Wizards of the Coast

Wizards of the Coast
Year Established	1990
Notable Games	Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons
Website	http://www.wizards.com

Wizards of the Coast, like so many luminous icons of the tabletop industry, was founded in a dingy basement in the rainy city of Seattle in 1990. Originally, they developed Magic the Gathering, and, after using their patents on various cardgame staples like "tapping" and "counters" to strangle literally every other competitor but Legend of the Five Rings out of business, they made so much goddamn money on the sucker's market that is the CCG scene that they were able to fulfill every nerd's dream of buying the dying Dungeons and Dragons property out from under Lorraine Williams, then revitalizing it with its most popular edition. Since then, they've been themselves bought out by the cold, emotionless, alien beings taking the form of corporate suits at Hasbro, but in recent times the corporation has adopted a more "hand-off" approach to Wizards, to mutual benefit.

They are a source of civilized and respectful debate on /tg/, but while the old guard will probably never forgive them for changing literally anything about the game from the Chainmail days, general consensus is that, as evil megacorporations in the tabletop business go, they really could be much worse.

Early History: It's Magic! Oooo-oooh!

Wizards started out as a small-time game publisher, releasing new editions of defunct old niche games and small dribbles of their own material. They'd probably have gone the route of Iron Crown Enterprises or be languishing in obscurity today, if not for a stroke of good luck. Some math major with an eye towards game design walked into their office and pitched a board game to them. They liked it, but they didn't have the cash to produce it, so they asked him to come up with something cheaper to produce, something portable and quick to play. Well, to make a long story short, he went home, ran some numbers, and the rest is history.

Magic: The Gathering was (and, if you're into the Skinner Box of CCGs, still is) a damn fine collectible card game, the first commercially successful one of its kind in the world... which isn't actually that impressive, considering the only other CCG at that point was a baseball card game from the early 1900s. Still, it started an industry, won shitloads of game-design awards, and led to Wizards using its patents on various basic card game mechanics ("tapping," counters, etc.) to ruthlessly crush all competitors. Sometimes, they were justified in protecting their IP against hacks and shovelware imitators. Sometimes, they just went after people they didn't like. Let's just say there's a reason L5R used to make you lose points if you accidentally said "tap" instead of "bow."

It also made them more money than can easily be imagined, not least because the 90s was the age of know-nothing idiots speculating on "nerd shit," a trend started in the comic-book industry. (Humorously, the cards from this time have sometimes ended up being more valuable than the pointless comics bubble ever would be.) Rather than blowing it all on hookers and blow, in the tradition of the 80's, they funneled it back into their RPG business, buying up various old games and refurbishing them, including Ars Magica from fellow swaggering new kid on the block White Wolf. Most of them had enjoyed only moderate success at best, not least because the market then was smaller than it had ever been following the fundamentalist-o-caust of the 80's purge and the company was putting its fingers into too many pies and failing to support all its games, but eventually, they managed to land the biggest fish of all.

And so, my lord became a king by his own hand...

As a cash-strapped and internal-politics-crippled TSR was folding and dying, Wizards bought them and all their stuff, including the famous and venerable Dungeons and Dragons property, for a paltry $25 million. They gave all the old TSR guys jobs, called off the lawyers and openly allowed fans to release stuff for poorly-selling but much-beloved campaign settings, and put various designers from TSR to work building the most popular and successful edition of D&D ever. Then paid to do it again when it needed a shitload of patching, leading to the silliest D&D edition name of all time (3.5). They also held a contest to design a setting that was weird and new for the new edition, ultimately settling on Keith Baker's Eberron.

Along with that edition, they put out the Open Gaming License, offering free reign for other companies to use their rules and produce supplements. While this had the unfortunate side effect of sometimes putting their tacit approval on complete fail, it is generally held to be one of their smartest and most fan-friendly moves ever, generating huge amounts of content for their game without paying a dime for it. Whether you want uber-minimalism, hard sci-fi, or erotically-charged sexventures, you can generally find it somewhere in the library of OGL content, in varying degrees of quality.

As the decade wound down, they also got the license to make a CCG for Pokémon, and while we scoff now, it was a pretty good game that wasn't a complete Magic rip-off, and it probably made them about as much money as Magic for a while there. The Pokémon craze was at its height, and children everywhere begged money off their parents, worked menial lemonade-stand jobs, and, in some truly fail-tastic cases, murdered each other in cold blood for the next sweet, sweet hit of booster pack fever.

New Management, or the Road to the Great Mistake

At the turn of the millenium, 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). 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 conclusively proven. 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 (Monte Cook's traditional caster-dominance, weak martial classes, incoherent high-level play that turned into a maze of magic item abuse and extra turn stacking, 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 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...

The Resulting Disaster

Fourth edition had big ambitions, as mentioned above. It wanted to fix long-running problems and slaughter useless sacred cows. It wanted to make things better than they were before. So, why did it go wrong?

The key thing to remember about 3e vs. 2e is that, really, there wasn't that much of a change. Hit dice increased dramatically, the brain-meltingly backwards Thac0 system replaced with the D20 system, but other than that it was running pretty much the same engine as late-edition 2e. So there wasn't that much of a change for players and DMs alike to get over, once they took a closer look - perhaps the most drastic change was making monsters run on similar mechanics to players, something that they hadn't done in 2e, and redoing experience to give every character the same rate of progression.

4e was just too much of a change for the average D&D fanboy to handle. In no time at all, a huge array of complaints had been wracked up, though some of the more common ones would probably be:

• The "vidya game" feel of the Powers system, the result of 4e's efforts to try and crush the "fighters are boring" and "spellcasters dominate everything" errors under the same rock.
• Wizards got nerfed, and nerfed hard - admittedly, this was one of the more contentious complaints, as just as many players celebrated this and mocked the complainers as wizard fanboys pissed that their favorite class wasn't the best anymore.
• The alignment system was altered heavily, stripping it down to what 4e regarded as the bare essentials (Lawful Good, Good, Evil, Chaotic Evil and Unaligned) and completely removing its mechanical effects - again, this was specifically in accordance with the fact people had been fighting over alignment and related issues (like Paladins getting trapped into falling) for years, at least since 2e.
• The in-built assumption that players would use a gridded battle mat and miniatures to play their games with, writing everything up in terms of "squares".
• The replacement of the Half-orc and Gnome as PHB 1 races with the Dragonborn and Tiefling - completely ignoring that both races (especially gnomes) had been complained about for ages.
  • Female dragonborn being portrayed in art with tits also got a certain kind of neckbeard all up in impotent fury.
• The revoking of the former Open Game License.
• The death of Dungeon and Dragon Magazines as physical things and making them into online PDFs.
• The constantly promised, yet never materializing, online resource for playing D&D with.

The result was a HUGE backlash against WoTC for the sudden drastic changes. Paizo 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. This resulted in a large upsurge of fans, giving Paizo the power to become a true challenger to WoTC's former stranglehold over the gaming market.

Attempts at Redemption

Naturally, WoTC immediately tried to find some way to bring back the fans. The first result of their fumbling efforts was the Essentials Line, essentially a "dumbed down" version of 4e that succeeded only in pissing off the 4e fans they had developed.

Eventually, they gave up on 4e. They started taking polls, interviewing players, conducting open playtesters.

The result, was the release of Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. D&D Next.