Well, I never played vanilla D&D. My friends and I were all AD&D players, which is probably why we remember things differently.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.Not how I remember it from the days of the big red basic game box, but time does do funny things to our memories.
Going back to the OP, GW was/is certainly better run financially than TSR ever was (not that is a difficult thing to acheive)
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.
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.
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.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.