D&D 5E 5e most conservative edition yet? (In terms of new settings)

[jgsugden]

Who cares?

Can you run an amazingly fun game using the materials released so far? Because I can. Isn't that the goal?

I know a guy - a very smart guy - that has played D&D for 35 years. He bought one set of dice (and was given a few extra here and there) and a handful of miniatures. He has never bought a book. He always used the DM's books or used free online stuff.

His total expense, for 35 years of playing, is likely under $100 of writing utensils, paper, and those few dice and minis.

And he has had some of the most memorable PCs I can remember. He has played over a dozen human fighters in games with me - and each was very different. Same mini, though. A Ral Partha guy in plate with a two handed sword (who he now plays as a very short human as those old minis are not quite the same scale as modern minis), but very different personality. One is a tactician, another a beserker, another a diplomat, another a comedian...

The point here: D&D can involve a lot of fun options and ideas, but if you've played for a bit, you can make really good stuff all by yourself.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't buy, for one cold second, that Planescape was "losing money", given the absolutely vast amount of material, much of it quite fancy, that they put out for it. Some individual products may have sold poorly, but now way overall it was.

So "those boxed sets" seems like a gross generalization to me. I'm sure Birthright wasn't a huge seller, but I very much doubt DS or PS had any sales problems, nor the FR. I can believe there was too much material coming out, after all, you can only play in one setting at once, but TSR would have gone under in the early '90s if stuff like DS and PS wasn't making money.

You have an unfortunately optimistic image of TSR: they were a massively incompetent company. One if the Setting box sets was actually sold below cost, accidentally, because their finance and product teams never spoke. Stan! has spoken about how the Dragonlance Saga team had no idea their product line wasn't selling until WotC bought the company and then gave the creative team the sales data...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You have an unfortunately optimistic image of TSR: they were a massively incompetent company. One if the Setting box sets was actually sold below cost, accidentally, because their finance and product teams never spoke. Stan! has spoken about how the Dragonlance Saga team had no idea their product line wasn't selling until WotC bought the company and then gave the creative team the sales data...

I'm sorry, economics is real mate. There are limits to what you can claim.

A company as incompetent as you want to suggest would have, exactly as I said, gone under in the early 1990s. Clearly some of their products were selling like absolute gangbusters if they were routinely selling other stuff below cost. Also one product selling below cost doesn't mean they all were, which is the suggestion I was responding to.

 

[Jester David]

• None of the settings you list are usable in Adventurer's League. And probably they never will be.

Yes. But neither was Ravnica. And it's unlikely Theos will as well. And there's all of five Eberron adventurers for AL, and the content isn't permitted in regular League play. You can't play an artificer in AL.

But this also isn't a major factor as 95% of players don't play AL. There's millions of D&D players and under 3000 WPN stores.

AL isn't a major factor for what's acceptable content. The fact the fourth most played fighter subclass on DnDBeyond isn't AL legal and isn't in a published book is a testament to that...

• As above, none of those setting materials are available in D&D Beyond

Fair. But you don't need a setting in D&D Beyond. That's for class content.

And it's pretty easy to add homebrew content on a case-by-case basis. Like super easy.

• Are those setting materials above easily integrated in Roll20 with existing officially published D&D materials?

It's also pretty easy to add homebrew to Roll20. Which can be seen with the number of people playing worlds other than the Realms or Eberron...
Not that this is a major issue either, as <10% of people play on Roll20.

You'd be better off asking "How will this interact with Critical Role?" as that has a larger audience (probably by an order of magnitude) and more impact on D&D...

• Porting over to other settings like Golarion - yes of course that can be done; but feels like a lot of work. Work that I am not interested in doing; nor do I get paid to do it.

Why would you get paid? You don't get paid to write an adventure or run the game for your friends or homebrew a monster. And you wouldn't get paid if WotC did it either...

Why would you expect to get paid now? How is that a realistic concern?

Also... you don't need to "port" anything over. There's no crunch in history. No mechanics to update in a nation description. No rules option in a culture.
You can buy the 1e World of Greyhawk folio from DMsGuild and use that at your 5e game table on the fly.

• There is something about a new setting published by WotC that elevates it. Makes it literally "official". For example, I almost never hear anyone asking for anyone to reprint "Dragonmech" or "Midnight" (Ok, maybe Midnight). But boy people seemed pretty darn excited for an official Eberron campaign.

Which is just a number issue. Because D&D has such a big audience, the small number of people excited for Eberron sounded impressive. Despite something like 60% of gamers running homebrew worlds, and another 20% running the Realms.

More people probably bough Rising From the Last War for the artificer than will ever run a game in that world...

I love me some Midnight as well. And it'd be neat to run something in that setting and I'd love FFG to bring that back.
But they really don't need to as I have all the old 3e books and don't need new rules or mechanics. Everything I love about Midnight is in the story and the lore. I remember so much about how the Dark God Izrador won the last war and conquered the lands of elves, dwarves, and men with his orc armies, and has ruled the continent for a full century. I don't remember how it changed spellcasting or tweaked races, but that's not really essential to the setting and was the least interesting bit of the book.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Despite something like 60% of gamers running homebrew worlds, and another 20% running the Realms.

Weren't those figures from like 1915 er... I mean 2015? A really long time ago anyway. I'd love to see updated figures with a really strict definition of "homebrew" (i.e. just because I deleted Kelemvor from my version of the Realm because he's absolutely trash and all the lore around him and the Wall of Souls and so on is trash, doesn't make my setting "homebrew").

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I would argue that the cross-promotion with Magic the Gathering shares a certain amount of DNA with the launch of Dragonlance as a multimedia franchise focused around novels. So if the one is not an original setting than the other is only half an original setting.

I'm also going to stand up for Mercer's Exandria being roughly as close to an "original' WotC product as Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms was when it was actually officially adopted as a campaign setting. Although he had been publishing the materials in TSR's Dragon magazine it was very much the 3rd party work of one guy through over half of the '80s. Obviously popularized through an internet show is a bit different than published in a magazine, but that is partly just a matter of changing forms of mass communication. Notably the Realms were also adopted less because of some rabid fan base and more because it filled a perceived need for a fresh generic kitchen sink setting where new things could be readily accommodated, and that had nothing to do with the recently ousted Gary Gygax.

In any case, Critical Role World did originate as a setting to play D&D/Pathfinder, so it is a lot closer to an "original" campaign setting than Ravnica or what have you. Probably as close to "new original setting" as we are going to get, since I suspect it is going to gobble up whatever "new setting" resources they weren't going to spend on MtG settings, unless some other D&D show with an original setting surpasses it in popularity and they want to get in on that.

 

[Jester David]

I'm sorry, economics is real mate. There are limits to what you can claim.

A company as incompetent as you want to suggest would have, exactly as I said, gone under in the early 1990s. Clearly some of their products were selling like absolute gangbusters if they were routinely selling other stuff below cost. Also one product selling below cost doesn't mean they all were, which is the suggestion I was responding to.

They didn't go from great to selling the company overnight.
They went bankrupt in '97 but were in a bad way during '95 and '96 as well.
Lots of companies file for bankruptcy and recover slowly. TSR filed and was immediately sold. They were in such a bad way recovery wasn't possible.

They famously wasted money on bad games. Like the Buck Rogers RPG and Dragon Dice.

Ryan Dancey on the Acquisition of TSR

 

[Jester David]

Weren't those figures from like 1915 er... I mean 2015? A really long time ago anyway. I'd love to see updated figures with a really strict definition of "homebrew" (i.e. just because I deleted Kelemvor from my version of the Realm because he's absolutely trash and all the lore around him and the Wall of Souls and so on is trash, doesn't make my setting "homebrew").

I think if they managed to do another survey like that, there'd be a huge number of people playing in Exandria and it would rival the Realms in popularity and blow other settings out of the water.

Financially, it makes more sense for WotC to update and reprint the Tal'Dorei guide than any other setting.

 

[atanakar]

You say that, and it's definitely technically true, but it seems to me that a "poorly supported" 2E setting had a lot more support, typically, than a typical 5E setting, which is one-book-and-done.

Let's not re-write history. 2E was absolutely fantastic for settings. 3E and 4E didn't remotely come close, and 5E is even weaker than those, with the vast majority of its settings being merchandised tie-ins, either to third-party stuff or MtG.

I'm not re-writing history. I never said 2E wasn't a great era. I said support was bad for several lines and several splat books were rushed to print with poor quality content just to have something new on the shelves to sell. Buck Rogers anyone? Not everything was glorious during the 2E. That doesn't take anything away from the great settings we got.

WotC already paid once for the concepts, novels and art of MtG settings. Transforming does into D&D settings makes perfect sense. I consider these settings to be original work. Whether they paid someone 5 or 10 years ago to create the concept instead of the last year makes no difference. They still invested in creativity.

In fact, 5e is less conservative than 3e and 4e, because they are going into new territory (MtG) and trying new partnerships (Critical Roll). That approach is paying off. They will keep doing that. Good for them.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Yeah. I wonder if there are some bean counters at WotC who know EXACTLY how much all those semi-ok settings cost TSR; and maybe they are not now creating original settings due to that evidence. Most of us will never know; but it's an angle I hadn't considered. There are lots of reasons why TSR got into financial trouble; I guess this may be one of them.

That would require TSR keeping better books than I think they probably did.

I think what the bean counters mostly see is that the their books receive the right amount of development time, promotional energy, and sales numbers if they release about four a year, and by time they've scheduled in all the adventures and settings with built-in fan bases and/or cross-promotional synergy and the occasional supplement there's no space left on the calendar for a whole new setting.