Critical Role Wildemount: Most Pre-orders Since D&D Core Rulebooks

It seems that the most popular D&D setting in the 5E era is... Wildemount! Talking about the upcoming Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, WotC's Greg Tito said on a Twitch stream recently that "we're pretty sure that this book has seen the most pre-orders and pre-release excitement since any of the core rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition were released".

Here's the quote in full:

"...It was number 1, ranked number 1, for all books on Amazon. How many of you out there remember when Amazon was just selling books? Raise your hands. Yeah, that's me. So it's really cool, even though obviously I do a lot more other fun stuff right now, there is a ton out there that are excited for this book, and it isn't even out yet.

"We have little bit of an internal metrics, but we're pretty sure that this book has seen the most pre-orders and pre-release excitement since any of the core rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition were released, and if you've been following along at home, Dungeons & Dragons has been selling like hotcakes since 5th Edition released in 2014."

It sounds like the Critical Role setting is proving more popular (at least right now) than traditional D&D settings like Ravenloft or Eberron, newer ones like Ravnica, or adventures set in the Forgotten Realms.

Explorer's Guide to Wildemount will hit game stores on March 17th.

 

[Fenris-77]

No sorry, when you say something is inspired by something, it better be inspired by it, otherwise your lying, I don't except marketing speech as an excuse to mislead people.

'Inspired by' could mean just about anything. There's no minimum correlation implied in the phrase. Had they said "based on the mechanics of 5th edition" that would have been different, but I don't think they did. You might not be happy with how much actual 5th edition crunch there is in the game, and that's a legitimate position, but i's got nothing to do with 'inspired by" actually means, or doesn't mean in this case.

 

[FlyingChihuahua]

No sorry, when you say something is inspired by something, it better be inspired by it, otherwise your lying, I don't except marketing speech as an excuse to mislead people.

You either have a hyper sensitivity to lies or a bias against WotC.

I'm going with the latter.

 

[Oofta]

No sorry, when you say something is inspired by something, it better be inspired by it, otherwise your lying, I don't except marketing speech as an excuse to mislead people.

Sigh. Okay. One more time. The phrase "inspired by" is just meaningless market speak. Have you never seen a movie "inspired by real events"? The game was loosely based in FR. At time of publication, 5E was the current version. Therefore the game was inspired by D&D 5E.

Do you even know if whatever vague "inspired by" quote came from? WOTC marketing department that wouldn't know D&D if it was spelled out for them? The game publisher?

But I'm done. I think this is a pretty sad excuse of a justification for saying that WOTC lies in the context of this thread. It's a direct accusation against the devs and unjustified.

 

[Parmandur]

23 monsters, that is interesting.

Not gigantic, but nothing to sneeze at either: given Mercer's style, these are going to be bigger, meatier fights, probably.

 

[Parmandur]

When you think about it, it makes perfect sense for WoTC to do this. The only question was why they didn't do it earlier. As has been mentioned, the reasons are compelling. The KS was a huge success. Ep1 of season 1 has 12.4 million views. The CR team are a bunch of younger good looking people. It makes total sense for WoTC to capitalize on this, and the results aren't all that surprising.

Let's face it, old settings like Greyhawk might be my personal favorite because that's what I grew up playing, but much like Eberron became more popular for the generation that started there, Wildemount is the current new setting a whole new wave of players are familiar with. From a business perspective, it makes total sense to focus on that setting before Grayhawk or Spelljammer or Dark Sun.

Given the 18 month turnaround, and the time to reach the decision beforehand, this is pretty fleet for WotC current design pipeline setup. This means they started work before the cartoon Kickstarter.

 

[generic]

Not gigantic, but nothing to sneeze at either: given Mercer's style, these are going to be bigger, meatier fights, probably.

I doubt it, this is a WotC setting book we're talking about... In addition, the Green Ronin book has a few monsters, but most of them were just NPCs and wildlife, with some distinct enemies, and some re-flavors of enemies. I expect the latter.

 

[Professor Murder]

As a massive Greyhawk and Planescape fan, I gotta agree with this. There's literally nothing that WOTC could put out for the vast majority of their older settings that would be any more interesting than, "Here's how to mechanically build this obscure thing in 5E rules." I think people constantly (and maybe even purposefully?) discount the amount of material on DMsGuild, thinking that "it's only FR and Ravenloft (and a few others)" means it's not easily portable to their setting of choice and already built to enter play. I think a great article series would be covering some DMsGuild releases and noting "this is perfect for Dark Sun" or whatever.

The people crying for the old stuff and saying they don't have time to do the conversion work themselves IME simply don't want to put in a couple hours of research to find that the stuff is already there waiting for them. Case in point: I spent an hour going over fan conversions of Sigil's Factions, picked up two DMsGuild releases about faction and organization rules, read them over the course of an hour, and had a document complete and formatted nicely an hour after that. So, three hours later, my Planescape campaign is ready to roll for the next infinity years.

IMHO YMMV sorrynotsorry that this might come off a little harsh

For me, the big difference between a WotC product and any 3rd party product is DnD Beyond.

 

[Zardnaar]

Rather than outright lying it's a bit disingenuous claiming Sword Coast Legends is inspired by D&D coming from a developer.

It's indirectly tying 5E to Sword Coast Legends.

The Devs were promoting a turkey,big you paid money for that game yeah bad feeling all around.
I never preorder games lol.

 

[gyor]

Rather than outright lying it's a bit disingenuous claiming Sword Coast Legends is inspired by D&D coming from a developer.

It's indirectly tying 5E to Sword Coast Legends.

The Devs were promoting a turkey,big you paid money for that game yeah bad feeling all around.
I never preorder games lol.

I never bought it, but I've heard things about it the suggest it wasn't even originally intended to be for D&D never mind 5e, that only came up later.

 

[Oofta]

I never bought it, but I've heard things about it the suggest it wasn't even originally intended to be for D&D never mind 5e, that only came up later.

So let me get this straight. You accused WOTC - and more specifically Jeremy Crawford and company - of being liars because they've lied in the past. Because somebody in a marketing department, perhaps WOTC, perhaps game's publisher used the phrase "inspired by". In a game you've never actually played and have no first hand knowledge of.

A quick google tells me the back-drop was FR, included standard D&D races and tropes. That alone is enough to make it "inspired by" in market speak. A glance at even one review indicates that while it wasn't a very good game, it did have a lot of FR specific D&D insider-jokes.

All of which just means that they didn't write a very good game. Because someone else said it didn't implement 5E rules very well you can tar everyone associated with the project with the "liar" label.

Good grief.