I respectfully disagree and am willing to admit that it may only be my perception... but there are AL rewards available to people who play HotDQ in stores that are not available to people who play it at home. There have been multiple Expeditions adventures published that can only be played in stores (or with a store's blessing). Until we see more adventures that can be played at home as well and as fully as they can be enjoyed in stores, then I'll stand by my assertion that 5E currently favors OP (and in store OP at that) over home play.
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D&D 5E Dragon/Dungeon Magazines?
- Thread starter VorpalBunny
- Start date
aramis erak
Legend
We're not likely to see dead tree mags of Dungeon or Dragon ever again. Compilations, perhaps. Almost all magazines are struggling badly these days - paper cost is way up, and readership is generally down.
delericho
Legend
Yep. As soon as Dragon #360 failed to appear at the newsstand, it was done.
At this point, I don't particularly rate our chances of seeing them return as monthly e-mags either. Though I'm hoping to be wrong about that.
I think the only real future for Dragon & Dungeon mags will be if they provide some form of digital content and then offer bound compilations Annually (hardbound) or Semiannually (softbound).
The Core issue is the demand for such content has Drastically reduced over the years. In the magazines' heydays they were pretty much the Only frequent source of new gaming material on the market. That's just not so anymore. In fact the mags have really become a very tiny fish in a very large ocean of game material producers whether they be other game companies or simply the proliferation of amateur work shared on forums, blogs, etc. In those days, if you created something new and interesting, you pretty much just shared it with your local game group. If you wanted it to see light amongst the entire community, you tried to get published in the mags. Now-a-days you just set up a blog or share it on a site like EnWorld and you've reached thousands.
So yes, overall, I feel as though the market for the mags is pretty much gone at least in their former incarnations. IF they go to a semiannual or annual release of official new game content and official adventures, they might be able to sell them, but we already know that the splat book model (which basically these would just become part of) never brings in as much business as the core, so it simply may not make enough financial sense to continue on with them. That is assuming they plan to make money off them.
The only other option is to provide them as a Service to loyal fans such as: "As a form of thank you for playing D&D and buying books, we are providing this free monthly content to anyone who registers on our fan site." However, the content would be less per month than a full magazine worth of content each month. Though if they even provided one adventure and one useful game mechanic oriented article per month, they would have a substantial set of material to release in say an Annual PDF for all those who'd prefer a single source for their material rather than 24 bookmarks in their browser, or 24 individual PDFs floating around. Though they would still never make much money on this. It would be more of a complimentary publication meant to garner a little brand loyalty rather than to really make much profit.
The Core issue is the demand for such content has Drastically reduced over the years. In the magazines' heydays they were pretty much the Only frequent source of new gaming material on the market. That's just not so anymore. In fact the mags have really become a very tiny fish in a very large ocean of game material producers whether they be other game companies or simply the proliferation of amateur work shared on forums, blogs, etc. In those days, if you created something new and interesting, you pretty much just shared it with your local game group. If you wanted it to see light amongst the entire community, you tried to get published in the mags. Now-a-days you just set up a blog or share it on a site like EnWorld and you've reached thousands.
So yes, overall, I feel as though the market for the mags is pretty much gone at least in their former incarnations. IF they go to a semiannual or annual release of official new game content and official adventures, they might be able to sell them, but we already know that the splat book model (which basically these would just become part of) never brings in as much business as the core, so it simply may not make enough financial sense to continue on with them. That is assuming they plan to make money off them.
The only other option is to provide them as a Service to loyal fans such as: "As a form of thank you for playing D&D and buying books, we are providing this free monthly content to anyone who registers on our fan site." However, the content would be less per month than a full magazine worth of content each month. Though if they even provided one adventure and one useful game mechanic oriented article per month, they would have a substantial set of material to release in say an Annual PDF for all those who'd prefer a single source for their material rather than 24 bookmarks in their browser, or 24 individual PDFs floating around. Though they would still never make much money on this. It would be more of a complimentary publication meant to garner a little brand loyalty rather than to really make much profit.
The expeditions are available as PDFs and can be played anywhere, although frankly they aren't really anything to get excited about. Each of them are smaller and less detailed than a single adventure published in Dungeon. There have always been minor rewards available to folks who participated in the Wednesday night encounters program. Back in the 4e days they gave out free Fortune Cards. From what I've seen, there really isn't anything 'extra' included for HotDQ as far as loot or in-game items for the participants, but there might be something in the actual in-store packets that is missing from the PDFs available on the encounters site, I'm not sure. Also, the encounters version of HotDQ only goes through Episode 3, and although you can continue playing it beyond that if you have access to the hardback, there is no support in regards to AL rewards if you do so.
In other words, while I do think that WotC has provided a nice framework for in-store play, there is nothing that I've seen to lead me to believe that the in-store experience is somehow given preferential treatment over the at-home experience. I certainly don't consider the very minor rewards of faction pins etc to be an incentive to play in-store.
As far as digital editions of Dungeon and Dragon magazines, I maintained my subscription to DDI for years after I stopped playing 4e, simply to have access to those two online magazines. While there wasn't a lot of content I could use in my earlier edition games, I still found there to be enough articles and adventure seed ideas to make the subscriptions worthwhile. When they stopped distributing Dungeon and Dragon I cancelled my subscription (it runs out this month...) but if they were to bring the magazines back in digital form, I'd re-subscribe in a heartbeat. Those two magazines are a great source of material regardless of the edition.
In other words, while I do think that WotC has provided a nice framework for in-store play, there is nothing that I've seen to lead me to believe that the in-store experience is somehow given preferential treatment over the at-home experience. I certainly don't consider the very minor rewards of faction pins etc to be an incentive to play in-store.
As far as digital editions of Dungeon and Dragon magazines, I maintained my subscription to DDI for years after I stopped playing 4e, simply to have access to those two online magazines. While there wasn't a lot of content I could use in my earlier edition games, I still found there to be enough articles and adventure seed ideas to make the subscriptions worthwhile. When they stopped distributing Dungeon and Dragon I cancelled my subscription (it runs out this month...) but if they were to bring the magazines back in digital form, I'd re-subscribe in a heartbeat. Those two magazines are a great source of material regardless of the edition.
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SilverBulletKY
First Post
Where do you get the expeditions pdfs at?
Thank you.
SilverBulletKY
First Post
Do they only have the issues from 4th edition forward. It's still a lot of material, but was just checking.
delericho
Legend
Mostly. I think there's a very small amount of 3e material from the months between the printed mags ending and 4e being released, but not much. Oh, and as I understand it there was a very small amount of non-4e material released in the latter days of the magazine.
The eight (?) issues of The Strategic Review and issues 1 - 250 of Dragon are available on the "Dragon Archive" CD-ROM set. However, that's pretty hard to find and rather expensive these days - for legal reasons it dropped out of print pretty quickly.
As far as I'm aware, the entirety of Dungeon and issues 251 - 359 of Dragon aren't legally available in electronic format anywhere - nor are they likely to be (for the same legal reasons as mentioned above). Hard-copies of some of those can be found on Paizo's site, and of course eBay and similar can help fill the gaps.
(Worst of all, my understanding is that there are a couple of issues of the e-magazines that have been lost entirely - they were put out before the DDI was established, and somehow got lost in a website re-design or other reshuffle. Though I may be mis-remembering that one.)
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