D&D 5E D&D strategy: now actually makes sense!

Mike Mearls said:

rather than submitting to Dragon, we nuked that step

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I haven’t made it through all the AMA, but I have listened to this podcast.

Anyways. We can now actually understand the 5E strategy. For months we have asked, where are the short adventures, the monsters, the other things we would normally expect? Why is Dragon+ like it is? Will there be real Dragon or Dungeon? More webcontent? What about fan-created content? Is it just UA? How do they ever discover game designers of the future?

The thing is, from the podcast, turns they have been sitting on this for years. They have known all along. Oh sure, there where hints, vague comments here and there, but even as they kept talking up their story-lines they knew.

Know they tell us.

And while there are teething problems, it may cover a lot of the above, and then some. The content gets out there in a crowd sourced kind of way, they got money from it, others get exposure, and its less work then trying to put together a magazine and doesn’t tie up their staff.

Mike Mearls said:

you’d be creating your own subclasses (settings or games)….

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It is also confirmed that they see the SRD as more for publishers, and bolder projects. Not really a surprise, but it is very explicit in their thinking. DG is for the DM who wants to share the various things from his game, or someone trying out doing content for a bigger public. SRD is for a someone, probably a more established publisher, who wants to do a new game or setting that is much more of a departure. MM mentions a supers games as an example. So this way 5E gets bolder support, and 5E mechanics start to spread beyond D&D.

Why wait this long? Mearls, in various interviews, has cautioned against publishers rushing things and the need to really understand how the game works. My guess is that getting the details of the DG together also took

But they have known all along. I don’t think anyone really guessed. It was a pretty good secret.

And now what they have been doing makes sense.

Seconded. I'm looking forward to the Guild's impact on the way we interact with each other and with the game. Something akin to how the OGL changed the way the fanbase interacted with the game in 2000, but now being fully digital, and way more granular.

TerraDave said:

But they have known all along. I don’t think anyone really guessed. It was a pretty good secret.

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They did say shortly after the 5e release that they were working on some kind of marketplace for people to share their content, so that part wasn't really a secret. The only thing that surprised me was that they've been working on this for the past six years or however long it was.

The sheer brilliance of this move is really amazing.

darjr said:

The sheer brilliance of this move is really amazing.

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I agree. This is genuinely innovative.

TerraDave said:

But they have known all along. I don’t think anyone really guessed. It was a pretty good secret.

And now what they have been doing makes sense.

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It's almost like the professionals whose livelihood depends on designing and marketing the game knew more about designing and marketing the game than the angry masses criticizing and second guessing them did. Funny how that works.

Ath-kethin said:

It's almost like the professionals whose livelihood depends on designing and marketing the game knew more about designing and marketing the game than the angry masses criticizing and second guessing them did. Funny how that works.

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Sure. And no one has been more confident about this edition then I.

But...

*The owners of D&D have certainly mismanaged it in the past. Sometimes spectacularly so.

*We have certainly had in the past "just trust us" when we really shouldn't.

*This particular move was not really foreseen, to their credit in some ways.

I do agree that they are now doing a good job.

pukunui said:

They did say shortly after the 5e release that they were working on some kind of marketplace for people to share their content, so that part wasn't really a secret. The only thing that surprised me was that they've been working on this for the past six years or however long it was.

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I saw "share", which could just be some kind of fan policy. I didn't see marketplace. Or maybe just didn't get it.

Ath-kethin said:

It's almost like the professionals whose livelihood depends on designing and marketing the game knew more about designing and marketing the game than the angry masses criticizing and second guessing them did. Funny how that works.

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True, but a little more openness along the road wouldn't have hurt. Aside from a few tip-of-the-slongues, the DMGuild and OGL were essentially blind-sides to the larger community. A little more "Dragon+ isn't a place to get new game rules, but we are working on something" type of retorts, rather than silence, might have calmed nerves down a bit more.

Regardless, the games probably in a better place than its been in years; the fans can now legally and easily support the game in the ways they want; WotC can act as shepherd to the larger brand, and the design team is freed up from making yet-another-ranger-variant to focus on larger products.

More on strategy.

So I finally went through the AMA.

A couple of things stuck out.

Mearls said:

we are creating a new type of event called a Launch event to replace D&D Encounters. ...The cool part about this, is that we can do this for products that aren't adventures and highlight the content therein.

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Mearls said:

I think we're much more likely to do a small number of big, comprehensive expansions than lots of small ones.

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These quotes imply that a MMII or UA (book) may in fact lie in the future. These hints are not really new. But they seem to thinking how to fit these into the bigger picture. So, for example they do a new MM and then have adventure support that highlights monsters from that book.