like...oh, all of media.
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I think megacorps can put out creatively good things with their brands, but it's almost by accident of them finding the right people at the right time who use them to tell the right stories. Once the Dread Eye of Corporate starts paying attention, though, all bets are off.

For products like D&D, which are as much toolsets for folk to make their own fun as they are premade experiences, it gets fuzzier; it's up to the community to add it's own edge to the products, which imo they have. Now, the Kids These Days are into a different type of edge than we were (Radical Acceptance Vs Offending Normies), but that's good; they should find their own levels rather than tirelessly repeating ours.
 
Ladybird said:
I think megacorps can put out creatively good things with their brands, but it's almost by accident of them finding the right people at the right time who use them to tell the right stories. Once the Dread Eye of Corporate starts paying attention, though, all bets are off.
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I'd say more like "it's over, Joe, it's Chinatown yet again":shade:!
 
Ladybird said:
I think megacorps can put out creatively good things with their brands, but it's almost by accident of them finding the right people at the right time who use them to tell the right stories. Once the Dread Eye of Corporate starts paying attention, though, all bets are off.
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In a way, the increased popularity brought about by Stranger Things and CR has been bad for D&D. Without that, it might have gone along unnoticed as M:tG's ignored little brother for even longer, but now working on D&D is the kind of thing a non-gamer executive is willing to leave Microsoft to work on. It's similar to what happened with Marvel movies. ten years ago, there were lots of people working on those movies that actively loved Marvel comics. Once Marvel movies became a big deal, those people were slowly pushed out until we got to the point where we had Marvel execs openly stating that they had a policy of not hiring people that were familiar with the comics. That's the kind of territory that D&D is moving into.

Not that it really matter as long as the OGL survives. Paradoxically, WotC may be the biggest player in the room by far, but it is also utterly irrelevant and invisible to a non-5E gamer like myself.
 
Baulderstone said:
In a way, the increased popularity brought about by Stranger Things and CR has been bad for D&D. Without that, it might have gone along unnoticed as M:tG's ignored little brother for even longer, but now working on D&D is the kind of thing a non-gamer executive is willing to leave Microsoft to work on. It's similar to what happened with Marvel movies. ten years ago, there were lots of people working on those movies that actively loved Marvel comics. Once Marvel movies became a big deal, those people were slowly pushed out until we got to the point where we had Marvel execs openly stating that they had a policy of not hiring people that were familiar with the comics. That's the kind of territory that D&D is moving into.

Not that it really matter as long as the OGL survives. Paradoxically, WotC may be the biggest player in the room by far, but it is also utterly irrelevant and invisible to a non-5E gamer like myself.
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Because, you know, the standard corporate practice of hiring people who have absolutely no knowledge of the products or services the business sells has worked out so well.
 
Necrozius said:
While I agree, I think Wrath of Khan was a great film despite the director and writer not being Trekkies.
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I think the difference here is that Nicholas Meyer, while not a Trekkie, was a good writer and director. He was creative talent, not a corporate executive from outside the entertainment industry. It's the equivalent of putting a talented game designer in charge of D&D even if it wasn't something they'd worked on before, rather than putting a video game marketing bot in charge.
 
Baulderstone said:
I think the difference here is that Nicholas Meyer, while not a Trekkie, was a good writer and director. He was creative talent, not a corporate executive from outside the entertainment industry. It's the equivalent of putting a talented game designer in charge of D&D even if it wasn't something they'd worked on before, rather than putting a video game marketing bot in charge.
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And just to add, Meyer had made a fun science-fiction movie with Time After Time. In fact, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which he also made, uses the same basic template of fish-out-of-water time travelers in modern-day San Francisco.
 
Gringnr said:
Pretty much this. I think most grogs find the "salad days" to be pre-2e (a milestone I chose simply because of the removal of demons, devils and assassins brought on by the Satanic Panic). I certainly do. You simply can't have that underground feel (and to me D&D/AD&D very much had underground "comix" sensibilities) when you have a high-profile product that a huge corp is trying to get into as many hands as possible. So, D&D 'proper", i.e., official WotC/Hasbro stuff, is unlikely ever to have that same feel again. The OGL allows for it in a kind of sideways manner, but the days of official D&D releases with naked breasts and gruesome drawings are over. . Planescape will be coming out, and grogs will complain about it, but WotC's not gonna change their direction.

It's that thing I keep going back to about seeing a band in a club when they're young and hungry, vs. seeing them phone it in for the millionth time in a giant arena. They've been changed by success. It's most likely permanent. And expecting them to produce anything with the same feel and quality of their old stuff is a fool's errand.
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If you want the underground feel, I suggest moving to a Middle Eastern country, trying to order some RPG books off ebay, and then having them impounded by the customs, as happened to me this week. The impounding, not the moving (that was a few months ago). Yup, it's the region where the satanic panic never died.

The 80s can have it back, frankly.
 
Necrozius said:
While I agree, I think Wrath of Khan was a great film despite the director and writer not being Trekkies.
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Baulderstone said:
I think the difference here is that Nicholas Meyer, while not a Trekkie, was a good writer and director. He was creative talent, not a corporate executive from outside the entertainment industry. It's the equivalent of putting a talented game designer in charge of D&D even if it wasn't something they'd worked on before, rather than putting a video game marketing bot in charge.
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Pretty sure Jack Sowards was a Star Trek fan, even if Nicholas Meyer wasn’t. Yeah, not quite the same as I was talking about the suits not the talent.

But, there is a little of that. Roddenberry hated the militaristic spin the franchise took through the TOS movies that Nicholas Meyer brought in, especially Undiscovered Country. Meyer’s movies were very successful though.
 
Triumvir said:
If you want the underground feel, I suggest moving to a Middle Eastern country, trying to order some RPG books off ebay, and then having them impounded by the customs, as happened to me this week. The impounding, not the moving (that was a few months ago). Yup, it's the region where the satanic panic never died.

The 80s can have it back, frankly.
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What country did you move to? Was it a job thing?
 
WoK had the best fucking intro music for any Star Trek thing ever though. Or at least one of the best. ADVENTURE! AWE! Splashing ocean waves- er I mean the cosmos!!
 
Triumvir said:
If you want the underground feel, I suggest moving to a Middle Eastern country, trying to order some RPG books off ebay, and then having them impounded by the customs, as happened to me this week. The impounding, not the moving (that was a few months ago). Yup, it's the region where the satanic panic never died.

The 80s can have it back, frankly.
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I can remember the tension of carrying my 1E Monster Manual through customs in Kuwait as a kid. Fortunately, the customs agent got distracted covering up all the bare skin in my mother's women's magazines with a black marker.
 
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