Editing Wizards of the Coast (section)

==New Management, or the Road to the Great Mistake==
At the turn of the millenium, [[Hasbro|terrible, alien intelligences]] examined our realm of existence.  With minds too different from ours to comprehend their motives, and the cold, unfeeling calculations of inhuman thoughts, they reached out their slick black tentacles into our plane and acquired Wizards of the Coast.  They also paid nearly ten times as much for the privilege as Wizards spent for TSR, so suck it fanboys!

What happened next is hard to conclusively prove, since nobody involved wants to stop working in the business forever by getting a rep as a fuckin' snitch, but over the course of a decade, most of Wizards' upper management was quietly replaced.  Various minor aspects of the property, like GenCon and the ''Dragon'' and ''Dungeon'' magazines were portioned off and outsourced to other producers (notably, Paizo).  Keeping a low overhead meant firing all the veterans to hire newbs with lower asking salaries, draining the company's talent pool.  Whether these cutbacks were the fault of Wizards, a company run by enthusiasts for enthusiasts with a history of mediocre business sense, or Hasbro, a corporate giant with a history of undermining their acquired brands with needless executive interference and anti-consumer bullshit, is probably never going to be openly known.  Either way, eventually, the decision was made to build an entirely new edition of ''Dungeons & Dragons''.  

In theory, this wasn't necessarily a bad thing.  Third Edition and ''3.5'' had always had their flaws ([[CoDzilla|Monte Cook's traditional caster-dominance]], weak [[fighter|martial classes]], incoherent high-level play that turned into a maze of magic item abuse and extra turn stacking, a cesspool of bad character options left over from the ill-thought-out "ivory tower" game design, etc.) and the latter was starting to show its age.  Furthermore, they decided that this edition wouldn't just be a revamp of the old, but a complete rebuilding of the entire ''D&D'' system from the ground up, intending to fix long-running problems and set a bold new direction for the future.  No more would martials announce "I make a weapon attack" and throw a d20 round after round: they would have access to cool techniques and a varied playstyle just like the casters.  No more would casters break the game over their knee and [[Cybering|don their robe and wizard hat]] to fuck its corpse: their power would be drastically scaled back, with magic now divided into limited-application combat components and longer-and-more-involved ritual spells.  

Unfortunately, this well-intentioned and high-profile project was destined to go horribly wrong...