D&D 5E Why FR Is "Hated"

[SkidAce]

For me, and this is purely my selfish wishes here and certainly not what I expect from WotC, I LOVE the setting guides for the Magic the Gathering game that have come out recently. The three guides that have come out so far are about 40 pages long, chock a block with TONS of flavor, and very much what I want for a setting. Add a decent couple of maps and I would gladly play in any of those three settings for years.

You do know there is years of lore and information buried amongst thousands of cards that could be just as daunting as the FR lore.


But I agree with you....its a fantastic setting, I bought every setting guide so far and would love maps.

 

[RotGrub]

IMO, areas of the FR that are untouched by lore are an ideal compromise for a Campaign. For example, the Bloodstone Lands are a great out of the way sandbox.

As for the 5e Realms, I really don't like the way WotC has been updating it. In fact, I'm still waiting for one large map of the 5e FR.

 

[Zardnaar]

Do you have a copy of that financial analysis?

TSR suffered for the following reasons:

1. The relative popularity of card-based games (WoTC!).

2. Terrible agreements. Except, to some extent, Random House.

3. Making products that cost more than the retail price they were selling them for. (!)

4. Rising popularity of computer games.

5. Too much content, too low quality.

6. Really, really, really bad management. They had no good metrics on sales, returns, costs, and what customers wanted. Seriously.

7. Bad management, continued. There were various ways that money was being siphoned from TSR for less productive uses. If you catch my drift.

The miracle wasn't that TSR failed. It was this it succeeded for as long as it did, considering.

TSR was badly run but the direct causes were.

1. Return of the novels. They printed to many.
2. Dragondice. They ordered a million sets sold 70k.
3 . Selling campaign settings at a loss. Lavish production values on things like Planescape.

The campaign settings also spilt the market and a few of them were incompatable with other setting without heavy modification.

Sales went down and you are better off selling 100k units of 1 product than 10k units of 15 products and towards the end TSR was making 60 odd products a year. Adventures were selling in the 3 to 5k range.

Outside the core books some of the biggest selling D&D books of all time are adventures.

 

[robus]

For me, and this is purely my selfish wishes here and certainly not what I expect from WotC, I LOVE the setting guides for the Magic the Gathering game that have come out recently. The three guides that have come out so far are about 40 pages long, chock a block with TONS of flavor, and very much what I want for a setting. Add a decent couple of maps and I would gladly play in any of those three settings for years.

Agreed 100%. Maps are the missing link to these becoming excellent settings. I've made a couple of maps for Zendikar and Innistrad. I was a bit let down by Kaladesh, but if it's considered mostly a city setting then it's OK (I've made a start on a map but it's hard to visualize), but official maps would be ideal.

 

[gyor]

IMO, areas of the FR that are untouched by lore are an ideal compromise for a Campaign. For example, the Bloodstone Lands are a great out of the way sandbox.

As for the 5e Realms, I really don't like the way WotC has been updating it. In fact, I'm still waiting for one large map of the 5e FR.

Yes I know, something like the SKT's map, but for the whole of Faerun (bonus if it's for the whole of Toril),and just as detailed. I'd buy that for sure.

 

[Caliban]

Then again, I might not be the target market. I've run LMoP, and other than that, convert 1e modules.

I'm not really their target market either, anymore. I read pretty fast - about 100 pages an hour if it's a subject I'm interested in. I read all the Dragon Lance trilogies, a lot of the Greyhawk novels, and a lot of the FR novels. Just something I do when I get interested/obsessed with a subject. I used to be a Realms fanboy, years ago, but now it feels overcrowded to me.

I've played and run hundreds of modules - starting in 2e, but mainly from Living Greyhawk, Living City, Organized Play, Pathfinder Society, and now Adventure league. Now, something inside me just rebels at the thought of running a pre-written adventure - I don't even run for Adventure League anymore. Adventure League is just a place to play a little and test out game mechanics and character builds.

But with all that accumulated lore on dozens of worlds and hundreds of adventures in the back of my head, I'm pretty good at running adventures that I create as I go, in a homebrew setting of my creation. It's all a hodgepodge of recycled and blended ideas and concepts, but it's mine.

So I don't buy settings or adventures unless they have official "crunch" for me to use - either in my own game or for an Adventure League character.

I have fond memories of the Realms, but no desire to revisit them.

 

[Shasarak]

Well that depends on the market and the product, doesn't it? The investment required to produce or consume a Coke, Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke, or Diet Coke is extremely small and the potential market extremely large. Neither of those apply to RPG campaign settings. Coca-Cola can produce gallons of these products in seconds, I can consume them for well under a dollar and in a few minutes time and there are hundreds of millions of people like me. Yet would you believe that until Coca-Cola actually invested substantial research and then test marketed this, they were actually worried they would split their market? It's true.

WoW and Diablo cost substantially more to product and consume, the markets aren't as large as for Coke, yet they too aren't all that difficult for their users to play as consumers. Yet, even so, I'm sure their relative costs have an impact since they are also more expensive. Chances are there actually are some people out there willing to pay for one but not both and that's more noticeable than with all of the choices available in sweetened drinks.

Now let's look at RPG settings - MUCH more expensive to produce (relatively speaking) and by smaller companies and directed at a market orders of magnitude smaller. They take hours to read, prepare adventures in, and play. Not just a few minutes as in drinking a soda and not with such easy prep and cleanup as a computer game (though those too may take hours to fully play). And that investment generally has to come from multiple people at the play end, compounding the time I'm spending as a consumer. Those factors are probably going to lead the analysis in different directions than for Coke. Moreover, that analysis was done, as I pointed out, when WotC analyzed TSR's problems as part of their due diligence in deciding to buy the company and save D&D from years of bankruptcy limbo. It may be that WotC could credibly support more than one setting (though I really doubt they could support the same number as TSR did) but they have apparently decided the business case for doing so isn't strong enough for them to do it... at least not yet as far as we know.

Ultimately, you can't just look at strongly different products, assume they don't split the market, and then assume the same applies to the RPG industry - even the biggest dog in the industry. And you really can't just brush off the analysis they conducted, using the data they were able to collect, by doing so.

The problem is that WoW and Diablo cost orders of magnitude more to produce (and keep running) then the "MUCH more expensive" campaign settings that you are so worried about. Name any other product you can think of that is cheaper to produce then something that literally gets thought up out of nothing and written down. The art budget for RPGs is probably more expensive then anything else other then printing and shipping.

It would actually be interesting to see if there is another industry out there that only does produce "one" thing because they dont want to split their market. I suspect not, somehow it seems only the RPG market and even then maybe just one company within that market.

 

[Shasarak]

So you don't believe the conclusions WoTC came to when they did thier financial analysis of the company they'd bought/were buying?
You know better than the people who made this investment?

One of the conclusions that WotC came to when they did their financial analysis of TSR was that there was no money to be made in making Adventures.

 

[Shasarak]

Eberron? Not really, and certainly not in comparison with Forgotten Realms, which I believe is Hussar's point. Most NPCs listed in the original ECS rarely break level 10, with exceptions such as your typical Dragonmarked House Baron (e.g. Merrix d'Cannith). Most NPCs listed actually do have NPC class levels. This intentional design approach is apparently worth writing about, as Sean K Reynolds discusses this fact about Eberron in this old article. Even low-level NPCs are further toned-down in Eberron, as class levels are regarded as rare and exceptional.

There are only a few named NPCs off the top of my head that I can recall having high levels (15+) in Eberron: Vol, Great Druid Oalian (an awakened greatpine), the Keeper of the Flame Jaelin Daran (but only when she's in Flamekeep), and the Twin Rulers of Aerenal. As you may have noticed, these high level characters almost overwhelmingly tend to be geographically restricted. The Twins aren't going to leave Aerenal. Oalian can't leave Greenheart; he's a tree. Jaelin's high levels are only within Flamekeep, and she's a level 3 cleric everywhere else. None of these characters exceed level 20.

Can you honestly say the same about Forgotten Realms in 3e? It's laughable to claim that they are even remotely comparable. There's probably more characters in Forgotten Realms who exceed level 20 than there are in Eberron who exceed level 10. That's the sort of thing that Hussar is talking about.

That was probably the most unbelievable aspect of Eberron. Somehow there was this "hundred" year war that resulted in a couple of level 10 NPCs.

Uh huh, right

 

[Maxperson]

That's not what I am getting at. If I am on the fence about buying a product that could be the tipping point for me to not shell out my cash. The "Elminster introduces" thing

I think the number of people who would not buy FR because Elminster is introducing the setting is minimal. You can't please everyone and they can buy something else.