Editing Wizards of the Coast (section)

==Schism and Competition==
Despite what the [[butthurt]] fanboys will tell you, ''[[Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition]]'' was (and still sort-of is as they sell off the backlog) a financial success.  And the hatred for it was never uniform.  Even people that hate 4e will admit that it's not a [[FATAL|terrible]] [[Racial Holy War|game]], but even its fans have to admit that, in many ways, it is utterly unrecognizable from the game that preceded it.  The sad truth is that 4e was worse than a bad game: it was a flawed-but-good game which just happened to have a lot of stupid drama to deal with.

To make a long story very short: 

The people who love 4e love it for its tightly-defined rule set, tactical depth compared to 3.5 (no more martials flanking and power attacking every turn while the casters fly out of reach or teleport out of sight and spam save-or-die rays from their familiar), strong support for the DM via online materials, ease of play compared to the frequent RULESRULESRULES problems of earlier editions, giving every class, even former low-tier sad-sacks like the [[monk]] a fair shot at being as awesome as the previously-dominant full-casters, and for introducing some genuinely good new ideas to the lore.  (Ex. [[The Raven Queen]] replacing the evil death gods as an iconic neutral death goddess, some ''great'' new books and campaign ideas for ''[[Eberron]]'', adding lots of off-beat, niche races like [[githzerai]] and [[goliath]]s to the core rulebooks, and a new, wonderfully revamped version of ''[[Dark Sun]]'' for the first time in two-and-a-half editions that not only brought back all the best parts of that gameline but sanded off all the worst ideas, like the biomechanical halfling empire and the DM taking over a character during the Dragon transformation.) 

The people who hate 4e hate it for sharply segregating the game into combat and story sections, focusing heavily on the use of [[miniatures]] and battle mat combat rather than the "theater of the imagination," being hard to run without "power cards," sold separately, to keep all the abilities straight, nickel-and-diming consumers to try to force them to buy ''[[World of Warcraft]]''-style subscriptions for access to character generators or other online materials, shoehorning all classes into the same sets of mechanics (Leaders heal and buff their allies, Strikers hurt things, Defenders [[tank]], Controllers debuff and throw out area attacks), making a lot of gratuitous changes to D&D lore, from slaughtering the cosmology of ''[[Planescape]]'' to dropping a [[Exterminatus|Spellplague]] on the ''[[Forgotten Realms]]'', and releasing a castrated new version of the Open Gaming License for the game system. 

Worse, it seems many of these problems were corporate mandated from above by Hasbro, seeking to create a more tightly-controlled IP and cut the Open Gaming License off at the roots. While 4e remained a modest financial success, many fans began leaving the oldest roleplaying game of all behind to go looking for other ways to scratch the itch. And many of the Hasbro-based marketeers, being, like most marketeers, dumb blood-sucking [[vampire]]s who only vaguely remember what it is to be human, made the whole situation worse by emphasizing 3.5's flaws as much as they praised 4e's features in a vindictive way that hurt feelings and created a lot of bad blood.

Paizo, the former magazine publishers, took advantage of this to start fully promoting their own D20-based RPG game, [[Pathfinder]], a sort of "D&D 3.75" that attempted to fix the problems without transforming so drastically from the 3.5 model. How successful they were is... debatable (read that page for details), but it drew in the fans like mad.  Because it ran on the OGL, it soon had rafts of refugees publishing quality third-party material for its game. Riding that surge of popularity, Paizo began to become a true challenger to WoTC's former dominance over the gaming market, even outselling them at times.

This act, creating one's own worse competitor, was humiliating for Wizards and disquieting to Hasbro. The slimy, icy tendrils of the conglomerate began to withdraw. So long as Wizards did not become a financial liability, the interns through which Hasbro communicated sang (they burn out, bleeding from every orifice, after channeling a single communication and have to be replaced), it would now be free to pursue whatever direction it wished for yet another edition.  But it ''must'' have another edition.  The insatiable hunger of the otherworldly suits would not be satisfied with ''second place'', no matter how profitable it proved.

Yet, in many ways, as Wizards scrambled to clean up the floors under the intern and move on, this whole experience was good for Wizards.  Now that they had actual competitors, product quality could be an actual defense against the bizarre demands of their alien masters, since now they stood to lose customers if they fucked up.  And they could dissect what Paizo did leading up to ''Pathfinder'' and take notes.