D&D General Is DnD being mothballed?

Maxperson said:

They aren't books of crunch. I don't want to have to buy 2/3 of something I don't want to get 1/3 that I want. Calling those crunch books is like calling adventures setting books since they have some setting material inside of them.

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Oh, I agree. I was pointing out that the rate of release of "crunch" is a bit higher than the rate of release of "crunch books". 5e is definitely the edition with the most hybrid books combining crunch + setting + adventure. Previously editions tended to have most books focused on only one of those three.

UngainlyTitan said:

Bloody Hell, I do not play Magic but I have some notion of what a Planeswalker is.

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Mercurius said:

You can sell 200K copies each of 5 books for $50 each = $50 million

or...

You can sell 50K copies each of 40 books for $25 each = $50 million

You make the same revenue, but in the first approach you make five big books, while in the latter you make forty smaller ones. Which one do you think is more cost-effective to produce?

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these are hardly the only two options, what about selling 8 books for $50 and selling 160k each?

No one is suggesting to sell adventures by the chapter to increase the number of releases…

EzekielRaiden said:

No, it's not. The difference between 3e/4e (which had essentially the same pace!) and 5e is about a factor of three. And that's if we're being generous to 5e. It's arguably closer to a factor of four or even five.

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the difference between now and too fast might still be two books, 3e and 4e were both way too fast…

Mercurius said:

What they're doing is working in the way that the want it to work - maximizing profits

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that clearly is the goal, whether they are… they increased the releases slightly, they are still trying to figure that out themselves

I don’t think they are very far off however, ie 12 books is too much, 7 or 8 might already be, 6 however, that at least is not clear (and to me even less than to WotC)

Mercurius said:

So from their perspective, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. 5E has been wildly successful, especially since 2017 or so. I don't see them diverging too much from the formula that continues to see the game grow

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agreed, the playtest is proof of that. As with 3e, 4e, and 5e, it will take a drastic decrease in sales for WotC to make more than cosmetic changes

Maxperson said:

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Well that too, but I always called that Wing Walking. Do not see how the physics of tennis/Badmington on a plane would work.

Maxperson said:

Here's the 5e release rate of crunch books beyond the core 3.

2015: Nothing
2016: Volo's Guide to Monsters
2017: Xanathar's Guide to Everything
2018: Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes
2019: Nothing
2020: Tasha's Cauldron of Everything
2021: Fizban's Treasury of Dragons(I forgot about this one)
2022: A book of mostly reprinted stuff with slight changes: Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse
2023: Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants.

So less than 1 per year, but not 1 per 2 years. Still glacially slooow.

Edit: And there are still only two really solid crunch books. Xanathar's and Tasha's where it's not a bunch of monsters and lore mixed in with a little crunch.

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But, again, you're telling me what's in it for you. Fair enough. But, you're still not telling me what's in it for WotC or the rest of us. I can barely keep up with the amount of crunch for players in 5e as it is. I'll freely admit that. And, watching a new player, which my group has just gotten absolutely struggle with all the options that already exist for 5e tells me that there is not a whole lot of need for more.

Again, this idea of a need for a constant stream of crunch. Why? Most of it was never used by a given group. Think about your 3e or 4e games (whichever you played lots of). Did you actually use more than a tiny fraction of the material available? We certainly didn't. Thousands of feats, spells, book after book of magic items and equipment. All for what? So it could sit on the shelf and gather dust?

No thank you. I mean, good grief, by your own count, you've gotten a crunch book every year with a couple of exceptions. I highly doubt you've put much of a dent in any of it. How many FIrbolg characters have you seen in your games? How many aarocockra? I've just seen my first Samurai fighter in my current game. Fizban's saw a gem dragonborn and a couple of spells. 200 (300?, no idea) pages of material and it could have been three pages max as far as my table is concerned. Volo's hasn't even had the cover cracked in my games AFAIK.

A book a year of crunch with 2 exceptions and this is "slow"? Never minding that many of the modules come with crunch as well. And SCAG came out in 2015, which had crunch.

It's only slow in comparison to 3e and 4e. Fair enough. But, we know that 3e and 4e were mistakes. They were very, very big mistakes. I like the fact that the hobby is growing year on year. So, how is it good for the hobby to increase the rate of crunch books? Will having fifteen more classes attract new players? Are there people out there who are saying, "Well, I'd play that new D&D thing, but, y'know, they just don't have a Warden class"?

If I had my way, they'd go back to 3 books a year with a 4th as a sort of possibility. 2-3 adventures a year and a supplementary book of some flavor. That's the pace I want.

Hussar said:

But, we know that 3e and 4e were mistakes. They were very, very big mistakes.

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You're half-right here. 4E was a mistake, but 3E? No; a "mistake" isn't something that would become the staple of the second-most successful company (i.e. Paizo), allowing them to run with it for twelve years after WotC abandoned it. It simply wasn't generating the $100M annual ROI (return on investment) that Hasbro demanded, which is something that honestly seems like unrealistic corporate projections more than any mistake in 3E's release schedule (again, Pathfinder kept up a similar release schedule for over a decade without issue). After all, those same projections are now (as best we know) being hit (i.e. D&D is generating $100M to $150M per year), and yet still termed as "undermonetized."

Alzrius said:

You're half-right here. 4E was a mistake, but 3E? No; a "mistake" isn't something that would become the staple of the second-most successful company (i.e. Paizo), allowing them to run with it for twelve years after WotC abandoned it. It simply wasn't generating the $100M annual ROI (return on investment) that Hasbro demanded, which is something that honestly seems like unrealistic corporate projections more than any mistake in 3E's release schedule (again, Pathfinder kept up a similar release schedule for over a decade without issue). After all, those same projections are now (as best we know) being hit (i.e. D&D is generating $100M to $150M per year), and yet still termed as "undermonetized."

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Sidenote: As far as I remember, and related to the discussion about numbering products, Paizo also steered clear of using names like Player's Guide II. They had Advanced Player's Guide which be more obviously something that you don't need when you start playing.

MuhVerisimilitude said:

Sidenote: As far as I remember, and related to the discussion about numbering products, Paizo also steered clear of using names like Player's Guide II. They had Advanced Player's Guide which be more obviously something that you don't need when you start playing.

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I see that, and raise you the Bestiary 6 and the Adventurer's Armory 2.

Heck, even the upcoming Pathfinder Remastered will be giving us the Player Core 2.