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.
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.
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.
Axe Goth Real?
: 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!
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.
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!
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
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)
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
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
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
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/...
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
like they didn't know, they didn't get paid because they were liars, but still!