D&D 5E How WotC will approach the campaign settings?

Jeremy Crawford said that the core setting isn’t the Realms. The core setting is the multiverse.

This tweet probably explains why we have not seen a Forgotten Realms or another campaign setting. I think they plan to produce something different from what we are used to, but I cannot still understand what format this will have.

A holistic approach? I don’t find it likely. I can’t figure out how this will work.

An outsource approach? Maybe. They outsourced their first adventures (the first path with very mixed results).

A combination of two. A half – simultaneously release from in-house (Realms) and 3rd party companies? Maybe, but i think is too far-streched.

Something else? What is your opinion?

While Jeremy certainly tweeted that, and that's the official position, also relevant is - as you say - what's actually published. And brand director Nathan Stewart says "The Forgotten Realms is the universe that we at Wizards of the Coast are focusing our storytelling in for the foreseeable future", which seems fairly unequivocal.

So I'm expecting occaisional PDF documents for settings on wizards.com like the recent Eberron one, but print stuff will be all Realms based.

Isn't the Weave from Forgotten Realms?

I don't believe we'll see any campaign settings for quite a while, because any setting you may want you can buy off of dndclassics.com

All those products are usable with your 5E game. The only things they are missing are 5E version NPC stats and a couple mechanics for setting-specific character generation-- and those they've now begun giving us online. So there's absolutely no reason why they need to reprint all of those hundreds of thousands of words... spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for thousands of man-hours of work... just to produce products that end up being 85% identical to ones already out there.

I mean let's be honest here. Is there *anything* in the 4E Eberron Campaign Setting book that was better or more useful than what you got in the 3E Eberron book (except the mechanics for the 4 new races, one class, dragonmarks, and descriptions of where the new 4E Player's Handbook races are meant to appear?) I own both books. And other than the stats... there is nothing in those two 4E books I found that probably justified the amount of money they spent on producing it. Heck... that's probably the reason they originally were going to advance the 4E Eberron storyline 2 years... just to write *something new* that made the book seem necessary and not just a complete copy/paste job from the 3E one.

I know some players have an allergy to buying and using stuff off of dndclassics.com (which is ironic, considering the amount of people who were CRUCIFYING WotC at the start of 4E for not making these products available to consumers then-- oh how times change...) but those products are the easiest and cheapest way to produce a whole crapload of products for people to use, and they can spend what little man-hours they have remaining in the office to make very specific products that are meant to get as many players as possible to buy it. After all... if new products only appear every 4 months but this dearth inspires 1000 players to buy them... *as opposed* to producing two products in that same time but which only 500 players buy each one (because if one doesn't do it for them they know they can just wait two months for another one that does)... WotC has sold the same amount of product but have had to spend twice as many resources for the same result.

So, do you think that the only love for the other settings will be only conversion guides? That would be awful imho and a very conservative policy. No new campaign lore, stories, npcs? It would be disappointing!

They've said they plan to support 5 settings, but they didn't say how long it would take. Realms is the first setting they're supporting with products (adventures), and Ebberon has received support via. an online supplement. I suspect that Realms will continue to be the focus for this year and might receive a setting book when they're ready to move on to the next setting. The other settings will likely receive only online support until their turn comes up after Realms. Ebberon is a good possibility for the next setting, but there have been many rumors of Dragonlance and Greyhawk as well.

The other settings than the WotC supported 5 might receive support if they license out those settings in a limited way. For example, Mystara is popular, and I've heard that one of the authors would like to bring it back. WotC could license it to him to make a setting book and maybe an adventure or two, but the release times would have to be scheduled to not compete with WotC actual products.

That, IMO, would be the best way for them to handle the setting. The fans could get new products without WotC having 3rd parties directly competing against their product (which was the biggest flaw with the open gaming license from 3E).

gweinel said:

So, do you think that the only love for the other settings will be only conversion guides? That would be awful imho and a very conservative policy. No new campaign lore, stories, npcs? It would be disappointing!

Click to expand...

That seems likely. It's been made clear that they have ideas for 2 adventures per year for the next 5 or 6 years. It's also been made clear that all of them are playable in Adventurer's League...which means they all take place in the Forgotten Realms.

Plus, it really seems like this edition they aren't planning on publishing almost anything except how to convert older editions and the minimum updates required to use that material.

I agree much with [MENTION=7006]DEFCON 1[/MENTION]. What I really want are conversion guidelines for each edition, so I can take that old material and use it in my games. An Eberron-like PDF for Dragonlance is nice, but give me guidelines for converting 1e monsters to 5e, and I'm happy to do the work myself. The only thing I don't have a handle on is the relative differences in power between 5e and other editions.

One option they have is to simply outsource a lot of the other campaign settings. I'm sure MWP is itching to do Dragonlance stuff, and some of the other companies out there like Kobold Press and Sasquatch would happy to pick up the slack for Greyhawk, Mystara and so on. That let's WotC focus on FR as their primary storyline engine, while taking advantage of the full history and background of D&D. It was a model that worked pretty well for 3e. They don't even need an OGL for it; just a much better GSL than 4e had. Or even with no GSL, some proactive licensing could go a long way.

Imho, the reproduction of gaming material isn't as good as the new, "fresh" production. I am not saying no to reproduction but if you want to expand you ll go and create new material. Either a new campaign setting or new products for the old ones.