D&D 5E 5e isn't a Golden Age of D&D Lorewise, it's Silver at best.

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Again, your opinion, not shared by everyone. If people are going to call me out for not explicitly expressing my preferences as personal, I will do the same.

Having a metaplot actively makes some of the biggest settings in the game harder for a lot of DMs to run. I'd say that "it's just my opinion" isn't a valid argument when the "opinion" is making the DMs job harder.

And yet, except for Drizzt and the last upcoming gasp of Dragonlance, we're not seeing any D&D fiction. So I guess you really can't have those stories anymore.

Except for the D&D movie, too. And the upcoming Drizzt TV show. And Baldur's Gate 3. And the other recent D&D video games. And the adventures that have come out in 5e.

And, is there any evidence that there are so few novels because of WotC moving away from a metaplot? Or were they just not setting well? Or one of the other hundred reasons why there would be fewer D&D novels?

And even if moving away from the metaplot is the reason why there's not as much of that stuff anymore, that doesn't mean that it's impossible to have your cake and eat it too in this scenario. You can have D&D novels that don't advance the metaplot, just like Eberron.

 

[Parmandur]

@AcererakTriple6 boy, this took some digging, but Chris Perkins speaking at Hame Hole Con 2015 said the following, and I think this might be even more true than it was then:

Home-brew vs. published -- A great bulk of those who play D&D run homebrew settings. But of those home-brew campaigns, over half of those homebrewers do pillage from other settings ... 15% or 50% of the world they've created has hawked stuff from other worlds. They're comfortable pillaging our products for ideas. That homebrew number, I can't remember the exact percentage, but I think it's like 55% homebrew. And then it's like 35% Forgotten Realms, and then everything else ... Very few people right now, turns out, running Dark Sun campaigns. A sliver of a sliver. Very few people running Hollow World campaigns. Very few people are running Mystara campaigns. It pretty much goes Homebrew, Forgotten Realms, I think Greyhawk's at 5% ands then everybody else is at 2% or 1%.

BBS008 Chris Perkins WotC at Gamehole Con 2015 - Gaming and BS RPG Podcast

Chris Perkins from Wizards of the Coast spoke at Gamehole Con 2015 and talks about WotC's different release schedule and hints at an upcoming product!

gamingandbs.com

WotC's Chris Perkins Talks About... Everything! Upcoming Storylines, Products, Staffing, Other World

WotC's Chris Perkins, Principal Designer for Dungeons & Dragons, was at Gamehole Con a couple of weeks ago. He took part in a panel there in which he covered a lot of things - product schedules, partnerships, other worlds, story flavours, staffing, upcoming storylines, Greyhawk, and so much...

www.enworld.org

 

[Parmandur]

Except for the D&D movie, too. And the upcoming Drizzt TV show. And Baldur's Gate 3. And the other recent D&D video games. And the adventures that have come out in 5e.

And, is there any evidence that there are so few novels because of WotC moving away from a metaplot? Or were they just not setting well? Or one of the other hundred reasons why there would be fewer D&D novels?

Yup, all this. WotC has been pretty blunt that the reasoning was that they didn't want to produce mediocre novels in
-house on their own dime to try and make them a thing, which was profitable in the 90's. They want media companies to them and pay for the privilege of using D&D IP and assume the financial risk. So, Paramount wants to make movies and Larian wants to make video games, and pay WotC upfront and finance it all on their end.

Publishers aren't interested in pumping out tue-in novels, though HarperCollins was down for some Drizzt, and the pics and young adult material is happening too.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

@AcererakTriple6 boy, this took some digging, but Chris Perkins speaking at Hame Hole Con 2015 said the following, and I think this might be even more true than it was then:

Home-brew vs. published -- A great bulk of those who play D&D run homebrew settings. But of those home-brew campaigns, over half of those homebrewers do pillage from other settings ... 15% or 50% of the world they've created has hawked stuff from other worlds. They're comfortable pillaging our products for ideas. That homebrew number, I can't remember the exact percentage, but I think it's like 55% homebrew. And then it's like 35% Forgotten Realms, and then everything else ... Very few people right now, turns out, running Dark Sun campaigns. A sliver of a sliver. Very few people running Hollow World campaigns. Very few people are running Mystara campaigns. It pretty much goes Homebrew, Forgotten Realms, I think Greyhawk's at 5% ands then everybody else is at 2% or 1%.

BBS008 Chris Perkins WotC at Gamehole Con 2015 - Gaming and BS RPG Podcast

Chris Perkins from Wizards of the Coast spoke at Gamehole Con 2015 and talks about WotC's different release schedule and hints at an upcoming product!

gamingandbs.com

WotC's Chris Perkins Talks About... Everything! Upcoming Storylines, Products, Staffing, Other World

WotC's Chris Perkins, Principal Designer for Dungeons & Dragons, was at Gamehole Con a couple of weeks ago. He took part in a panel there in which he covered a lot of things - product schedules, partnerships, other worlds, story flavours, staffing, upcoming storylines, Greyhawk, and so much...

www.enworld.org

So, what people are playing and what people like are two very different things. People like the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Dark Sun, Planescape, and Ravenloft pretty much equally, but people play the Forgotten Realms way more than anything else. Which lends support to my argument that the Forgotten Realms is played not because it's more popular than the other settings, but because there are just more products made for the world.

 

[Parmandur]

So, what people are playing and what people like are two very different things. People like the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Dark Sun, Planescape, and Ravenloft pretty much equally, but people play the Forgotten Realms way more than anything else. Which lends support to my argument that the Forgotten Realms is played not because it's more popular than the other settings, but because there are just more products made for the world.

More popular for actual play of the game, which ia what matters to the people selling gaming material. An awful lot about 5E'produxt strategy is explained by Perkins there: why they stick to the Weord Coast, which is both popular and easy to port over to.Homebrew, in particular

 

[Maxperson]

@AcererakTriple6 boy, this took some digging, but Chris Perkins speaking at Hame Hole Con 2015 said the following, and I think this might be even more true than it was then:

Home-brew vs. published -- A great bulk of those who play D&D run homebrew settings. But of those home-brew campaigns, over half of those homebrewers do pillage from other settings ... 15% or 50% of the world they've created has hawked stuff from other worlds. They're comfortable pillaging our products for ideas. That homebrew number, I can't remember the exact percentage, but I think it's like 55% homebrew. And then it's like 35% Forgotten Realms, and then everything else ... Very few people right now, turns out, running Dark Sun campaigns. A sliver of a sliver. Very few people running Hollow World campaigns. Very few people are running Mystara campaigns. It pretty much goes Homebrew, Forgotten Realms, I think Greyhawk's at 5% ands then everybody else is at 2% or 1%.

Very few are running Mystara or Dark Sun, but would it be that low if they actually made those settings for 5e? 5e brought in HUGE numbers of new players and those players wouldn't have easy access(current physical product to buy) to those settings.

 

[ersatzphil]

More popular for actual play of the game, which ia what matters to the people selling gaming material. An awful lot about 5E'produxt strategy is explained by Perkins there: why they stick to the Weord Coast, which is both popular and easy to port over to.Homebrew, in particular

I suspect it also speaks to how most of D&D is played in generic fantasyland / the Forgotten Realms, and even if other settings are beloved, it's harder (at least in my experience) to get players onboard. You can bring in a first time player, tell them, "Have you seen the 'Lord of the Rings' movies? Or 'Conan, the Barbarian'? It's sort of like that", and it'll work just fine.

As much as I might love Dark Sun, I can't reasonably assign 'The Verdant Passage' to my players as homework before they make their characters. Even in the 90s, most of my interaction with that world was reading the sourcebooks and novels, and not playing with them, as much as I might have liked to.

 

[Parmandur]

Very few are running Mystara or Dark Sun, but would it be that low if they actually made those settings for 5e? 5e brought in HUGE numbers of new players and those players wouldn't have easy access(current physical product to buy) to those settings.

It surely would be more, but all else being equal, the Forgotten Realms and Serrial-Number Filled-Off Land ("here are the city states of, uh, GreyDeep and WaterHawk, and over here we have...um...Freyr's Gaye, a true hove of scum and Villainy, all along the..er...Spear Coast. Because of how pointy the trees are, yeah") are probably going to be the big playing fields. There is a lot of history that went into the feedback loop that makes the Forgotten Realms such a thing, but itnis there.

 

[Parmandur]

I suspect it also speaks to how most of D&D is played in generic fantasyland / the Forgotten Realms, and even if other settings are beloved, it's harder (at least in my experience) to get players onboard. You can bring in a first time player, tell them, "Have you seen the 'Lord of the Rings' movies? Or 'Conan, the Barbarian'? It's sort of like that", and it'll work just fine.

As much as I might love Dark Sun, I can't reasonably assign 'The Verdant Passage' to my players as homework before they make their characters. Even in the 90s, most of my interaction with that world was reading the sourcebooks and novels, and not playing with them, as much as I might have liked to.

Oh, yeah. I think a big part of the secret sauce to the FR is that it was not originally a game Setting ar all, but a fan-fiction crossover Setting that young Ed Greenwood put together so he could have Fahrlfred and the Grey Mouser met Aslan in Narnia before stumbling into the Shire and fighting with Conan. Thst D&D came along and gave this mish-mash a purpose is pretty astounding

 

[teitan]

2e came out in 1989. Are you saying it started to fail less than one year into release?

Because it actually did but not massively.