WI: TSR merges with Games Workshop

Not how I remember it from the days of the big red basic game box, but time does do funny things to our memories.
Well, I never played vanilla D&D. My friends and I were all AD&D players, which is probably why we remember things differently.
 
Ah, by the time AD&D was out, we'd moved on to Traveller and (I think) Twilight:2000.

Definately basic D&D was a Tolkien rip-off. I think the earliest versions even had Hobbits as opposed to halflings.

Going back to the OP, GW was/is certainly better run financially than TSR ever was (not that is a difficult thing to acheive). I've heard that versions 3 and 4 of D&D seemed to push the miniatures idea pretty hard. I suspect you'd see that aspect sooner with a GW run D&D.
 
Going back to the OP, GW was/is certainly better run financially than TSR ever was (not that is a difficult thing to acheive)

boy, is that ever true. I can remember way back in 1E days, seeing an announcement in Dragon magazine that basically said, "Hey, we haven't been doing our publishing right, and we finally got an expert on publishing finance, and now we can reduce the price of our publications by a substantial amount." EGG and the founders of TSR were enthusiastic and eager to get their game into print, but the sad fact is that they were all novices at it. They made some really bad decisions at times, paying for the rights to some SPI games and trying to sell them, licensing some questionable stuff, etc.
 
I am sure I read somewhere that they acquired and then desperately tried to enthuse the public about their Buck Rogers RPG as one of the new exec team's family held the rights...

All the while still running Gamma World and Star Frontiers.
 
Well in the OT, I think that GW did more to kill tabletop RPGs than computer games ever did, with their decisions to make White Dwarf and the shops all about their own products. With TSR game systems added to the stock, it's a slight advance.
 
Tabletop RPG-ing was badly damaged by Magic The Gathering, much more so than by GW doing anything.

It didn't help that just before "the great crash" people had been releasing a lot of crap games. It was something of the classic bubble situation.
 
Some of my favourite game stores got badly burnt when that happened. A few of them had to close doors, or move to much cheaper (read nastier) parts of town.
 
More of a push in the gaming rules to use miniatures for sure. The Warhammer RPG was an attempt by GW to get another group of people buying their figures (and by process moving into their fantasy battle game). - Worked on me BTW. Started with the RPG, ended up buying a couple of armies.
 
More of a push in the gaming rules to use miniatures for sure. The Warhammer RPG was an attempt by GW to get another group of people buying their figures (and by process moving into their fantasy battle game). - Worked on me BTW. Started with the RPG, ended up buying a couple of armies.

You could simply see D&D going back to its wargaming roots but with the GW-style selling technique (like the tournaments and golden demon award for paiting). You could have the core Forgotten Realms based tabletop wargame (it would be diverse enough to have a wide variety of armies) with the other worlds being either add-ons or games that share figurines but with different game mechanics althogeter (think WH 40K vs space hulk). Something similar to spelljammer or planescape might be introduced to allow different worlds' campaign.
 
I am sure I read somewhere that they acquired and then desperately tried to enthuse the public about their Buck Rogers RPG as one of the new exec team's family held the rights...

All the while still running Gamma World and Star Frontiers.

The book series that they came out with their Buck Roger rights, was a decent read. I never pick up the game.
 
You could simply see D&D going back to its wargaming roots but with the GW-style selling technique (like the tournaments and golden demon award for paiting). You could have the core Forgotten Realms based tabletop wargame (it would be diverse enough to have a wide variety of armies) with the other worlds being either add-ons or games that share figurines but with different game mechanics althogeter (think WH 40K vs space hulk). Something similar to spelljammer or planescape might be introduced to allow different worlds' campaign.
I observe that one of the original concepts of the Realms was that of a multiverse of many worlds (thus Forgotten Realms - Forgotten from the perspective of Earth), so if one assumes that the Forgotten Realms becomes the core (which would seem to assume that we still see AD&D, so I wouldn't overstate the shift to wargaming), then the framework for a world-crossing element is already there.
 
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