Pages From The Upcoming Nautical D&D Book!

Jester David said:

Why would you want that when:If the DMsGuild is so terrible and full of content that nobody really uses, why do you care if Greyhawk is on there or not?

Click to expand...

I think there's a big divide between what WotC releases officially and what's third party content, though the divide is more important when it comes to player content compared with DM content. I'm not saying everything WotC releases is perfect. Lord knows I think they have made some bad calls even on things in the PHB, and would like a 5.5 to clean a good bit up, but that's not a good argument for here.

However, there's a certain level of "this is official" that helps keep things in check and overall helps constrain or at least focus choices. DMsGuild, because of its "anyone can submit" model, has a LOT of material. There's some very good stuff there but there's a lot of really not good stuff, too. Then there's OGL material that's elsewhere. It's confusing and hard to wade through it all.

But, as I said, I draw a pretty big line between "for the DM" content and "for the players" content. A one-off monster that's used for an adventure or two isn't likely to really mess up a game the way player content does. What left a lot of people with a bad taste back in 3E was the fact that there was so much content and the DM was often left in the position of trying to wade through the potential interactions. I know I was a lot happier with options WotC had curated in Unearthed Arcana back in the 3.5 days.

DEFCON 1 said:

5 years ago a vocal minority kept complaining that WotC wasn't releasing material fast enough and that a new splatbook HAD to happen, despite being told by the company that is wasn't going to until at least several years down the line.

Click to expand...

Imagine that, the purchasers of a product saying "hey, we'd like you to release something"....

Jay Verkuilen said:

Yeah, I love those old modules but Yawning Portal was... well... appropriately named. I totally don't get why that was a hardcover. Nice PoD redos of classic modules on DMs Guild? Sure. I suspect they had a production schedule to fill and something wasn't working out.

Click to expand...

I remember people on this very board were begging for collections of short adventures, rather than a long 1-15 adventure path.

oreofox said:

Also, what do you need to play Forgotten Realms in 5e that wasn't already available from the past 30-40 years? Why focus on Greyhawk, and not mention one of the other settings. Greyhawk and FR both have basically the same races. But why not open up Ansalon and Dragonlance? There are races, classes, subclasses, monsters, and other things rather unique to that setting that are not available using the generic Forgotten Realms products. What about Spelljammer? What about Dark Sun? I see so many people pining for that setting (I don't see the appeal, but apparently a large number love it).

Click to expand...

FR could use an update as the current state of the world is a decade out of date, during which time there were several wars and a major Realmshaking event. The current status quo of large regions of the world is unknown.
Meanwhile, virtually every other setting is identical to how it was last published.

I like settings, but opening up every setting in a short period is probably a bad idea. Any chance of those "gems" getting noticed would be lost under the waves of content.
We got TWO new settings last year, bringing the total number of supported settings to four. Which is more official support than we got in 4e and 1e, and matches what we got during 3e. And it's pretty likely we'll see more on the Guild sooner rather than later.

The catch is the overwhelming majority of players run homebrew worlds. The Realms is the most popular non-homebrew world, but only just. The market for classic settings is small.

Jay Verkuilen said:

However, there's a certain level of "this is official" that helps keep things in check and overall helps constrain or at least focus choices. DMsGuild, because of its "anyone can submit" model, has a LOT of material. There's some very good stuff there but there's a lot of really not good stuff, too. Then there's OGL material that's elsewhere. It's confusing and hard to wade through it all.

Click to expand...

I was responding to a comment that WotC should add more settings to the DMsGuild made by someone who just minutes earlier had slammed the quality of the Guild.
Which begged the question: if the DMsGuild is so inferiour to the official content, why add more settings to the Guild?

But the difference between "official" and "third party" and "Guild content" for campaign settings is extra fuzzy. Because you don't have balance issues with lore. Flavour and world backgrounds doesn't require playtesting. The difference between WotC releasing a campaign setting for the Guild or using Midgard by Kobold Press or Tal'Dorie by Green Ronin is much more cosmetic.

Jay Verkuilen said:

Imagine that, the purchasers of a product saying "hey, we'd like you to release something"....

Click to expand...

It's less that they weren't releasing content (they were: three books a year) but that the fans wanted everything all at once. The 4e or 3e release schedule of a big campaign setting AND a couple splatbooks AND more monsters, all within the first twelve months of the edition. They wanted two or three years of content all at once.
An entire product line's worth of content right away.

Which makes some sense. As people want the game to feel "complete". You don't want half a game. But once you have all that content, there's not really any reason for the publisher to continue to exist.
We saw that with John Wick Presents and 7th Sea: when people got everything they ever needed all at once there was no need for a second wave of products.

jayoungr said:

I remember people on this very board were begging for collections of short adventures, rather than a long 1-15 adventure path.

Click to expand...

Certainly, and quite frankly I'm not a huge fan of level 1-15 APs myself, but just because people were begging for something doesn't mean that TftYP's not particularly imaginative conversions of some classic modules or, in one case a direct republishing of something that had already been released not too long back, fit the bill. It was a lazy release and quite frankly I feel somewhat like a chump for having bought it. I've thought three times since then about buying their books.

Jay Verkuilen said:

Certainly, and quite frankly I'm not a huge fan of level 1-15 APs myself, but just because people were begging for something doesn't mean that TftYP's not particularly imaginative conversions of some classic modules or, in one case a direct republishing of something that had already been released not too long back, fit the bill.

Click to expand...

Well, you said you didn't know why they published it, and my answer is because there was demand. Whether you like the final project is a separate point.

Jester David said:

I was responding to a comment that WotC should add more settings to the DMsGuild made by someone who just minutes earlier had slammed the quality of the Guild. Which begged the question: if the DMsGuild is so inferiour to the official content, why add more settings to the Guild?

Click to expand...

Oh yeah, going one way and then the other a few posts later isn't too consistent.

But the difference between "official" and "third party" and "Guild content" for campaign settings is extra fuzzy. Because you don't have balance issues with lore. Flavour and world backgrounds doesn't require playtesting. The difference between WotC releasing a campaign setting for the Guild or using Midgard by Kobold Press or Tal'Dorie by Green Ronin is much more cosmetic.

Click to expand...

Yes, I'd agree with regards to lore. Most of my comments were directed at player-facing content, which I think has to be held to a much higher standard than things that are really only for the DM to use.

It's less that they weren't releasing content (they were: three books a year) but that the fans wanted everything all at once. The 4e or 3e release schedule of a big campaign setting AND a couple splatbooks AND more monsters, all within the first twelve months of the edition. They wanted two or three years of content all at once.
An entire product line's worth of content right away.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that's nuts, really crazy binary thinking. Releasing the core and then setting to work on additional content after gaining some additional experience with things in play is the way to go. The problem I had with what WotC was doing initially was that pretty much everything was APs. That's essentially all they released until Volo's, with SCAG being the only contrary example, and the player-facing content of that was pretty minimal.

As far as Greyhawk is concerned, there's another issue as well. Virtually all of the most iconic modules for D&D were for Greyhawk. Other than maybe Dragonlance, no other modules are even close when it comes to just how well known these modules are.

Good grief, U1-3 were released what, almost forty years ago, and people STILL recognize them. Do you think that anyone would recognize a module for Al-Quadim in the same way?

If WotC opens up Greyhawk, then all those incredibly popular (and valuable from a brand POV) become fair game. And they would get redone and redone in a hurry. How many versions of A1-4 do you think we'd see? Or the other S series modules? D series? All before WotC could come out with an "official" version.

It's just not going to happen. There's no upside for WotC to do so.

Jay Verkuilen said:

Yeah, that's nuts, really crazy binary thinking. Releasing the core and then setting to work on additional content after gaining some additional experience with things in play is the way to go. The problem I had with what WotC was doing initially was that pretty much everything was APs. That's essentially all they released until Volo's, with SCAG being the only contrary example, and the player-facing content of that was pretty minimal.

Click to expand...

It felt like they were only doing APs, but they always did something else every year. But, again, we got SCAG after a year, VGtM after two, XGtM after three, and by year four we also have MToF andGGtR. That's a lot of content already. We're pretty good for races and subclasses. And that's just four years and change into an edition that needs to last several more years. If they had released something, oh, every six months rather than every year, we'd had gotten everything we have by 2016, and by now we'd already be looking at twice as much content and getting into bloat territory. And then what would WotC release over the next five years?

jayoungr said:

Well, you said you didn't know why they published it, and my answer is because there was demand. Whether you like the final project is a separate point.

Click to expand...

The Willie Sutton defense!

Like all Greatest Hits albums, it's a classic slot filler, whatever else it is.