Quote from: Windjammer;473577In fact, they only have two ways of dealing with these things. Pretending it didn't happen, or whopping out their big boy and give bullshit answers to serious questions.

Now show me one other RPG company which does that.

Ha!  Haven't read that in a while.    I remember typing that out 15 minuted prior to a pnp dnd game at my brother's house.

Quote from: RPGPundit;473894My god man, what were they thinking?!! How can the largest gaming company in the world be this incompetent at this sort of thing?!!

RPGPundit

I think they fired pretty much anyone who had any history with the company or with dnd in general.

Quote from: Melan;473923There goes my "they may have meant it to say the first book on Neverwinter" theory. :hmm: Well, whatever, there are better things to be concerned with. [edit]Like, say, I reread Khare: Cityport of Traps on my vacation last week. It was published in the Steve Jackson's Sorcery! gamebook line, and shows it was written for a young audience, and some of the encounters require a major suspension of disbelief, but damn it is one fine city, and John Blanche's art really gives it its seedy character. There should be more cities like that for role-playing games.[/edit]

Was their own book, "City of Stormreach" somehow not a hardcover focused on a single city?

I stand corrected, they are idiots.

Quote from: kythri;473985Was their own book, "City of Stormreach" somehow not a hardcover focused on a single city?

That only counts if they say it counts.

I guess the Hammerfast book they did just last year doesn't count either?  Maybe because it's a "town" or "dwarven outpost" and not a "city"?

Talk about weasel words.

Quote from: jgants;474059I guess the Hammerfast book they did just last year doesn't count either?

Wow, that was even a 4e product. That makes it officially the biggest unforced error of the year.

Quote from: Benoist;473916Maybe because they are the largest company in the world...

Yep. I'm betting the copy was written by a marketing intern who has never played an RPG, based on notes she took at a meeting between texting to her friends how bored she was by all this geek shit.

The bigger a company gets, the more the marketing, editorial, and support staff are divorced from the core product.

Quote from: jgants;474059I guess the Hammerfast book they did just last year doesn't count either?  Maybe because it's a "town" or "dwarven outpost" and not a "city"?

Talk about weasel words.

Either the original press release or a customer service response shortly afterward clarified that they meant "the first hardcover book". So Hammerfast (or, for that matter, Vor Rukoth or Gloomwrought - softcover and boxed set) were never meant to qualify. [But yeah, saying 'this is the third product we've done on a fantasy city in the past 18 months' doesn't really have that sales oomph.]

What's so hilarious is that that response already highlighed that a tacit restriction to "in the current (4E) line up of D&D products" was in place all along. If so, why not own up to that? Their behaviour just makes no sense.

WotC is just out luck with this book, it seems. Earlier today it was anncouned that the big Neverwinter MMO - the one which was supposed to come out at around the same time as their Neverwinter campaign book - got shelved to 2012 because it was not up to par. So the book lost one of its major rationale - cross pollination with the MMO crowd via synchronised releases.

Came across a review of this new 4E Neverwinter Campaign Setting book.

http://www.rpgmusings.com/2011/08/review-neverwinter-campaign-setting/


In particular, it mentions something which seems to be rather irksome to me on a first read.

QuoteDire Corbies are talked about very briefly, given one monster statblock, and then the reader is very bluntly told that to learn more they have to read a DDI article about them. Although the monsters listed for faction encounters came from a huge variety of sources and the book on the whole points DMs to different books to get stat blocks for NPCs and monsters, the dire corbies section felt extremely heavy-handed in the way it felt like a product placement. I would have rather not had the book bring them up at all than promote the DDI article in such an obnoxious way.

If this wasn't Forgotten Realms, something done this obnoxiously as a cross promotion with DDI, would have turned me off immediately from ever buying this particular book.

:banghead:

Nevertheless, I still want to look through this book before dismissing it completely.  But so far it's looking less and less attractive to me.

This sort of thing reminds me of what's been done to some university textbooks in recent times.

Basically in some textbooks' recent editions, they removed all kinds of stuff from the print edition, and put it up online instead (some for pay, some for free).  In some sense, the older editions of these textbooks from a decade ago (and earlier) may very well be more "complete" than the newer "crippled" editions.

It feels like one is being ripped off by deliberate omissions, in an underhanded manner by the publisher.  (Though one may feel differently, if this was a first edition of a new textbook, where there's no previous editions and history).

Quote from: ggroy;474295This sort of thing reminds me of what's been done to some university textbooks in recent times.

Basically in some textbooks' recent editions, they removed all kinds of stuff from the print edition, and put it up online instead (some for pay, some for free).  In some sense, the older editions of these textbooks from a decade ago (and earlier) may very well be more "complete" than the newer "crippled" editions.

It feels like one is being ripped off by deliberate omissions, in an underhanded manner by the publisher.  (Though one may feel differently, if this was a first edition of a new textbook, where there's no previous editions and history).

The above textbook shennanigans are currently the bane of my existance; fucking textbook publishing jackholes...

Quote from: ggroy;474292Came across a review of this new 4E Neverwinter Campaign Setting book.

http://www.rpgmusings.com/2011/08/review-neverwinter-campaign-setting/

In particular, it mentions something which seems to be rather irksome to me on a first read.

If this wasn't Forgotten Realms, something done this obnoxiously as a cross promotion with DDI, would have turned me off immediately from ever buying this particular book.

Nevertheless, I still want to look through this book before dismissing it completely.  But so far it's looking less and less attractive to me.

Thanks for the crippleware Wizards *shakes head*

Quote from: Planet Algol;474325The above textbook shennanigans are currently the bane of my existance; fucking textbook publishing jackholes...

Same here, but earlier this past decade.  :banghead:

Quote from: Planet Algol;474327Thanks for the crippleware Wizards *shakes head*

It's not really like that. There are 5 types of dire corbies in the DDI article, but 4 of them are 17th level or higher. The Neverwinter Campaign Setting is explicitly heroic tier. The one dire corby that fits the tier is the one included in the book.