D&D 5E I think WotC has it backwards (re: story arcs)
- Thread starter Mercurius
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cmad1977
Hero
And... we're back around to you limiting everyone else's choices. What a surprise.
Actually he has no power to limit your options in any way shape or form. I don't know why you insist that he's preventing you from performing whatever action it is you want.
Parmandur
Book-Friend, he/him
And... we're back around to you limiting everyone else's choices. What a surprise.
Oooookay. Look. I don't have power over WOTC. They are doing what they are doing based on a big picture business plan. May be right, may be wrong. I like it, you don't. Not going to change their minds any. I'm gonna just keep on playing.
Jester David
Hero
If they're not banking on selling regular expansions, can they really lose customers?
And if the customers are so fickle that they'll abandon the game without constant gratification and fan service, are they really fans you want?
Okay, but remember, you asked...
You mention menus, which is a good comparison. So I'll start with that.
1) Choice
Look at how fast food places do menus: limited pages with a few key selections. The thing is, expensive restaurants also tend to have smaller menus. You can tell amateur restaurants because their menus are too crowded. Simplifying and focusing menus tends to be a common guideline in restaurant makeover shows.
This is because too many choices makes people freeze and become indecisive, and having too many options spreads your focus thin making quality variable.
This isn't just words, but studied behaviour. Columbia University did some experiments on this using jam jars:
https://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/345/345 Articles/Iyengar & Lepper (2000).pdf
You can find some condensed thoughts on it here: http://coglode.com/gems/choice-paradox
In case you want to keep reading and click later I'll summarize the key point: consumers were more likely to buy when offered 6 jams (40%) instead of 24 jams (3%) and reported greater satisfaction.
Too many books on the shelf make it harder to buy one or two and make the game harder for new people to start playing. It's a barrier to entry. The "wall of books" phenomenon where people look at the options and are intimidated, not knowing where to start or what to buy next. And the pressure to have to buy all the books, which is increasingly expensive the longer a game is around.
We're not talking about fixed points in time but the life of the entire edition (and likely the game). Glut is bad, whether it is after a year or five years. The end result is identical: too much content. A middle ground approach doesn't end glut, it just delays it. And that's the point, delaying the end. And we want the game system to last.
2) Diminishing Returns
A fast release schedule hastens the end of the game system, as there's a finite number of books that can be produced. The core book will always sell the best and every accessory will sell fewer books. And, the more accessories you release, the fewer successive ones will sell.
The core books will sell X copies, the first major accessory will sell Y copies (where Y<X), the second major accessory will sell Z copies (Z<Y), etc. The faster you release books the faster your sales will descent below the minimum expected profits. Where the company places the minimum sales varies; it's likely much higher for WotC than Paizo. (Paizo is likely happy to make the same profits year after year while WotC likely expects growth).
When sales pass a minimum threshold then a new edition starts to look attractive. But new editions divide the audience and splinter the fanbase. You'll never have a 100% conversion rate from the previous edition and have to bank on lapsed and new players making up the difference.
Fewer books can delay this sales attrition. This spreading out the decline of sales over years rather than months. And, because revenue has to come from elsewhere, new books are a bonus added on top of the expected revenue, giving the impression of growth. And because the releases would be so few and far between they're more special and thus desirable, because...
3) Less is More
It's very possible to make less money with more sales. Books have a production cost (writing, editing, art, layout, printing, shipping, etc), which means each product begins in a financial hole. The first few thousand sales don't generate profit, they just pay off the costs. So if you're only selling a small number of copies of books beyond you cut-even point you're not making much money.
This negatively interacts with intrabrand competition. If you release two or three books, those books might compete for sales. People might only buy one of the three books released. Because more books are released you can reach more people in different audience and sell more total books. However, if you release fewer books you're no longer competing with yourself, and more people are funnelled to that one book boosting its sales and thus generating more money.
Similar type products often compete with each other. Basic and Advanced D&D competed for sales, as did the campaign setting books. Because someone was a Greyhawk fan they wouldn't buy a Forgotten Realms adventure, even if they could easily convert it because there would be a GH adventure with no conversion needed coming shortly. Adventures also compete with each other. Right now there are no small modules, so people wanting that content have to buy the hardcover super-adventures and pull out sections to use for smaller modules. If WotC released both the hardcover adventures and smaller modules, total sales for the storyline books would drop and so would profits, even if they were selling more total product.
This is why the "don't buy it" or "buy fewer books" argument is problematic. If WotC releases two splatbooks a year but a large segment of the fanbase is only interested in paying for one splatbook or only has the energy to incorporate one splatbook into their game then WotC is essentially competing with themselves.
And a big reason why people might only buy the occasional splatbook is because accesories have lesser value.
4) Limited Use
There's two audiences for accessories: Dungeon Masters or players. Most splatbooks tend to be focused on players. They're mostly for making characters and focused on PC options. This is because, ostensibly, there are three to six players for every DM and thus a larger audience for PC splatbooks. But, in practice there tends to be one or two dedicated players at the table who just buy the books and support the more casual players.
But successive splatbooks have limited use, both DM and player books.
This is most apparent with Dungeon Masters. A DM splatbook would be the equivalent of Unearthed Arcana (or Pathfinder Unchained): a book of optional subsystems. But this is only useful at the start of campaigns as few games radically change house rules in mid-story and you're only likely to use a finite number of house rules each game. And once you find a combination of house rules that fits your playstyle, you're less likely to change.
PC options see more use because of this, but there are still limits. You can't really play two PCs at the same time. And even a prolific gamer with multiple home games who is exceedingly death prone won't make so many characters that they require more than a single splatbook every, oh, eighteen months. They cannot consume the content as fast as it can be released. New material is really only useful for new characters and has a very limited impact on existing campaigns. Right now most players are still on their first campaign, let alone on the third or fourth where new options for the entire party might be required.
In the PHB alone if you count all elven wizards as "one combo" there's almost a hundred different characters you can make. And if you add in subraces and subclassess there are almost 600 different combinations. A group with 5 players who like high mortality campaign and where every player makes at least 4 characters over the course of the campaign can run 30 campaigns without a true repeat. Plus backgrounds, which just adds more variety.
Thus, successive splatbook releases don't tend to have more than a theoretical impact on a game. Smaller percentages of each release are used because there's so much unused content already available. The splatbooks are really of primary use to two types of gamer; the reader and the builder. The splatbooks are consumed not for use at the game table but for the enjoyment of reading and owning the material or the building of characters as a side activity for theory crafting. Both those audiences can be served through other products or even other games.
If the contents of the book are not primarily of use at the game table, that makes the splatbook...
5) Content for the Sake of Content
Setting a release schedule tends to result in mandated content. Saying "two splatbooks a year" means that content is expected and the fans will get upset if this changes. It very quickly results in content being released not because it is needed or adds something to the game but because there's a hole in the schedule. The more books you release the more you're releasing content the game does not need or the fans don't really want. It's very literally choosing quantity over quality.
It's easy to fill gaps early on. When the game released there was a serious gap in the sorcerer, as there was one traditional non-funky subclass. We needed more sorcerer options. After after a single real splatbook that gap would vanish. The holes in the game become less pressing and omnipresent and more niche. Instead of "we need a sorcerer build that does... anything" the calls for content become "we need a sorcerer build that deals cold damage and uses Wisdom as a secondary stat" or "we need a sorcerer that fits a Norseland/Viking vibe".
Monster books are a great example of this. For 3.5e WotC opted to release one new monster book each year. Because you can always use more monsters, and there was a wealth of legacy monsters in the game that didn't make the cut into the Monster Manual. But, the later monster books because more and more… padded. There was a set page count and set number of monsters and so there were more and more filler monsters that weren't particularly good but filled out the pages. Later books tried other tactics, such as including much more lore and encounters, and in 4e they held back iconic monsters to seed through later Monster Manuals to make those books more attractive. Paizo has done better; their first two Bestiaries were crammed with classic monsters and they looked through geek culture for more monsters to add, like fey creatures and Lovecraftian beasts. The Bestiary 3 went international, adapting creatures from other cultures - which tend to be more memorable than creatures created by game designers. The Bestiary 4 had a lot of higher power level (and mythic) monsters as well as the best of the AP monsters. And they rounded out their annual monster book with the NPC Codex and the Monster Codex with classed creature statblocks. I say "better" than WotC, but each Bestiary still had an increasing amount of padding: useless monsters unlikely to see play but required to fill out the page count. Monsters that will never see play. There were some stinkers in the B4. And even the good monsters have a diminished chance of use because there's so much competition with more iconic monsters. And now they have a conundrum for 2015: what to release as their fall hardcover. Because the fans just expect a fall book now. We don't really need a seventh monster book (especially not with all the 3rd Party monsters) but they need to release something because it's expected.
The one advantage a later monster product has over the initial attempts (at least for 3e and 4e) is that the monsters tend to be better designed and work with the strengths of the system while avoiding the weaknesses. But this is a form of...
6) Power Creep
It's been said that in a balanced game there's no power creep there's option creep. The thought is that power creep is intentional: the common wisdom used to be that to sell future accessories the content has to just be better, otherwise people will stick with the existing content. The counter to this is just providing more options that let you do different things with your character, which provided a lateral power increase.
However, option creep effectively is power creep as perfect balance is impossible. When presented by two options, one will always be more powerful. In a splatbook that presents new options some will be more powerful (and lead to power creep) and some will be less powerful (and thus less desirable and effectively filler). And the more options available also means the more combinations that are available which can synergize well together.
The trick is limiting the amount of power creep by keeping the power increase as small as possible. Balancing a lot of content is tricky. When making an entire splatbook of content it becomes impossible to adequately test the entire book. There are only so many playtesters at the disposal of WotC. The more content that is being released the faster you need to produce the content and less time you have to test any given rules element. While WotC can always hire more writers (in house or freelance) to increase the number of books they can produce, they can only expand their base of playtesters so much.
And power creep is just bad, creating an arms race between DMs and and players, where the DM has to work harder to keep up with the increasingly potent PCs. And this enlarges the disparity between optimized and non-optimised PCs, creating challenges that one PC cannot fail at while another PC cannot succeed. And there's pressure to make the published adventures pick a side: settling on a power level either makes them too easy or too hard. Either way might decrease sales as the adventures are less useful as written. And the disparity between characters can make some players upset and feel less useful and have less fun, which causes tension at the table.
7) Group Stability
Players will sometimes buy books their DM doesn't have and/or want. This isn't really a surprise. These players will often see something they really want in a book and try to have it added to their game. Sometimes the DM will say "yes" and sometimes the DM will say "no".
This puts pressure on the DM and the gaming group. The DM is already the hardest working person at the table, and more content just means more work as they have to keep up with new releases and check player's builds. It's effectively DM homework. The player has invested money on the product and wants to use it. But the DM might have valid reasons for saying no, such as balance concerns, awkwardness working the concept into the campaign world, or the trouble of incorporating a PC change. I've known players with character ADHD who would change their PC every session if they could, never feeling satisfied with what they were playing.
The more books that are released the greater the odds of content causing problems. Especially from a worldbuilding perspective, as the DM needs to accommodate more races appearing or types of class or monsters, working in new and unusual content alongside the standard races and tropes. The classics.
8) Greatest Hits
Certain options are just expected. We have the basics covered fairly well but there are some big D&Disms that just aren't in the game yet. These are options like the psion, a druid with an animal companion, or the bard focused on enchanting enemies. Books with content such as that would be nice, but it needs to be available all the time because that content is just expected. The books need to be evergreen and continually in print.
A heavier release schedule will always place the focus on new material. WotC will become less focused on selling the old product (which has been paid for) and instead looks to sell the new books, because those are still in the red. And you can't reprint everything, as that's cost prohibitive (and many books will not sell enough copies to warrant a second print run, as mentioned in the point #2). In the past D&D has been unconcerned about reprinting splatbooks and release schedule was more akin to Magic the Gathering where you had the transitory releases of the year that were around for a time and then vanished off store shelves. This made it harder for newcomers to get access to the iconic options. This meant that some books were hard to find after their initial release, unless you had a FLGS that could reorder books.
9) Stocking Shelves
A heavy release schedule isn't just expensive for gamers but game stores. Stores effectively buy the books first and then sell them to recoup expenses. A heavy library of game books means more money just sitting on the shelves.
Book stores are unlikely to have an infinite budget for gaming books and likely stock the core books and a few of the more recent releases. Those that do stock everything might opt to only have a single copy of accessories. If the one copy sells there's a window where they do not have the product and might lose a sale if someone comes looking for it. The customer will go elsewhere. This goes double for big box stores or smaller book stores not dedicated to gaming, which have limited shelf space for gaming books and the game books are competing for shelf space and the percentage of the investment. Too many releases means older product might not be stocked, such as the core rulebooks. (I cannot say how many times I saw the local Chapters with just the latest couple accessories but no PHB.)
And if the edition or game ends suddenly, the game store is stuck with product they cannot get rid of or have to sell at a sharp discount to unload. That's lost money. Which sounds pretty doom-and-gloom but has happened to stores four times in the last fifteen years.
Fewer books means that stores will have an easier time keeping the full product line in stock and having multiple copies of key books.
10) Bloat
Let's end this with the obvious: too many books just makes the game unwieldy.
More books makes that content harder to find. You don't know which book the options you want are and trying to find a particular prestige class or paragon path or archetype can be challenging.
More books means the game is harder to play. There's more time spent explaining unfamiliar rules (a spell or feat or class feature) and less time actually playing. It makes adjudicating rules harder because there's suddenly new information to absorb. And it detracts from the flow of the narrative as you're breaking from the description to read (and reread) mechanics.
There's no hard rule for when a game becomes bloated. There's no agreed upon line or set number of books when a game shifts from elegant to too complicated.
The Middle Ground
Past editions have been release heavy. But it's also possible to release no accessories. Not every RPG relies on regular sales of splatbooks. Originally, back in the day, Gary Gygax planned to end support for D&D and move onto other games because that's what you did with games. It's not like Monopoly or Hungry, Hungry Hippos have expansions. There's no Clue accessory with more suspects, weapons, and a new wing of the mansion.
But that just seems to be unfathomable. It's too different from how other RPGs do things. Hence the desire for a "middle ground" between no releases and monthly releases. But I'm not sure that's really a solution. Slowly releases from every month to three or four times a year doesn't fix things, it just delays the problem. It's not a cure it just keeps the disease in remission. It's not really a middle ground approach because it's still doing the same thing, albeit at a different rate; it's a middle ground in terms of rate of releases but not a middle ground in terms of position or intent.
A true middle ground might be less about just slowing the rate of releases but changing the tone and presentation of new releases. Making them less like video game DLC patches to the game that just slap on more of the same and more like expansion packs that actually change the game in dramatic ways.
A while back I made the case for a Eurogame style release schedule, with a couple key expansions every year or two, which eventually end. Like Pandemic or Settlers of Catan. I love both games and there are some fun expansions, but playing with more than a couple is just too much. It's preferable to just fine the one or two that alter the game in the way you want and add those. Each of the Catan expansions is big and dramatic, adding a whole different dimension to the game without just being another type of resource or type of project to build.
Psionics is the best example. It's a big addition to the game with a lot of content: classes, subclasses, possible races and subraces, as well as monsters. It's a big change to the game which should be playtested in advance and given room to breathe. It's a good model for what a release should be. It's not just a forgettable content patch with more of the same but a big product that cannot be handled through small web articles. Epic play might be another, either levels 21+ or something akin to Pathfinder's Mythic rules.
There's room for *some* expansions. A second monster book would be nice, especially to fill some gaps in high CRs. And a campaign setting. But even calling for a set book-a-year seems needlessly arbitrary. A good second monster book (i.e. a Fiend Folio) should be designed so that you don't need a third, and a good campaign setting should be comprehensive enough that we don't need endless sourcebooks filling in the gaps. But that kind of product should almost be the exception and not the rule.
HobbitFan
Explorer
That was a long well thought out post Jester C.
I agree with your reasoning on most of your points.
I do wonder a few things:
How do the Unearthed Arcana articles relate to all this?
How does WOTC expressing interest in campaign settings tie into the new model?
and finally, I agree that WOTC realizes they need to release less to avoid bloat. I'm not getting a clear picture from them that they themselves understand what their support model is going forward.
I agree with your reasoning on most of your points.
I do wonder a few things:
How do the Unearthed Arcana articles relate to all this?
How does WOTC expressing interest in campaign settings tie into the new model?
and finally, I agree that WOTC realizes they need to release less to avoid bloat. I'm not getting a clear picture from them that they themselves understand what their support model is going forward.
Jester David
Hero
Thanks. It's stuff I've been musing over for some time.
(It might end up as a blog at some time...)
UA doesn't add books to the shelves, so it's not a financial burden or imposing on newcomers. It's explicitly optional (rather than implicitly) so it's easier for DMs to ban or only approve on a case-by-case basis. And since it's free there's no sunk cost fallacy pushing people to want to use the content. Because it's smaller and freeform in length it can be more targeted and fix gaps in the system (like a spell-less ranger and more sorcerer builds) being less content for the sake of content.
And because it's a free e-document they can adjust the balance as needed, reducing the effect of power creep.
So there's certainly room for free UA articles. It skirts around most of the problems with splatbooks.
These get tricky. A campaign setting book is a necessary expense. It won't appeal to everyone but they need to present a book, to give new players a setting - or provide a template for how to build your own world. And the Realms has a lot of fans who need to know how the world has changed.
Even a book with crunch so long as those mechanics are focused on the setting. Backgrounds and a few feats would probably be enough. More like the 3E book than the 4e with the weird unrelated warlock pact (which was extra weird when you realize that, at the time, the warlock already had three builds opposed to everyone else's two).
Arguably you could even have two if there wasn't a lot of audience of thematic overlap. The Realms and Dark Sun. But I don't think this is necessary. The fluff of campaign settings is unchanged and you can update the settings just as effectively with Unearthed Arcana as a book.
Corpsetaker
First Post
Proper editing and communication can reduce power creep. I think one of the biggest problem was having multiple people working on different books and not communicating with each other and going back and comparing their new ideas to the current rules to make sure there are no problems.
Parmandur
Book-Friend, he/him
For what it's worth, a lot of that crunch will see publication in some form at some point - even if just in appendices to other products. The current set-up, though, means that the crunch can be very slowly playtested before being put out, which Steve Winter diagnosed as the major downfall of 2E (lack of concerted playtesting colliding with deadlines).
Settings, I've said this before, I think they'll do box sets, something like the older tyme setting boxes meets Starter Set/Lords of Waterdeep. Less a pure information delivery mechanism like a book, and more of a tangible product, with maps, etc.
Settings, I've said this before, I think they'll do box sets, something like the older tyme setting boxes meets Starter Set/Lords of Waterdeep. Less a pure information delivery mechanism like a book, and more of a tangible product, with maps, etc.
Nellisir
Hero
Excellent post, Jester. I'm going to go back and give it XP in a moment.
I think you're right about Hungry Hungry Hippos, though.
Clue did get a major overhaul in 2008, which seems to have been poorly received. In addition, the Limited Gift Edition does add another weapon. The Harry Potter Edition "is a major departure from traditional gameplay and constitutes a spin-off in its own right" and includes a variable game board. There's also a Dungeons & Dragons Edition from 2001. There's a whole host of branded editions. It's a bit of a fuzz whether those are accessories or variants or spinoffs or something else, but D&D could easily be reissued in multiple brands that reskin the same rules over and over.
I think you're right about Hungry Hungry Hippos, though.
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