D&D 5E D&D Team Productivity?

[embee]

That's bonkers. How is that even possible? They surely must be happy about their success at WotC. Nice job.

*shakes fist

DAMN YOU, WOTC! HOW DARE YOU MAKE D&D POPULAR!!

 

[Oofta]

*shakes fist

DAMN YOU, WOTC! HOW DARE YOU MAKE D&D POPULAR!!

Yeah. I remember when they were cool. Back before they sold out and went all commercial.

 

[Mistwell]

Correct. When discussing general rules additions, those do not count.

Edit: and 1e had the Deities and Demigods, which had rules for adding gods to any campaign the DM wanted.

The DMG and PHB both had the base rules for Deities and Demigods and adding them to any campaign. All the Deities and Demigods book did was simply add more of them based on those existing core rules, with a couple of minor tweaks. Which is less than any of the 5e monster books do, which is add more monsters based on those existing core rules, with a whole lot of more meaningful tweaks on the core rules than you'd find in Deities and Demigods.

I still want to know why you think all the new races and subraces in the two additional 5e monster books are somehow not "new rules"?

 

[BigZebra]

*shakes fist

DAMN YOU, WOTC! HOW DARE YOU MAKE D&D POPULAR!!

They deserve praise for their work.

 

[Maxperson]

Not into any Setting that doesn't have Norse or Greek gods. It's just as limited in that way as the Ravnica book.

The point is, drawing arbitrary distinctions about what "counts" is obfuscation. Books with rules are rulebooks, so if Deities & Demigods "counts," so does GGtR. Rulebooks is rulebooks.

The Forgotten Realms has Norse, Finnish and more. That book is not intended for any specific setting, unlike Ravnica.

 

[Parmandur]

The Forgotten Realms has Norse, Finnish and more. That book is not intended for any specific setting, unlike Ravnica.

It is for the specific Setting that includes any real world deities. That's going to exclude a lot of tables. Calling that "not a Setting book" is odd. Then, if we for some reason were to grant it is not a Setting book, we come to the fact that it is almost entirely a monster book, and you stated earlier that monster books don't count. So it still wouldn't count.

However, since it is a book with rules, it counts as a rulebook by my standards. Just like Ravnica. This is easier for tracking product releases and productivity per the OP.

 

[Haffrung]

Ok, so what?
What you see as a low productive rate seems to the plan. And the plan seems to be working for the company.... So?

We could identify 7 or 8 strategies WotC have employed with the release and support of 5E (system, artwork, marketing, release tempo, etc). It‘s impossible to identify which of those are responsible for the success of D&D, or even how much WotC strategies are responsible relative to external cultural trends.

Yes, we could say if it’s not broke don’t fix it. Though that same argument could be used to dismiss any changes to WotC‘s approach.

 

[jasper]

So by my calculations in the roughly six and half years since 5e's launch WotC have published 24 D&D books and 2 boxes. 3 of the books have been updates of old material (Saltmarsh etc), 5 of them have been partially outsourced to other companys like Sasquatch, Green Ronin etc and 2 have been almost entirely written outside the design studio (Acquisitions and Wildemount).

Now surely that is a pretty low productivity rate?? I mention this now because it seems like a very very long time that this Candlekeep book has been in production.

All of the above comes from a position of love. I own every 5e product in at least two formats and a lot of them in 3 (standard, special edition and Beyond).

6*12 = 72 +6 =78. 78/24. A book done every 3 months and 7 days. You still have talk with and approve outsider designs. Shoot I 5 years into a Cobol to Sql conversion. The Sql guys missed one of my small group of programs.

 

[Maxperson]

Regardless of whether 1e has 0 or 1 and 5e has two general rulebooks at this amount of time in production, both numbers = slow. Slow doesn't mean that they have to have the same number of general rules books.

1e and 5e are slow release rates. 2e, 3e and 4e were very fast release rates. There is a middle ground.

 

[Haffrung]

For my part, the quantity of books published isn’t disappointing so much as the narrowness of the content. Mega-campaigns and the occasional spurt of new player options... that’s about it. WotC publishes almost nothing to support DMs who run their own campaign settings and adventures. Books of lairs, encounters, small adventures, NPCs, etc are left up to amateur publishers. The content the designers teased during the Next development promotion, like systems for naval combat, tactical battles, surviving in extreme climates, etc have been released piecemeal through adventure books.

Basically, if you’re not interested in megacampaigns set in the Realms, WotC doesn’t have a lot to offer.