You're the one TTRPG in the history of the hobby to have a billion dollar company behind you, why the hell do you have the issues you have?

I'm an ardent 4e defender and I get that at the end of the day that's not the game for everyone but the fact that 4e with a fraction of the resources Hasbro has had an insanely in-depth character creator and 5e's answer is "uh... beyond, i guess...?" is embarrassing.

That plurk was talking about CR and like, the amount of manpower that Hasbro can afford for its do no wrong division means that 5e has no excuse to have a wonky as hell CR formula, you could afford to crunch those numbers for once.

no i think the situation's even weirder

wotc was still hit with layoffs

even when they were doing nothing but making money

i have NO idea what hasbro is doing

YEAH EXACTLY

LIKE HELLO? YOUR TABLETOP DIVISION IS PRINTING MONEY

WHY ARE YOU MAKING THEM FIRE PEOPLE

MTG IS SELLING INCREDIBLY WELL LAST I HEARD TOO

Like the game itself isn't bad. It's the best version of 3.x and my junior high and high school years were the salad days of Ryan Dancey's OGL Jamboree Complete Fuckfest so for all my high ideals for game design I can shut up and roll with the best of them.

But with the amount of money Hasbro has the amount of money their MtG/D&D division makes them 5e should be on another level. We should have had to invent new terms for the problems it had because it was doing things ahead of its competitors.

it's just....safe.

everything about the decisions it makes are safely incompetent.

I'm having my Mr. Krabs "wait a minute I hate golf" moment here but it really is just, "Wait a minute. This isn't a large indie company game!"

and like I want to be clear, I loathe dnd because I have played dnd since I was six years old, I am tired. but 5e should be more than it is.

It's just...you have ALL THE MONEY hasbro

the money is NOT going to the tabletop division apparently

5e should be stunningly good or bafflingly, absurdly bad

IT SURE ISN'T

ONE WONDERS WHERE THE FUCK IT IS GOING BECAUSE IT AIN'T THE TOYS EITHER

T...TRANSFORMERS MOVIES???

this really does feel like either we're going to see an embezzlement scandal in the next five years or its like

it's a banana michael what could it cost

ten dollars

levels of oblivious spending

Like when an Onyx Path game shits the bed because I had to count higher than twelve, I'm forgiving because I know it was conceived, pitched, written, drawn, edited, proofed, laid out, playtested, scrapped, redesigned, left in a Google Drive for eight months, re-rewritten, and then released by like a dozen perpetually anxious bisexual nerds with $20 dollars.

I get they are working with the narrow means available to them!

terminalis: I mean then they commit tax fraud and don't pay ANY of their devs a living wage and I'm stunningly angry known sex pests might have accidentally been right about OPP's management being shit

like they didn't know, they didn't get paid because they were liars, but still!

But yeah, Hasbro is a real company, not three Discords in a trench coat trying to sneak into Kickstarter!

So what in the fuck is going on there?

I know several of you are tired of hearing me bitch about this but the fact that there is a wizard school setting for 5e and if you want a course list, or enough professors to teach a school the size they mention, or NPC students who aren't literally one sentence and no stats, your option is to homebrew like your life depends on it, or hit the DM's Guild?

TSR would have never allowed that. Hell, WotC would have had like 10 Strixhaven adventure modules and Complete Sophomore with like 20 prestige classes released within the fiscal calendar.

i'm with ruka, i feel like in a decade or two someone will uncover a dusty abandoned filing cabinet full of like

hilarious levels of embezzlement

because truly i don't know where it's going. it can't all be into advertising.

someone is clearly funnelling money Somewhere in hasbro and i genuinely cannot tell where

also i'll never get tired of bitching about strixhaven because like. it should have been the easiest win imaginable.

everyone likes wizard schools! that shitty novel series written by the terf queen was one of the most formative fictional worlds of my generation! there is fertile ground to riff off it and make something that isn't tainted by the goddamn terf queen!

and we know this because predating strixhaven is approximately 500 different homebrew settings which do that exact thing

how the fuck did they just drop that nothingburger of a book and leave

even ravnica and theros had more meat in them then strixhaven did.

theros had a whole piety system that you could rip out and use in non-theros campaigns that were god focused

it will never not make me incredibly buttmad

hasbro's management decisions from the toplevel are staggeringly bad

speaking as a transformers person like. i'm more astonished when they don't set their own brands on fire every year or so

the fact that 5E is as stable and "safe" a product as it is speaks volumes to how much everyone beneath the top level of management has scrambled to fireproof the thing from the festering shithive of maggot-brain insanity sitting atop the empire of franchise corpses hasbro sustains itself upon

I mean we're all also talking around the elephant in the room.

Which is that according to many, many sources, only WotC is profitable and it's largely off the back of Magic.

There's a reason every 10 months a story crosses the tabletop sphere of "investors threaten to divest WotC from Hasbro, again"

because it's plainly clear to anyone with eyes that the millisecond MtG stops printing money (which, well, it might, the way they seem to be trying to pivot mtg cards into "speculative assets" which, BARF)

the entire company is going to buckle at the knees like a sickly victorian child.

tl;dr half the reason D&D doesn't have money is because we're looking at the dark side of "Final Fantasy 14 was the load-bearing pillar while the rest of Square Enix was shitting the bed"

They are literally siphoning probably a good 50% of the profits from it and MtG into the rest of the company because the rest of the company is so badly managed that it's become completely insolvent

yep

that's my point here, WOTC is the only part of hasbro that isn't being completely micromanaged by hasbro to hell and back into making constant horrendous business decisions, and that's not because hasbro doesn't want to do that, it's because hasbro is too incompetent to succeed at it

yesh

yeah

yeah and like. that's not a lesson hasbro is learning, as sourced by the above mentioned "corporate keeps mandating layoffs to make Profit Go Up"

there's probably some hellish back and forth internally every time we see an arm of wotc line up the gun to shoot themselves in the dick, completely in the opposite direction to everything they did before and after

what concerns me is those moments are getting more and more frequent.

which means hasbro is taking the stance of "we have a goose that does nothing but shit golden eggs, how do we build a machine to strangle every possible egg out of the goose before it dies"

"what do you mean we'd get more eggs by just feeding the goose and giving it a pond to live in. we want the eggs now, it has to make up for the golden sheep we already strangled and sold off last year"

like as a tl;dr, to prove both sven and- uh. sorry don't know your name, dorohedoro - a quick google of wotc's profits from the end of last year coughed up this - https://draftsim.com/...

q3 2024, hasbro dipped by 15%, but wotc and mtg went up 7% and 3% respectively

*to prove both sven and dorohedoro's points, i forgot a whole ass word

tl;dr my concern is that while hasbro is genuinely too incompetent to strangle wotc entirely (in part due to the extensive internal fireproofing and people who work there flinging themselves onto the grenade), i worry they'll only grow bolder in their attempts to Make More Money from Only Profitable Part Of Megacorporation

If anything this makes some aspects more baffling.

Circling back to this apparently WOTC down 24% on there most recent report.

oof

yeah there it is. hasbro's gonna start meddling more.

skulltaffy: the prophecy has been fulfilled

yyyyyyup

called it