These screencaps were posted by GM Leigh (of Mage Productions) on Twitter after being showed on WotC's Twitch stream, presented by Kate Welch and Nathan Stewart. Note the old Saltmarsh trilogy references!
Why would you want that when:If the DMsGuild is so terrible and full of content that nobody really uses, why do you care if Greyhawk is on there or not?
5 years ago a vocal minority kept complaining that WotC wasn't releasing material fast enough and that a new splatbook HAD to happen, despite being told by the company that is wasn't going to until at least several years down the line.
I remember people on this very board were begging for collections of short adventures, rather than a long 1-15 adventure path.Yeah, I love those old modules but Yawning Portal was... well... appropriately named. I totally don't get why that was a hardcover. Nice PoD redos of classic modules on DMs Guild? Sure. I suspect they had a production schedule to fill and something wasn't working out.
FR could use an update as the current state of the world is a decade out of date, during which time there were several wars and a major Realmshaking event. The current status quo of large regions of the world is unknown.Also, what do you need to play Forgotten Realms in 5e that wasn't already available from the past 30-40 years? Why focus on Greyhawk, and not mention one of the other settings. Greyhawk and FR both have basically the same races. But why not open up Ansalon and Dragonlance? There are races, classes, subclasses, monsters, and other things rather unique to that setting that are not available using the generic Forgotten Realms products. What about Spelljammer? What about Dark Sun? I see so many people pining for that setting (I don't see the appeal, but apparently a large number love it).
I was responding to a comment that WotC should add more settings to the DMsGuild made by someone who just minutes earlier had slammed the quality of the Guild.However, there's a certain level of "this is official" that helps keep things in check and overall helps constrain or at least focus choices. DMsGuild, because of its "anyone can submit" model, has a LOT of material. There's some very good stuff there but there's a lot of really not good stuff, too. Then there's OGL material that's elsewhere. It's confusing and hard to wade through it all.
It's less that they weren't releasing content (they were: three books a year) but that the fans wanted everything all at once. The 4e or 3e release schedule of a big campaign setting AND a couple splatbooks AND more monsters, all within the first twelve months of the edition. They wanted two or three years of content all at once.Imagine that, the purchasers of a product saying "hey, we'd like you to release something"....
I remember people on this very board were begging for collections of short adventures, rather than a long 1-15 adventure path.
Well, you said you didn't know why they published it, and my answer is because there was demand. Whether you like the final project is a separate point.Certainly, and quite frankly I'm not a huge fan of level 1-15 APs myself, but just because people were begging for something doesn't mean that TftYP's not particularly imaginative conversions of some classic modules or, in one case a direct republishing of something that had already been released not too long back, fit the bill.
I was responding to a comment that WotC should add more settings to the DMsGuild made by someone who just minutes earlier had slammed the quality of the Guild. Which begged the question: if the DMsGuild is so inferiour to the official content, why add more settings to the Guild?
But the difference between "official" and "third party" and "Guild content" for campaign settings is extra fuzzy. Because you don't have balance issues with lore. Flavour and world backgrounds doesn't require playtesting. The difference between WotC releasing a campaign setting for the Guild or using Midgard by Kobold Press or Tal'Dorie by Green Ronin is much more cosmetic.
It's less that they weren't releasing content (they were: three books a year) but that the fans wanted everything all at once. The 4e or 3e release schedule of a big campaign setting AND a couple splatbooks AND more monsters, all within the first twelve months of the edition. They wanted two or three years of content all at once.
An entire product line's worth of content right away.
It felt like they were only doing APs, but they always did something else every year. But, again, we got SCAG after a year, VGtM after two, XGtM after three, and by year four we also have MToF andGGtR. That's a lot of content already. We're pretty good for races and subclasses. And that's just four years and change into an edition that needs to last several more years. If they had released something, oh, every six months rather than every year, we'd had gotten everything we have by 2016, and by now we'd already be looking at twice as much content and getting into bloat territory. And then what would WotC release over the next five years?Yeah, that's nuts, really crazy binary thinking. Releasing the core and then setting to work on additional content after gaining some additional experience with things in play is the way to go. The problem I had with what WotC was doing initially was that pretty much everything was APs. That's essentially all they released until Volo's, with SCAG being the only contrary example, and the player-facing content of that was pretty minimal.
Well, you said you didn't know why they published it, and my answer is because there was demand. Whether you like the final project is a separate point.