Don Fernando wrote:Blackpaws wrote:Just curious for speculations' sake. Do you think Ravenloft still would have declined if TSR was never bought out by Wizards?
I think not. When Wizards took over TSR, the Ravenloft Line was, IMO at its best. Back then you could see, there were many ideas developing, for years to come. Saddly Wizards let the Line go and stopped supporting more products.
Ravenloft was dead before Wizards finished the buy-out. They were only publishing five products in 1999 (production on which would have started well into 1998), two of which were reprints. Not much more than the eight of '98 (five being novels and adventures).
They were working on ending the line like most of the other niche worlds that never really sold as well as one would have hoped because there were simply too many of them.
Strictly nostalgia. Things always looked better in the past: the grass was greener, the products were better, there was no fighting with the dev team or authors and the company was respectful to the fans. In other words total B.S.
The products were often hit-and-miss back then, and all were shorter than the current books. A 96 page book does not have alot of room to make mistakes where ass a 170 page book can make alot of errors and still have room to squeeze in some useful information. Let's face it, if you cut out all the really, really bad things in ANY of the 3E books you would have enough good or decent ideas to make one if not two 2E books. Even something as poor as CoD has enough sheer information to have a good 2E 96 pager tucked away between the Sherrif and Cold War.
