D&D 5E D&D Team Productivity?

[embee]

And the last annual adventure, Rime of the Frostmaiden, is 320 pages. That's pretty dang long, and it's also FANTASTIC quality. It's hard to find any product like that in previous editions IMO.

But what about the people who don't want their money's worth? Have you considered that?

What about that part of the market that's clamoring for shovelware?!

 

[Parmandur]

Ah, the magical shifting goal posts.
"In the 1st 6 years of" And then retro-actively picking & choosing the releases to be counted.

14 1e hardbacks.... I count 13 from memory. {PHB, DMG, MM, D&D, MM2, FF, UA, Oa, DSG, WSG, MoP, Greyhawk & Dragonlance} 14 if you count the 1st printing of Deities & Demigods.
What are you counting?
Or am I forgetting something & should go stare at my bookshelf when I get home?

I'm just interjecting, I just thought I'd throw in some parameters to compare the rate of products.

I was just counting from Wikipedia, so the 14th is Legends & Lore, so good point: in less than 7 years, 5E has as many published hardcover rulebooks as 1E had in 12. On top of that, by and large the 5E books are larger books.

There have only been 14 5E Adventure books (plus two premium reprints) in the first 7 years as of Candlekeep Mysteries release, but they are all large books with a significant amount of adventure content. By a quick and dirty count, there were ~34 softcover 1E modules published prior to 1984 (it really exploded after Dragonlance, later on), all quite short (between 5-10% of a 5E Adventure book). On balance, I think 5E has more official adventure material before you include RPGA, AL, Dungeon magazine, or DMsGuild stuff.

Undoubtedly, 5E has a much faster publication schedule at this point in direct comparison with 1E.

 

[Staffan]

But what about the people who don't want their money's worth? Have you considered that?

What about that part of the market that's clamoring for shovelware?!

That's what the DM's Guild is for.

(Note: I am not saying everything on the Guild is bad. I'm just assuming Sturgeon's Law holds just as true there as any other primarily amateur-based place.)

 

[Maxperson]

I think you're rather arbitrarily claiming 1e and 5e release rates both are the same "slow". I bet that if you work out, say, pages of (non-magazine) content per year, 1e will turn out to be significantly slower than 5e.

5E is faster than 1E. What particular reason is there to think that this is not the middle ground? It's certainly the most stable business model so far.

I think the release schedule for 5e is faster than 1e's release schedule and slower than 3e's and 4e's so how is that not middle ground between the two?

The rate of release of hardcover rules books is close to the same in both editions. I'm not looking at page count, but rate of release. If you're going to count stuff that really doesn't push the game as a whole forward, such as settings and adventures, 5e has more settings and bigger adventures. 1e still had a decent number of settings, as well as tons of smaller modules to play.

 

[Blue]

There is a middle ground, though.

Aren't they in it? If a hardcover a month was too many, 1 hardcover a year (or less) is the opposite end of the spectrum. 4 hardcovers a year seems right in the middle of those two - it's 1/3 of the hardcover a month, and 1 per year is 1/4 of that. So this is the middle ground already.

 

[darjr]

They apparently have a financial success, maybe even the best, longest running one of any edition, and it looks like it will continue. For instance the March book was in the top thousand or so of all books on Amazon before anyone knew the title.
On top of that there are, it seems, many times more happy customers than unhappy.

 

[Maxperson]

Aren't they in it? If a hardcover a month was too many, 1 hardcover a year (or less) is the opposite end of the spectrum. 4 hardcovers a year seems right in the middle of those two - it's 1/3 of the hardcover a month, and 1 per year is 1/4 of that. So this is the middle ground already.

They aren't in-between slow and manic, no. They are producing roughly the same numbers that 1e had.

 

[Don Durito]

To think we could've had 1000s more subclasses by now!

Not to mention all the existing settings that could've been repackaged and released in order to validate fans preferences for those settings.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I think you're rather arbitrarily claiming 1e and 5e release rates both are the same "slow". I bet that if you work out, say, pages of (non-magazine) content per year, 1e will turn out to be significantly slower than 5e.

1e had less hardback books, but had a LOT of modules created for it, not to mention the parallel production of BECMI which all contribute towards "D&D output by era". It also had regular content released in Dragon/Dungeon.

I'm willing to wager that 5e is the slowest output speed (excepting maybe 0e, which I know next to nothing about).

 

[Mercurius]

The old chestnut that will be trotted out is that the slow release schedule is the key to 5e's success: "I've got too much to play already!" etc. In terms of outsourcing, this is straightforward late-stage capitalism.

The old chestnut seems to be right, though, as the slower release schedule seems to correlate with--if not cause--the huge success of 5E.

But I was going to say something similar, re: late-stage capitalism. I didn't really think of it until reading the OP. But clearly, WotC is going for a small staff of full-time employees, and then outsourcing. Presumably this increases WotC's profit margins substantially.