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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8978319" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>The main people the metaplot impacts are people who tend to like official adventures/settings.</p><p></p><p>If you, like me, tend not to use official adventures, and make only some use of official settings, metaplot is rarely a huge problem unless it results in ruining a setting and future products for it/versions of it (c.f. Faction War). But if you're someone who likes official adventures, and it seems like a fair number of people are, then a metaplot can have a big impact.</p><p></p><p>My personal feeling is that the reason they're adding a metaplot is sales.</p><p></p><p>Already with D&D 5E, it seems like most official adventures are written primarily to be read, rather than played. We've had this discussion a lot of times and it is debated, but when you compare the way WotC structures adventures and presents information to both older adventures, and 3PP 5E adventures that very much are explicitly designed to be played, not read, this seems fairly obvious/unavoidable. Certainly regardless of intent, a significant proportion of adventure sales are going to people who don't, in practice, run those adventures - I suspect it might even be the majority of sales. But whilst each adventure is contained, there's no specific reason to buy the next adventure WotC puts out.</p><p></p><p>But if you add in a metaplot, that changes. We very much saw this in the 1990s and a bit in the 2000s with multiple different companies running metaplots (White Wolf, FASA, Palladium, etc.). We know that people buy adventures and other books specifically because they advance the metaplot. People do this, even if they're not actually advancing the metaplot in their home game - they want to know what happens with the metaplot. How strong that draw is varies from game to game (Shadowrun's metaplot was so convoluted and weird that it lost most people I think, for example), but the draw is there. Thus if D&D has a metaplot stringing all the major future adventures together, this would apply there too.</p><p></p><p>It's also kind of a gap in the market - Paizo has some elements of metaplot in their adventures, but not really 1990s levels, IMHO - and there's a whole new generation of gamers who weren't traumatized by the 1990s metaplots, and who can thus be monetized before being traumatized once more!</p><p></p><p>(It's worth noting some people, like Brandon Sanderson, have figured out this applies way beyond TTRPGs. His whole "cosmere" gimmick, where you have to read entire other books, sometimes entire other series, of his, to figure out what's actually going on in one of his books and/or feel smug about "I got that reference!", has definitely succeeded in cross-marketing his books significantly. With a lot of prolific fantasy authors, they have "lesser" books/series that go unread (for good reason), but Sanderson ensures that isn't the case. I'm sure his bank account and his publisher both thank him for that. But it can be bad too - part of the reason I dropped the Stormlight Archive series is that approximately 15-20% of Book 3 is incomprehensible woo-woo wank with unnecessarily mysterious characters unless you've read an entire different series which I hadn't - and I was only able to find this out by Googling the characters involved afterwards. It's kinda cute when Steven King has a cross-world character or two, frankly, but 15-20% of the book being waffle solely to cross-market? I'm sorry Brandon, but you're no Steven King.</p><p></p><p>The MCU also does this a bit but so far it tends to mostly be confined to after-credits scenes outside of actual sequels. Indeed people thought they were going to do a whole clever "multiverse" metaplot, but instead we have a largely disconnected mess of seemingly contradictory/unconnected loosely multiverse-themed plots - which don't even agree on what the multiverse is nor how it works! How much that was the result of bad planning/management and how much the pandemic messing up the release order of stuff we do not know.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8978319, member: 18"] The main people the metaplot impacts are people who tend to like official adventures/settings. If you, like me, tend not to use official adventures, and make only some use of official settings, metaplot is rarely a huge problem unless it results in ruining a setting and future products for it/versions of it (c.f. Faction War). But if you're someone who likes official adventures, and it seems like a fair number of people are, then a metaplot can have a big impact. My personal feeling is that the reason they're adding a metaplot is sales. Already with D&D 5E, it seems like most official adventures are written primarily to be read, rather than played. We've had this discussion a lot of times and it is debated, but when you compare the way WotC structures adventures and presents information to both older adventures, and 3PP 5E adventures that very much are explicitly designed to be played, not read, this seems fairly obvious/unavoidable. Certainly regardless of intent, a significant proportion of adventure sales are going to people who don't, in practice, run those adventures - I suspect it might even be the majority of sales. But whilst each adventure is contained, there's no specific reason to buy the next adventure WotC puts out. But if you add in a metaplot, that changes. We very much saw this in the 1990s and a bit in the 2000s with multiple different companies running metaplots (White Wolf, FASA, Palladium, etc.). We know that people buy adventures and other books specifically because they advance the metaplot. People do this, even if they're not actually advancing the metaplot in their home game - they want to know what happens with the metaplot. How strong that draw is varies from game to game (Shadowrun's metaplot was so convoluted and weird that it lost most people I think, for example), but the draw is there. Thus if D&D has a metaplot stringing all the major future adventures together, this would apply there too. It's also kind of a gap in the market - Paizo has some elements of metaplot in their adventures, but not really 1990s levels, IMHO - and there's a whole new generation of gamers who weren't traumatized by the 1990s metaplots, and who can thus be monetized before being traumatized once more! (It's worth noting some people, like Brandon Sanderson, have figured out this applies way beyond TTRPGs. His whole "cosmere" gimmick, where you have to read entire other books, sometimes entire other series, of his, to figure out what's actually going on in one of his books and/or feel smug about "I got that reference!", has definitely succeeded in cross-marketing his books significantly. With a lot of prolific fantasy authors, they have "lesser" books/series that go unread (for good reason), but Sanderson ensures that isn't the case. I'm sure his bank account and his publisher both thank him for that. But it can be bad too - part of the reason I dropped the Stormlight Archive series is that approximately 15-20% of Book 3 is incomprehensible woo-woo wank with unnecessarily mysterious characters unless you've read an entire different series which I hadn't - and I was only able to find this out by Googling the characters involved afterwards. It's kinda cute when Steven King has a cross-world character or two, frankly, but 15-20% of the book being waffle solely to cross-market? I'm sorry Brandon, but you're no Steven King. The MCU also does this a bit but so far it tends to mostly be confined to after-credits scenes outside of actual sequels. Indeed people thought they were going to do a whole clever "multiverse" metaplot, but instead we have a largely disconnected mess of seemingly contradictory/unconnected loosely multiverse-themed plots - which don't even agree on what the multiverse is nor how it works! How much that was the result of bad planning/management and how much the pandemic messing up the release order of stuff we do not know.) [/QUOTE]
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