D&D 5E Reasons Why My Interest in 5e is Waning

[jayoungr]

D&D movies will never be anything other than a boondoggle. They might make nice Rifftrax fodder, but not much else.

Why not? (In your opinion.)

 

[Werebat]

Why not? (In your opinion.)

Other than past experience? Well...

A "D&D Movie", marketed as such, is going to be a lot like a "Republican Movie" or "Jewish Movie", marketed as such. It's too broad of a thing.

I could almost envision a decent movie covering, say, the Dragonlance Saga, or some other property. I'd love to see a movie of Bassingthwaite's Eberron books (the ones starring Geth & Co.). But here we run into the problem of WotC just not seeming to know how to make a movie, or how to hire a company that knows how to make a movie. Or maybe just not having the required scratch to pull it off.

The best bet for a "D&D Movie" would be a specific existing book or line of books getting licensed to a real studio with real experience that wanted to do the project themselves. WotC signing a contract with Sweet Pea Entertainment or that guy who made Rebecca Black (in)famous isn't the same thing, and it's what we're going to get if WotC tries to make another movie.

 

[Zaukrie]

The lack of dragon magazine is something that I had not thought was contributing to the lack of release, but whomever mentioned that is smart. Even if there were not products, there was something to read every month, and the Dungeon too.

 

[Gecko85]

I would say if you like an extremely light release schedule then you probably weren't going to spend much money on D&D anyway.

I spent *plenty* of money on AD&D and BECMI back in the day, and as I showed earlier, they had a nearly identical release schedule as we're now seeing with 5e.

 

[Mallus]

Sure, I love cool fan content as much as the next guy. Problem is, they rarely make inroads within the community at large. I could mention several fan created D&D derived rulesets right here, but what is the chance that more than one poster in twenty will have heard of them, outside of maybe E6?

Yeah, unfortunately your right about this. Concrete & complex rule sets like 3e/Pathfinder really lend themselves to the kind of online debates the community clearly likes to engage in. Hell, I *like* to engage in them. But the downside is, of course, the same big systems that are fun to play with away from the table can get awfully unwieldy around the table (no one in my group will run 3e/Pathfinder anymore).

Is a Moon Liquifier a weapon that liquefies celestial bodies, BTW?

Yes. It's a fabled Dragonorn super-science device use to liquify one of their planet's smaller moons. It's mass was converted to liquid mercury, which then rained down over a continent. Historian debate whether it was a weapon or if the ancient Dragonborn just needed a *lot* of liquid mercury.

 

[Sailor Moon]

Right, but if most folks spent much money on D&D we wouldn't be having this conversation at all, we'd be discussing the next six months of monthly hardcovers!

Very few players buy everything Wizards put out; some buy maybe a fee splatbooks a year if they're particularly interested in the contents; and most only ever buy the PHB.

If they even buy the PHB. Plenty of groups are made up of casual players who make do with a single shared PHB between them.

So if monthly non-core book sales aren't bringing in enough to continually justify putting out the next one, they're just not going to bother putting them out. If diminishing returns means fewer people will buy February's release than January's, and fewer sales of March's hardcover than February's, why wouldn't you look at alternatives to avoid a costly investment in another edition turnover that may itself not prove very popular?

So yeah, I'm not going to buy more than a few hardcovers a year. I will buy D&D video games and a ticket to a movie if they look good, though, and Hasbro is banking that enough non-gamers will along with me that they'll make far more than they would if they catered to the release schedule you're asking for.

Here's the point that Wizards really doesn't seem to understand. D&D is a niche hobby, therefore, only certain amount of people are going to play it. Their expectations are set way too high to be honest. Most of us gamers do spend loads of money on RPG stuff but apparently it's just not enough profits for them.

They think by going this route they are going to bring in this untapped hoard of gamers out there that are just waiting to get into D&D. Well it's not going to happen on the level they are dreaming. When you set your expectations too high on a product that has a very limited audience then your profits are not going to be steller.

Paizo has the right idea and they are running a game company like it should. I would bet you that they clear their overhead and pay their staff really well. I would say they are happy from any profits they get and are satisfied with it. WoTc/Hasbro are not satisfied and never will be. That is the curse of capitialism and big business.

So basically in essence, releasing very few products will come back to bite them in the arse.

 

[reelo]

My enthusiasm has only increased, so much so that I'm buying older 3.5 books to convert to 5e.

Are there any decent conversion rules for 3/3.5E material?


And on the context of PDFs, what WotC could have done is add a code to each copy of the book which enables the buyer (upon registering online) to download a watermarked pdf of the same book.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Yeah, unfortunately your right about this. Concrete & complex rule sets like 3e/Pathfinder really lend themselves to the kind of online debates the community clearly likes to engage in. Hell, I *like* to engage in them. But the downside is, of course, the same big systems that are fun to play with away from the table can get awfully unwieldy around the table (no one in my group will run 3e/Pathfinder anymore).

Yeah we have one guy running a very occasional 3.5 game still when I'm tired of running the main 5e game that week. But wait until we get to 10+ level, its already bogging down constantly with checking books for rulings. I can barely stand to play 3.5 and I'd quit gaming altogether before running that awful system again. Its more fun to stab myself in the hand with a fork. PF just put out a PC optimization guide. I guess you need it to max your DPR when you have 20 PC options books to dig through. It reminds me of when I got the Rules Compendium for 3.5 thinking it would finally make that system somewhat fun to DM. Then I thought, "you need another book to make the rule books usable and add in all the crap that was piled on over the release schedule? Lets play something a bit more streamlined..." And we dropped it and I went back to having fun running D&D games.

 

[Sailor Moon]

Yeah we have one guy running a very occasional 3.5 game still when I'm tired of running the main 5e game that week. But wait until we get to 10+ level, its already bogging down constantly with checking books for rulings. I can barely stand to play 3.5 and I'd quit gaming altogether before running that awful system again. Its more fun to stab myself in the hand with a fork. PF just put out a PC optimization guide. I guess you need it to max your DPR when you have 20 PC options books to dig through. It reminds me of when I got the Rules Compendium for 3.5 thinking it would finally make that system somewhat fun to DM. Then I thought, "you need another book to make the rule books usable and add in all the crap that was piled on over the release schedule? Lets play something a bit more streamlined..." And we dropped it and I went back to having fun running D&D games.

The books you "need" to play Pathfinder is the Corebook and a Beastiary. Everything else is optional.

You have a tendency to throw in all these responses about getting bogged down in options when you are the one who's buying them. We play Pathfinder a lot with just the corebook and a few beastiaries. Limit what you allow if you are getting bogged down.

 

[chriton227]

Well to be fair the 1974 D&D crowd sounds like it was mostly college kids and out of work adults who had plenty of time to make up their own stuff. Many modern gamers are very busy adults with kids and careers.

Things have changed a lot in 40 years. In 1974, kids and adults didn't have the Internet, video games, and hundreds of channels of cable TV consuming large amounts of their time, tended to spend less time on their commute to work, and there was less of a culture of having to keep the kids busy with a multitude of activities. Education and homes also cost less relative to median income, so there was less financial pressure for the career treadmill and overwork/overtime. So it wasn't that the players in 1974 were slackers with lots of free time, it's that there were fewer things competing for their available free time. Try going cold turkey on TV, Internet, and video games for a couple weeks and you'd be amazed at how much time you have available for things like reading and game prep.