D&D 5E I just don't see why they even bothered with the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide.

Hussar · Nov 13, 2015

[MENTION=957]BryonD[/MENTION]. Did they release a new phb/DMG/mm for each iteration? Was there not a strong expectation that players would rebuy those books for each iteration? Then how is that not edition churn?

Look, I know you feel the sun rises and sets on all things 3e but come on here. If you rerelease the core three (now core two for Pathfinder) in what way is that not a new edition?

Do you not think each iteration has been smaller than the last? Do you think there are as many Pathfinder players today as DND players in 2001?

Note 4e is just as bad. Bad start and then even worse rerelease. Terrible for business.

....

The next ICv2 report will be interesting. If DND stays on top that means they can release three books per calendar year and still outsell any other rpg company. That's HUGE. That would mean their profit margins would be far far greater than anyone else's. It would also be a pretty strong indicator that they business model is the way to go forward.

Why produce ten books if all you do is cannibalize your own sales?

BrockBallingdark · Nov 13, 2015

Hussar said:
The next ICv2 report will be interesting. If DND stays on top that means they can release three books per calendar year and still outsell any other rpg company. That's HUGE. That would mean their profit margins would be far far greater than anyone else's. It would also be a pretty strong indicator that they business model is the way to go forward.

Well I'm just one man but since 5E came out, I haven't bought any Pathfinder books nor PDFs, I just keep buying 5E because I love it. Don't love Forgotten Realms but love what 5E has been doing.

Shasarak · Nov 13, 2015

Hussar said:
Nice snark. Subtle.

But good grief. See Page XX is not a meme that started with WotC. We were talking about editing right? Not prose but the actual job of an editor. Things like organization of a book. Oversight. That sort of thing.

You complain that WotC doesn't have a full time editor and yet their books are far, far better edited than a TSR book.

Good grief, page XX pales in comparison to not even being able to put in the correct madness table in your book but I guess you must have forgotten Rage of Demons already?

But please, continue to tell me how not having a professional editor is so much better for quality control.

Celtavian · Nov 13, 2015

Mistwell said:
Actually TSR, prior to the sale, was even worse than Hasbro at their worse. By all evidence, due to the massive money that Magic The Gathering brings in for Hasbro, Hasbro doesn't touch WOTC. There is not "corporate master" behind the scenes telling WOTC what to do and micro managing them - it's very hands-off according to all reports and indeed WOTC seems to have more influence in that relationship than Hasbro corporate (which I have heard has actually less employees than the WOTC division). And as D&D makes up so little of WOTC, it seems very few even pay any attention to D&D there.

TSR on the other hand was aggressively ruthless in terms of control over the brand, and squeezing every cent from fans, prior to the sale.

So no, I don't buy this "not like Hasbro" line. Not for a second. These are better times for D&D than under TSR near the end of TSR, by far.

Prove that Hasbro corporate management ignores one of their brands. I'd bet heavily against this. Companies do not allow segments of their business to operate without oversight, especially segments that generate millions of dollars. Most corporations nowadays run off computer corporate metrics.

You may be right that Hasbro management doesn't bother creative. I can see that occurring. What more likely occurs is bean counters monitor budgets and sales. That means any failure of a project to meet corporate metrics leads to its cancellation or a reduced budget set by some number cruncher assigned to oversee WotC which puts limits on the creative staff. Make no mistake, Hasbro wants the product line to make as much money as possible. They use corporate metrics to ensure that occurs.

Sorry if I feel much better when the game is in the hands of a small company owned by fellow gamers that love the hobby, but I do. I'll likely never feel that way why D&D is owned by Hasbro.

Mistwell · Nov 13, 2015

Shasarak said:
I think that it is impossible to believe that there is no corporate oversight of the DnD department, whether that comes from Hasbro or from WotC itself.

There is oversight from WOTC, but not from Hasbro. And the oversight from WOTC is, in almost every way, superior to what was happening in the last years of TSR.

There is no point in quibbling about which logo is on the hat of the faceless upper management drone responsible for gutting the DnD department.

Except they're not faceless, nor are they a drone. It's easy to dehumanize people anonymously (particularly when you don't even know the name of the target of the dehumanization) but that doesn't make it any most justified to do that to them.

BryonD · Nov 13, 2015

Hussar said:
[MENTION=957]BryonD[/MENTION]. Did they release a new phb/DMG/mm for each iteration? Was there not a strong expectation that players would rebuy those books for each iteration? Then how is that not edition churn?

I said they got people to buy the books and that is why they did it. What is your point with repeating my point as if it contradicts me?

Look, I know you feel the sun rises and sets on all things 3e but come on here. If you rerelease the core three (now core two for Pathfinder) in what way is that not a new edition?

Who cares what you call it? I love new editions.
You, however, are playing bait and switch with the vague concept of "new edition" against an implication of burn-out or some kind of business failure.
Huge success can (and did) drive the change just as much as failure can.

Do you not think each iteration has been smaller than the last? Do you think there are as many Pathfinder players today as DND players in 2001?

Don't know. Don't care.
But I do wonder why you are comparing PF to 2001 DND in one breath when were insisting that they are completely new entities in the prior breath.

I think that 5E and PF are sharing the marketplace. I think 5E has a clear edge, but PF is holding REALLY well.

Note 4e is just as bad. Bad start and then even worse rerelease. Terrible for business.

Maybe so. But we will never know. People were massively turned off by 4E BEFORE the first "iteration" was released. It was a very common refrain to slam people for judging 4E before they saw the finished product. (The fact that the previews provided enough for what turned out to be quite accurate assessments didn't seem to matter). Does a bad business model really hurt a bad product?

But again, I'm not interested in the 4E side. It came, it went. If you want to call 3.5 an "edition" knock yourself out. There is certainly enough ambiguity in that term to fit your usage. But if you start abusing that ambiguity to draw equivalence between two wildly different scenarios the your analysis becomes fundamentally flawed. The "lack of great success" may have been present and associated with one or more instances of "new edition", but that does not establish that all "new editions" (particularly when we are stretching to fit that term) need to have "lack of great success" as part of their cycle.

Lastly, I know you want to paint me as mindlessly entrenched in some kind of 3E litmus test thing. It makes it easy for you to portray lack of enthusiasm for 4E as being unrelated to the actual merits of 4E itself. You are wrong. I like 3E because it is a great game for delivering what I want. I like GURPS. I like Gumshoe. I've been playing 5E pretty much exclusively since it came out. Yes, I think 3E is one of the best sets to come out in, ever. But I don't like or dislike in any way because of 3E. I like 3E because it is a good game. I like 5E because it is a good game.
You making it be about 3E is just your views forcing you to put the cart before the horse.

Mistwell · Nov 13, 2015

Celtavian said:
Prove that Hasbro corporate management ignores one of their brands.

Prove they don't. See how that works when you take discourse to that extreme?

I'd bet heavily against this.

And I'd bet heavily in favor of it. Because every employee and former employee who has ever spoken about it says that. They'd all have to be liars for you to be right. And also because, as a corporate attorney for 20 years now, I have a lot of experience with large public companies and how they operate, and based on my experience I feel pretty confident Hasbro has zero oversight over the D&D department of WOTC.

Companies do not allow segments of their business to operate without oversight,

WOTC has general oversight from Hasbro and D&D has general oversight from WOTC but D&D has no oversight from Hasbro. This is not in any way unusual - it's the entire purpose of having subsidiaries and divisions and departments within a company. Otherwise you'd be having double oversight, which is not only inefficient but it can result in internal disputes.

especially segments that generate millions of dollars.

This part is just not true. Millions of dollars is nothing to Hasbro. Heck, my own small business generates millions of dollars in revenue. Hasbro generates BILLIONS in revenue each year ($4.28 Billion a year right now). Heck they have over a BILLION in cash alone. They have a market cap of nearly $10 Billion. All of D&D is literally a rounding error for Hasbro overall.

Most corporations nowadays run off computer corporate metrics.

Yes, and the Hasbro metrics measure each division, while the divisions run their own metrics on their departments. The Hasbro metrics don't measure the individual departments - again, totally inefficient and would result in conflict and poor use of resources.

You may be right that Hasbro management doesn't bother creative. I can see that occurring. What more likely occurs is bean counters monitor budgets and sales. That means any failure of a project to meet corporate metrics leads to its cancellation or a reduced budget set by some number cruncher assigned to oversee WotC

Nope. Hasbro doesn't directly monitor individual projects like D&D. That's again the entire point of having divisions within a company the size of Hasbro.

which puts limits on the creative staff. Make no mistake, Hasbro wants the product line to make as much money as possible. They use corporate metrics to ensure that occurs.

On WOTC overall, yes. On D&D? Not at all. D&D could generate zero income this year or double their income and almost nobody at Hasbro would notice - it's that small in the overall scheme of things.

Sorry if I feel much better when the game is in the hands of a small company owned by fellow gamers that love the hobby, but I do. I'll likely never feel that way why D&D is owned by Hasbro.

It's entirely run by WOTC (not Hasbro). WOTC is a better company than TSR was in the later years of TSR.

BryonD · Nov 13, 2015

Hussar said:
The next ICv2 report will be interesting. If DND stays on top that means they can release three books per calendar year and still outsell any other rpg company. That's HUGE. That would mean their profit margins would be far far greater than anyone else's. It would also be a pretty strong indicator that they business model is the way to go forward.

Why produce ten books if all you do is cannibalize your own sales?

I'm not at all clear why we have to make the quantum leap to 10 books.
It is also funny to see the same data interpreting mistakes of the last edition repeated.
At this point in 4E's life it was still the conventional wisdom that it was the edition for a generation, a few hard-hearted, closed-minded 3e-lovings h4ters were not going to do anything about that.

So, all that said, it will be shocking if it ISN'T at the top. They have released a trickle. But what really is their competition? I don't see anyone arguing that PF is more popular that 5E.
That doesn't mean they could not triple their sales volume with three times the books.
But it says NOTHING about margins. You have no clue what their margins are.
The reasonable interpretation is that whatever those margins are they fall under "not worth the bother". They want to produce just enough to string along the interest for their shot at a big movie.
If they were making big money, they would be doing more of what makes the big money.
But being "bigger than PF", doesn't mean they show up as blip on the kind of financial scale WotC and Hasbro care about. (And, yes, I know they have been mentioned in reports. I also know how those reports get spun. If something grows by a huge %, you play that up, regardless of the $).

Tony Vargas · Nov 13, 2015

Shasarak said:
There is no point in quibbling about which logo is on the hat of the faceless upper management drone responsible for gutting the DnD department.

It was the failure of D&D to meet and surpass unrealistic goals that was responsible for it getting fewer resources this time around - whoever made the actual decision probably didn't have any realistic alternatives to those cuts. The 'blame' for that could be shared out quite a bit. Setting those goals in the first place, committing to them, losing the DDI developer, the groundswell of negativity that was the edition war, the Great Recession, the toxic GSL undercutting the open-source model that had worked so well for d20...

Hussar said:
See Page XX is not a meme that started with WotC.

WWGS, wasn't it?

There were a lot of questionable rules and run-on sentences in 1e, but I don't recall really stand-out typos like that.

Now, later TSR era, sure. The one that stands out in my mind was one of the magic item compilation volumes - where some poor goof had done a search-and-replace of 'mage' with 'wizard' and changed every instance of 'damage' to 'dawizard.' That was an extra-special level of information-age carelessness.

You complain that WotC doesn't have a full time editor and yet their books are far, far better edited than a TSR book.

There's always something to complain about.

Mistwell said:
There is oversight from WOTC, but not from Hasbro. And the oversight from WOTC is, in almost every way, superior to what was happening in the last years of TSR.

Last years is the key, I think. TSR lost respect for it's own product. For all the flack they take, WotC hasn't ever done that.

Though, bad editing in the 90s was probably as much to do with the changing technology, and editors putting way too much faith in those new tools.

Shasarak · Nov 13, 2015

Mistwell said:
Except they're not faceless, nor are they a drone. It's easy to dehumanize people anonymously (particularly when you don't even know the name of the target of the dehumanization) but that doesn't make it any most justified to do that to them.

No one is going to be leaking any internal memos to put names to faces. The only people who know have no interest in doing it and the only ones who could find out have no interest in doing it.