D&D General D&D Book Prices Are Going Up

WotC announced today that D&D books will be increasing in price this year.

Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants will be $59.99 as a preorder and $69.99 thereafter. These will apparently come as physical and digital bundles, so you won’t need to buy the D&D Beyond version separately.

This space is dedicated to communicating clearly and transparently with our players- even when the topic isn’t particularly fun. Since the release of the 2014 D&D core rulebooks, we’ve kept book prices stable. Unfortunately, with the cost of goods and shipping continually increasing, we’ve finally had to make the decision to increase the price of our new release print books. We're committed to creating high-quality products that deliver great value to our players and must increase our prices to accomplish that.

This will go into effect starting with Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants and new releases after Glory of the Giants. Digital pricing is unaffected by this MSRP (manufacturer's suggested retail price) increase, as digital products don’t need to be printed or shipped. The increase also doesn’t impact backlist titles. While we can’t promise that there will never be a change to the prices of digital products and backlist titles, we have no plans to increase either.

Players who purchase the Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants digital-physical bundle through Dungeons & Dragons store can get the bundle for $59.95 for the entire preorder window, which is consistent with our current digital-physical bundle pricing. After the preorder window closes, digital-physical bundle prices will go to $69.95.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I can respect the inflation aspect, and I love physical/digital bundles in principle. But (at this juncture) I have no interest in D&D beyond, so the digital bundling feels less like a bonus and more like forcing me to buy something I don't want in order to buy the thing I do want.

 

[Oofta]

I can respect the inflation aspect, and I love physical/digital bundles in principle. But (at this juncture) I have no interest in D&D beyond, so the digital bundling feels less like a bonus and more like forcing me to buy something I don't want in order to buy the thing I do want.

This is a preorder bundle special, I doubt getting (and paying for) the digital version will be required.

 

[Oofta]

Welcome to America, where all the big companies believe in profit first.

Pretty much the same for all small and medium sized companies that want to stay in business as well. Companies that don't make a profit don't stay in business long.

There is nothing unique about D&D, they give away their core concepts for free* and anyone can come up with their own gaming system if they want. Yes, D&D has a ton of advantages but they do not and can not stop anyone else from competing in an open market.

*Although it's debatable if they could really protect it if there was a concerted effort to challenge it, but the primary result would do would be to make a lot of money for some lawyers.

 

[Parmandur]

Tasha’s is 192 pages too? Huh. Does that seem to few?

Xanathar's, too

 

[Velderan]

Tasha’s is 192 pages too? Huh. Does that seem to few?

Depends on what they do with the 192 pages really. Tasha's and Xanathar's both fit a lot of material into those pages and generally you don't hear people complain they were missing anything like they do for something like Spelljammer.

Where I find issue is something like Shadow of the Dragon Queen being only 224 pages for an adventure that devoted the first 35 or so pages to setting material compared to Curse of Strahd that was 256 pages and basically jumped right into the adventure. SotDQ barely established the BBEG and the last half of it reads like it would be a pretty meh adventure to run.

Clearly I was WotC's target demograph on that one because I own 2 copies. lol

 

[Parmandur]

Depends on what they do with the 192 pages really. Tasha's and Xanathar's both fit a lot of material into those pages and generally you don't hear people complain they were missing anything like they do for something like Spelljammer.

Where I find issue is something like Shadow of the Dragon Queen being only 224 pages for an adventure that devoted the first 35 or so pages to setting material compared to Curse of Strahd that was 256 pages and basically jumped right into the adventure. SotDQ barely established the BBEG and the last half of it reads like it would be a pretty meh adventure to run.

Clearly I was WotC's target demograph on that one because I own 2 copies. lol

So, it's not the page count, it's what you do with it...?

 

[Velderan]

So, it's not the page count, it's what you do with it...?

I'd respond with a joke, but the reply to my joke would probably be red text so I'll see myself out.

 

[Parmandur]

Tasha’s is 192 pages too? Huh. Does that seem to few?

Just thinking out loud about the offering here: Based on the preview info, Bigby's has "over 70" (~71) monsters, compared to the 224 page Fizban's 82 stat blocks, and suggesting about a third of the book will be the bestiary. Bigby has 1 Subclass as opposec to 2 gor Fizban, but has 8 Feats as opposed to 3 (including 2 1st Level Background Feats fitting the new oaradigm fie 2024 rules). If I were to wager, I'd guess there will be significantly less page count than Fizban's for ideals/bonds/traits for individual Giants, though the chapter with dungeon maps and adventure generation material is exciting in any James Wyatt joint.

 

[Parmandur]

Yeah, just checking Fizban's, and Chapter 5, Draconomicon, is 84 pages. I can well imagine the equivalent in Fizban's being half as long, given the lengthy personality charts there. That would make the difference.

Here is a rundown of the contents of Bigby from IGN, including significant details on which Monsters are in:

Everything We Know About D&D's Glory of the Giants Sourcebook - IGN

Here's everything we know about Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants, an upcoming sourcebook for Dungeons & Dragons that will focus on giants.

www.ign.com

 

[Benjamin Olson]

So, it's not the page count, it's what you do with it...?

I mean I'd argue that for campaign books fewer pages is usually better. Whether or not that's true of adventures from other publishers, the problems with WotC approach to adventure design become much more apparent the more bloat it gets.

I mean fundamentally a lot of bad habits of how adventures are presented don't become a problem when a person can read through the whole thing in one comfortable sitting, get a sense of how the various important elements relate to each other, and map the adventure out in their mind. The further you get from that scale the more of a mess you get as you need to connect elements mentioned obscurely in passing in other parts of the book. And in WotC's case, at least, I would argue that the overworked and overlarge teams creating the adventures also struggle to keep track of how all the moving pieces go together. The more pages there are the higher chance of their being elements that are only there because they served a purpose in some prior draft.

Rules supplements and setting books don't have these problems nearly so extremely, though I think the editorial quality does similarly diminish as they bloat up. Certainly I think we would have gotten a better Monster Manual (the largest 5e book) if they had just published a shorter version with the intention of a Monster Manual 2 a year or two later rather than trying to cram way more creatures than they could reasonably playtest for a new game into one.