Due to a number of developments, not the least of which being Hasbro lobotomizing the electronics division of Wizards of the Coast and feeding the properties to Infogrames, the Master Tools D&D 3 software has been delayed until the first quarter of 2002. Considering how far the product vision had strayed, it’s probably a good thing. How far afield did Master Tools range, you ask? Well, the mapping utility was useless for tabletop gaming, serving more as a primer for a non-existant online game.
Ryan Dancey, the man behind the D20 and Open Gaming Licences, is now the man in charge of getting Master Tools back on course. And he’s not gonna take any crap, either, as you can tell from a glance at the WotC message boards:
For better or worse, you’re stuck with me, and I’m an old-fashioned roll-the-dice kind of guy who would rather eat pizza and make Monty Python jokes with my wife and friends than sit all alone in a dark room and click a mouse to kill an endless stream of binary monsters.
Here, here! I suspect Master Tools’ powerdive toward oblivion is about turn into a climb back to the gaming stratosphere.