My love letter to WotC

[scruffygrognard]

The point made has never been that 'adventures don't sell' in the absolute sense. It was 'adventures don't sell in the numbers needed to make it a profitable worthwhile endeavor for a company the size of WotC'. That's always been their take since they bought TSR. They produce just enough of a line for a person to perhaps grab one off the bookshelf at the same time they pick up the PH on a whim... but they in no way wanted to base their entire financial scheme on trying to sell enough to make it profitable.

Smaller companies can. Smaller companies with lower overhead and without corporate monthly sales quotas can put a pair of designers on a module for a month to three of writing an adventure for production and end up selling enough copies of it to justify the expenditure.

Which is exactly why Hasbro should get out of the RPG business. It's a bad fit... plain and simple.

As I've written before, let them produce D&D boardgames, accessories, apparel, and toys but have them keep their hands off the the RPG if they can't do a proper job of it. Besides, they'd be able to license it for a pretty penny.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Which is exactly why Hasbro should get out of the RPG business. It's a bad fit... plain and simple.

As I've written before, let them produce D&D boardgames, accessories, apparel, and toys but have them keep their hands off the the RPG if they can't do a proper job of it. Besides, they'd be able to license it for a pretty penny.

Wait... so now if a company that writes RPGs doesn't also write adventures for those RPGs... then they shouldn't write RPGs in the first place? That's... silly. Probably the nicest way to put it. Silly.

AEG wrote Spycraft, 7th Sea, Legend of the 5 Rings... and if we were lucky, maybe produced AN adventure for them. I take a look at the World of Darkness and I see lots and lots of sourcebooks... but not so many adventures for them. GURPS is ENTIRELY a line of sourcebooks with barely an adventure in sight. Star Wars (all versions) was pretty much entirely rules and sourcebooks, Champions same thing. I fact, I would say MOST RPGs are game rules, campaign settings, and additional sourcebooks and not modules and adventures. If we're lucky, maybe a couple get written... rarely ever more than a half-dozen. And those that do write more... most of them were probably d20 companies trying to fill in the gap that WotC didn't want to spend time and energy on.

So your claim that a company has to produce adventures to be a real RPG company I would say is categorically false.

 

[scruffygrognard]

If WotC does not properly support D&D (adventures are a major component of the D&D game), has to constantly errata and patch their rules due to poor editing and a lack of extensive playtesting, and repeatedly fails to deliver promised digital content and apps for DDI then I'd have to say that they are ill-equipped to be stewards of the D&D line.

There is absolutely nothing "silly" about that. Devote the resources necessary to "grow the game" or license it to someone who can.

BTW, to my mind, D&d is a different beast than other RPGs. Historically D&D has been tied to modules/adventures more than other games. I'd argue that adventures are an integral part of D&D and a good part of what brings players (especially older players with time constraints) to the game.

 

[DEFCON 1]

And yet, WotC DOES support their game with adventures every single month. It's called Dungeon Magazine.

Of course, you'll probably then claim that those don't count... because they aren't GOOD adventures, or LENGTHY adventures... but that would just go further in proving that in order to make your opinion have actual weight, you need to keep changing it after someone points out that your claims up to that point are not exactly true.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

BTW, to my mind, D&d is a different beast than other RPGs. Historically D&D has been tied to modules/adventures more than other games. I'd argue that adventures are an integral part of D&D and a good part of what brings players (especially older players with time constraints) to the game.

Agreed.

Shared experience is a big part of D&D I think or at least it used to be. When talking with other gamers who played D&D we used to be able to talk about the Moathouse from T1 or adventures in the Temple itself or G1-3 (Against the Giants) or D1-3 (Descent into the Depths of the Earth and Vault of the Drow) or Q1 (Queen of the Demonweb Pits) or A1-4 (Slavelords) or B2 (Keep on the Borderlands) or I6 (Ravenloft).

Were there ANY of those shared experiences for 3E? Maybe The Age of Worms and Shackled City. You might be able to add in Rise of the Runelords or Red Hand of Doom, but otherwise?

This is what I miss most about D&D. When people talk about D&D it's mostly about how broken something is or it's edition war talk or about someone's bizzare home brew setting. The adventures were important at one time, but now apparently theyre not, at least to WOTC. Which is fine. I have my old Basic and AD&D adventures and if I'm ever feeling nostolgic I can convert them to Pathfinder with relative ease and run them. ANd even if I dont do that Paizo definitely cares about adventures which is part of the reason most of my gaming budget goes to them to begin with.

 

[Steel_Wind]

BTW, to my mind, D&d is a different beast than other RPGs. Historically D&D has been tied to modules/adventures more than other games. I'd argue that adventures are an integral part of D&D and a good part of what brings players (especially older players with time constraints) to the game.

D&D has been tied to module support very closely over the length of its production run. Other large popular RPGs have as well during the 80s and 90s. Call of Cthulhu? TONS of Modules and complete campaigns. Rolemaster? Lots of Modules again. Traveller? The same.

7th Sea, Spycraft and Legend of the Five Rings? No. But these are minor RPGs in the grand scheme of the hobby. World of Darkness, a large RPG in its day, was a different type of RPG where the focus was on roleplaying far more than tactical combat or investigation. There is a reason the game appealed to female players in vastly larger numbers than other games - and this was one of those reasons.

In the Naughties, there were a slew of modules for 3.xx. There continue to be a large number of modules for Pathfinder.

But 4E? No. WotC wants to sell rules, which, given their profit expectations, means they flood the market with far too many rulebooks in too brief an aperture of time -- and then that same drive for high profits motivates them to revise, reset and resell those rules earlier in that edition's run than they would if they were otherwise making money with modules and extensive campaign material. That's their current business model, like it or not.

In contrast, Pathfinder has an entrenched and profitable line of adventures that supply an incredibly large volume of adventure material for the game. Paizo has made a deliberate choice to avoid flooding the market with rule books in a small period of time. Their adventure and setting products are instead expected to fill in that revenue stream over a longer course of time.

 

[Wicht]

Were there ANY of those shared experiences for 3E? Maybe The Age of Worms and Shackled City. You might be able to add in Rise of the Runelords or Red Hand of Doom, but otherwise?

I would suggest Sunless Citadel was a shared experience for many (Meepo?). Also some of the Necromancer games have a bit of that shared-vibe (Crucible of Freya) and Rise of the Runelords, though it came in at the end of 3.5, most certainly had an impact as a shared experience. Granted two of those were non WotC but still... they were a part of the 3e/OGL gaming experience.

And while others rightly point out that are RPG games out there that rely more on setting and rules to sell the game, I can't help but observe that Dungeons and Dragons is the most well known of these games today and in its heyday way untouchable for brand recognition. In my opinion, a large part of its success, comparitively, is because it was a vehicle for a commonality of experiences. And modules were a large part of creating those experiences.

 

[scruffygrognard]

And yet, WotC DOES support their game with adventures every single month. It's called Dungeon Magazine.

Of course, you'll probably then claim that those don't count... because they aren't GOOD adventures, or LENGTHY adventures... but that would just go further in proving that in order to make your opinion have actual weight, you need to keep changing it after someone points out that your claims up to that point are not exactly true.

Actually I was countering the EXACT point that you had made... that WotC didn't publish adventures because it wasn't cost/resource effective for them to do so, while that wouldn't be the case for a smaller company.

As such it sounds logical to me that a smaller company should publish the D&D game.

 

[fumetti]

While I agree that WotC could do more to foster goodwill with their customer base, threads like this always seem to carry the tone of, "if only you'd go back to making the edition I loved," in this case, most people seem to be pining for 3.x.

I don't read it that way. Sounds to me like supporters want WOTC to produce for ALL previous editions (I know I do), not just the one the poster loved.

 

[fumetti]

I do, however, think that it's not inherently unreasonable to cater to fans of older editions a little bit - not much, which is why I said once a year would be more than enough, but enough to keep them interested and appreciative that WotC wants their business.

I don't know the sales of the Anniversary boxed edition with all the reprints in it, but the one original adventure--Deep Dwarven Delve--sells very well on ebay. Sellers are breaking open the box set just to sell that item individually.

It does suggest that it might be worth trying.

And what's to lose? WOTC isn't getting money from non-4E players right now anyway. Plus, 4E players would probably also buy them just for fun.