D&D 5E Mike Mearls interview - states that they may be getting off of the 2 AP/year train.

[ccs]

The catch is, D&D is often vestigial to these stores. They're about board games or card games or comics with RPGs on the side. D&D is shelved wherever they have space, tucked away in a corner or off to the side.
It's an outright bad business decision to rearrange the shelf to sell D&D, because that's not what keeps the business afloat. It's not what the store actually sells.

And it's an even worse business decision to stock a product in some haphazard way that doesn't promote sales.
Proper merchandising (there's several ways to do this) isn't prohibitively expensive - in either $ or space.

 

[Kabouter Games]

Yup! With a paid editor too. It's exactly what people keep asking for and claiming they'll pay for.

I have, and will continue. One day maybe I'll have the cojones to submit something for publication.

If it's a WotC store rep job the guaranteed it's about Magic.
90% of Wizards of the Coast's employees are focused on MtG, which brings in a ridiculous amount of money and sells at far more stores than D&D.
That does need reps, not only discussing future products and sales but also tournaments and weekly events. But I imagine it's done over the phone.

Well, the job description is for an in-store WPN rep. So yeah, MTG, but still in-store, not telecommunications.

The catch is, D&D is often vestigial to these stores. They're about board games or card games or comics with RPGs on the side. D&D is shelved wherever they have space, tucked away in a corner or off to the side.

Of course. But that doesn't mean you have to display it spine-out.

It's an outright bad business decision to rearrange the shelf to sell D&D, because that's not what keeps the business afloat. It's not what the store actually sells.

If you have limited shelf space, yes. I'm sure that's a problem for some stores. Others, not so much, and the decision to display everything spine-out is because...

many game stores are run by people who are gamers first and small business owners second. A large percentage are not run well.)

I'm not talking about anything mystical or groundbreaking. I'm talking about very basic shelf displays, stuff you learn at a minimum-wage job in a mall store.

Hasbro is also different company. Hasbro owns WotC and collects the profits, but WotC runs itself on a day-to-day basis. If Hasbro wanted to micromanage WotC they'd have amalgamated it and made it a division of Hasbro rather than keep it as a subsidiary with its own management and CEO.

I am aware of that. And if Hasbro want their wholly-owned subsidiary to maximize profits in all facets of their business instead of just M:TG, they'll push some of that in-store marketing effort into WotC.

Some of us can remember when TSR had AD&D books and Red Boxes in stores like Waldenbooks.

Paying $10 for 32-pages of adventure is steep when you can probably get twice as much adventure of similar quality from the Guild and then fire off a print copy on your home printer.

Heaven knows that's true. Gamers are CHEEEEEEAP. That's the real problem here. People moan about a well-designed adventure costing $1.99. They have no idea what goes into producing quality content.

If WotC does get back to small modules, it'd probably be best done via DriveThru's print-on-demand service.

That would be sufficient to my desires, certainly. I wonder...can one get a DM's Guild purchase through that process? I've never looked into it.

Cheers,

Bob

 

[gyor]

I just want a proper FRCG, that's all I ask for.

 

[Mercule]

He says Yawning Portal is about 100 hours of play, and about 14 levels.

This kills me. I would love to know how they figure hours of play. My group just started Curse of Strahd -- Session 0 and two actual play sessions. We pretty much started with "Hey, look! Fog," so there wasn't much time wasting. Still, they've managed to get from the gates to Death House and explored about 90% of the main edifice in 6-7 hours of play. Assuming that 250ish pages provides a fairly consistent amount of play time, they should be a little over 5% of the way through the module. I'm pretty confident that they aren't, barring TPK, but I could be wrong.

Now, I get that my group is somewhat... um... more casual than many, but I feel like they're actually doing a pretty good job of staying focused. I just can't imagine making it through CoS in 100 hours without just being a machine about it; focused to the point of tunnel vision and almost wantonly avoiding any flavor.

 

[Charles Rampant]

Well, my group did Curse in about 24 sessions, of about three hours each - but we also didn't do the castle. 100 hours sounds right to me.

 

[DEFCON 1]

My two groups have each done maybe 30ish sessions of Curse of Strahd, each session between 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours long (so that's 90+ hours)... and both are probably about maybe 3/5ths done? I'm thinking there's maybe another 20+ sessions remaining (and thus 60+ more hours.)

 

[Corpsetaker]

IIRC, it is because they are not profitable in today's market reality. No matter how cheap the paper, how skimpy the binding (within reason, there are standards), the margins are just far too thin for what you have to put into it to produce it. Unless you are designing a product to be a loss leader, like say--a starter set--it just does not seem to be worth it. This is why the 'Adventure Path' format, pioneered by Paizo in Dragon Magazine and later their own products, became so popular. Now, I do not work in the publishing industry and there may be some innovative way around those issues, but that has been the line touted by many in the industry since at least 3e.

I think maybe you are looking at the short term modules a bit wrongly here. Short term modules themselves aren't really supposed to make money, they are supposed to get people playing the game to the point where they will then go out and buy other products. Problem is, D&D is severely lacking in the "other products" department.

 

[bmfrosty]

I think maybe you are looking at the short term modules a bit wrongly here. Short term modules themselves aren't really supposed to make money, they are supposed to get people playing the game to the point where they will then go out and buy other products. Problem is, D&D is severely lacking in the "other products" department.

I have to disagree on the notion of not enough product and the notion that the point is to get them to go out and buy other products.

It's easy to buy a $16 box of D&D branded miniatures when I go to the game shop to play. The OCD collect them all aspect has me doing that regularly. They're releasing more mid range product during the course of the year this year too.

As for the point of it all, of course it's to make money, but I don't think they intend to make a significant amount of money for Hasbro with the game itself. I think the drive is to keep brand recognition up so that when the D&D movie comes out, enough people say "That's the game I play - I want to see that movie!" that it has a chance to make money like other hasbro properties do by being able to be made into movies.

 

[Charles Rampant]

I think maybe you are looking at the short term modules a bit wrongly here. Short term modules themselves aren't really supposed to make money, they are supposed to get people playing the game to the point where they will then go out and buy other products. Problem is, D&D is severely lacking in the "other products" department.

Presumably Wizards don't want to do loss leaders when they could just do, uh, profit followers(?!) instead.

 

[pukunui]

I don't want "campaigns in a box". I like making my own campaigns, but I also like having dungeons and adventures to drop into them.

The nice thing about the big campaigns they've been putting out so far is that they're structured in such a way as to be easy to pull apart. I used bits and pieces from PotA and OotA (and a few other adventures) in a homebrew campaign with little trouble.

So even if you don't like the stories attached to them, the big hardbacks can be valuable resources full of stocked dungeons and other adventure sites that are easy to cut and paste into your own campaign. I'm fairly certain they've done this on purpose, too.