D&D 5E Signs & Portents (that we can read into) about the ETA of 5E

[Sword of Spirit]

I'm not sure why the holy grail of GenCon really matters, when waiting until December is still the 40th year anniversary.

It seems to me that anyone who actually knows what GenCon is probably also knows enough about D&D that they aren't going to forget about it in 6 months. More than likely they also know that Next is in development.

I just see very little reason to focus on GenCon, unless they are expecting to make massive sales from the Con itself. Unlikely.

Sure, they can and should announce something there or put out some sort of teaser. Other than that--no big.

 

[Mercurius]

@Weather Report , yeah, Elric made some dubious stylistic choices, but remember that those were drawn in the late 70s, so it kinda makes sense.

@hbarsquared , I'm not sure why you and others are so insistent on pushing back publication of 5E another year. They've been working on it for two years already! How long do they need? What are they doing up there in Renton, anyways? They're working on 5E - and they have been for two, maybe three, years. That's a lot of man hours and Mountain Dew.

Would another year make 5E a better game? Maybe. I won't even say probably, because as every artist or poet knows, sometimes fiddling too much can ruin a piece. At some point they're going to have to take the risk and publish. The key is not as much when, but how - and in what form and order.

@Sword of Spirit , it isn't just about extra sales at GenCon. Its about hype, and building community excitement.

Again, I would be very surprised if the hype machine in the form of announcements and previews don't start shortly after the new year. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it will be in March or April. Who knows, really. But I think they're probably close enough to finished to get the ball rolling and start pulling together the D&D community again. Its time. We've already gone through two "dead years" - I can't see them going for a third.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Maybe after a break people will get excited about D&D again. ;-)

 

[Manabarbs]

Seriously, and this is not meant to be inflammatory, who cares about the 40th anniversary?

As @jodyjohnson said, there has been only one edition launched on an anniversary year, and even then it wasn't even advertised.

Personally, the only anniversaries-woah-we-have-to-celebrate are the: 100yr, 10yr, 50yr, 1yr, in that order. I could not care less about all the numbers in between. Forty years is not going to garner that much hype, especially if contrasted with a poor, undeveloped ruleset.

Let the year of the 40th anniversary be teasers, an expanded catalouge, reminiscences, novels, and hype. No playtesting, no inaccurate box set, no mistake-ridden publications. Let's see fully developed rules, complete with a functioning DDI and zero prospects for errata and a 5.5, sometime between January and GenCon 2015.

I agree that while hitting the 40th anniversary would be nice and they shouldn't take more time than they need to (for a variety of reasons), I think that the impact of the 40th Anniversary may be getting a bit overestimated in this thread. D&D is not going to suddenly be dominating the news cycles just because it's a semi-major anniversary, and while WotC could and probably will incorporate it into the marketing in some fashion if it lines up, I don't know that "40th Anniversary! New D&D!" is a significantly stronger marketing pitch than "New D&D!", or one that will reach way more people. It's not that I don't believe that there's not some person out there who's going to read the four-line sidebar in Time magazine's minor news items column and then decide to play again, but I'm not sure that that guy is necessarily a ton of guys.

I do think that later release dates are a lot worse for a lot of reasons, most significantly that while D&D still has about eight trillion times as much general brand recognition as the rest of the industry combined, its stranglehold on the mindspace of people already within the hobby has been gradually loosening for a while, and not having an active product certainly doesn't staunch that.

 

[MortalPlague]

@hbarsquared , I'm not sure why you and others are so insistent on pushing back publication of 5E another year. They've been working on it for two years already! How long do they need? What are they doing up there in Renton, anyways? They're working on 5E - and they have been for two, maybe three, years. That's a lot of man hours and Mountain Dew.

Would another year make 5E a better game? Maybe. I won't even say probably, because as every artist or poet knows, sometimes fiddling too much can ruin a piece. At some point they're going to have to take the risk and publish. The key is not as much when, but how - and in what form and order.

I'll say probably. I'll say it with a caveat; if that extra year is used for testing.

In a perfect world, Wizards would release a huge beta-style playtest packet, include a series of adventures at different levels (particularly some mid-high level adventures) and then wait a few months and see how the game breaks. Then they'd have a wealth of feedback on balance, and there would be a much lower chance of anything broken slipping through the cracks.

But even in the real world, where piracy of the game is a concern, Wizards could take the time for additional testing. They could put people to work on the first few adventures while the internal playtesters run the system through its paces. A few extra months of pure testing would really help diminish the errata.

Realistically, I doubt this would happen. Money, for starters. But testing would be the single best way to avoid problems down the line. And thus would make 5E a better game.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I just see very little reason to focus on GenCon, unless they are expecting to make massive sales from the Con itself. Unlikely.

The key is a large number of gamers go to GenCon, even gamers who don't play D&D currently(but likely did at one point or another...or at least have an interest in it).

This year at GenCon the WOTC presence was nearly non-existant. They had an area dedicated to playtesting 5e, but they were running 2 different adventures, one of which was sold out before the con began. So, if you were curious about what 5e was, you needed to stand in line for nearly an hour to play the adventure for a large portion of the weekend.

They also had no booth in the dealers room. Their booth was in a room that if you weren't looking for it, you likely wouldn't find it.

I talked to a bunch of gamers at GenCon who mentioned that they were interested in trying 5e, but never got around to it.

I think the key to making 5e a success is having a fully released and available game out at GenCon next year. They really need it to be out and available for purchase at the con so when people have a good experience with the game they can immediately buy it. They also need a LARGE number of DMs and a huge gaming space so that anyone looking to try it can get it almost immediately. They also need enough adventures that if someone likes their experience and wants to play again right away that there is a second and third adventure for them to try.

The only way they'll be able to have that many DMs and adventures available for the con is if the game is available at least 30 days in advance of GenCon. This gives DMs the chance to play with it for a while, get used to DMing it and be ready to give a good experience to the people who come through the door. It likely means that they need to announce a new Living Campaign before GenCon and start recruiting admins so that there will be a group of 20-50 people with beta access to the rules writing adventures before the game even comes out. It's possible that they rely entirely on WOTC employees to write the adventures that will run at GenCon and instead announce a Living Campaign for 2015(in fact, knowing them it's likely because the Organized Play division doesn't move fast). However, to find the DMs they'll still need the book out early.

In addition to this, GenCon is the focus of a lot of attention. News sites are on high alert during GenCon so everything that happens there will be broadcast all over the place. A release of the game in December risks a large number of gamers who aren't fanatical about D&D to not even know 5e has come out until GenCon 2015.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Again, I would be very surprised if the hype machine in the form of announcements and previews don't start shortly after the new year. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it will be in March or April. Who knows, really. But I think they're probably close enough to finished to get the ball rolling and start pulling together the D&D community again. Its time. We've already gone through two "dead years" - I can't see them going for a third.

I'm in complete agreement. I think January through April(or May) will be entirely filled with previews and leads up to the game coming out in May/June.

We only need to look at the track record of D&D books to see that it's likely:
PHB 1e: June 1978
PHB 2e: Can't find a month anywhere, 1989
PHB 3e: August 10, 2000
PHB 3.5e: July 2003
PHB 4e: June 6, 2008

 

[Mercurius]

Another thing to think about: I could be wrong about this, but I'm fairly certain that a GenCon sale, which is direct through the publisher, has a much higher profit margin than an Amazon sale.

Let's say the MSRP on the three core rule books is going to be $40 a piece, so $120 total. Generally speaking, publishers sell books for about 40-50% of the MSRP to distributors, so they'll only make $48-60 off a set. If those books cost $10 a piece to produce, that's only $18-30 profit - or $6-10 per book.

Now if they sell them for $40 a piece at GenCon, there might be GenCon fees and such, but we're talking at least $20 profit, maybe $30, per book. So one GenCon sale is worth 2-5 times that of, say, an Amazon sale.

I might have the numbers wrong (athough tried to account for that for a wide range), but the general principle holds true, I think: A GenCon sale is worth far more to WotC than an Amazon or B&N sale - at least twice as much, but maybe much more than that. And this doesn't account for the secondary benefits of building community, press, hype, etc.

 

[Tortoise]

Seriously, and this is not meant to be inflammatory, who cares about the 40th anniversary?
QUOTE]

It is a legit question and not inflamatory.

My guess would be at least some customers, some marketing types, and definitely Hasbro's shareholders as the single largest group to consider it something not to miss.

Since WotC has nearly cleared the decks of products related to D&D with minor exceptions being those tied to it through Forgotten Realms changes, which reflect how the realms will operate with the 5e environment, their revenue stream would be noticably reduced and already has been affected since the announcement. The revenue up-side has been the reprints and pdf sales padding things out while 4e languished, but 2014 looks barren by comparison.

While waiting for a very solid game would be fine from our standpoint, I doubt corporate masters like the idea of a dead product year.

 

[darjr]

doesn't wotc publish in the US? does that change the speculation? without the slow boat from china don't they have a faster turn around?