D&D (2024) What would change for you if Wizards started calling it 6E?

[mamba]

Early in 4e one of the developers made a statement about how 4e sold better than 3e did, but they never actually clarified what they meant by it. I think the consensus view was that they were saying the the sales at launch of 4e was bigger than the launch sales of 3e, but nobody is sure. They never released any hard sales data for 4e.

Given how early it was, and from what I have heard it was talking about the first few months of either edition. I doubt 4e outsold 3/3.5 over their respective lifetimes, but I am not aware of any official answer to this.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Given how early it was, and from what I have heard it was talking about the first few months of either edition. I doubt 4e outsold 3/3.5 over their respective lifetimes, but I am not aware of any official answer to this.

Even though MY store did, I can't say that I ever had the impression that 4e outsold 3.5. Not the core books, at any rate. I think it's likely that 4e splat books DID outsell 3.5 splatbooks, on average. IIRC, there were more 3.5 splatbooks overall, and some of them didn't sell very well at all. IME, even the worst 4e splatbook did "okay". I have no evidence to "prove" any of this, though - darn Pinkertons!

 

[cranberry]

So, like PHB (2024) vs. PHB (2014) as they plan to do?

It's my understanding that going forward after the 2024 update, they want to make periodic updates fluidly without any "markers" or lines in the sand.

So, for example, it will be like a game developer releasing a minor version update or bug fix to their software.

 

[Azzy]

It's my understanding that going forward after the 2024 update, they want to make periodic updates fluidly without any "markers" or lines in the sand.

So, for example, it will be like a game developer releasing a minor version update or bug fix to their software.

I don't know about past 2024, but Jeremy Crawford did state that they'll be using the year of release to differentiate the rule books.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I'll be honest, I wasn't planning on buying this even before the OGL/Pinkerton issues. Why? Because they are marketing it as just a few changes and updates. In other words, wasn't going to be enough of a difference to justify spending another $150 or whatever on the books. Especially when I looked at the first playtest and was kind of meh on many those changes (not bad, just not that cool). I didn't get Mordenkainen's Monsters Multiverse whatever book for the same reason. A few monster updates isn't worth the cash, not when I generally do massive rewrites to monsters anyway.

If they had marketed this as 6e, with enough serious changes to actually justify it buying it, then even if it were still backwards compatible with 5e, I probably would have been far more interested in getting it.

You aren't alone, but you also probably aren't part of any sort of majority. There will be plenty of players out there that will look at 2024E and see little difference from what they currently have, except for some edits to features that they could easily port to their 2014E game (re-written Great Weapon Master feat, re-written stealth and Hidden rules etc.) and just choose to snag those few things and incorporate them into their own game, rather than buy new books. WotC most likely knows and understands this, and is fine with it. All along they've known that not all players will pick up all the books.

But I do not believe they are doing these new books with the expressed purpose to "re-sell" to current players and get more of their money... they are doing it to get new versions of their books on their shelves that new players coming in will have as a baseline D&D that the designers are happier with. They've been doing this exact thing this entire time by incorporating errata in every new printing (and have never once implied they expected current players to "re-buy" the books now that they had these updates)... and the same could be said about 2024E. WotC will not care if a handful of players choose to just stick with 2014E... just like they said upon the publishing of 2014 5E that they were completely fine if players continued to play previous editions of D&D and not upgrade to 5E.

WotC doesn't need all our money, so they don't really care if some of us do not buy the new 2024E game. All they really are happy about (and it has been this way since 5E's release) is that we are playing some type of D&D. Because that is the best advertising for them. Happily playing any version of D&D (or indeed ANY RPG) is the best way to inspire other players to start playing as well. And no one who doesn't play the game knows what version any of us are playing, all they know is that we are playing 'D&D'... so what we ARE playing doesn't matter. And thus when those people make the choice to jump into the pool, they will pick up the current version of the books that WotC wants to be out there because it's the easiest and most talked about version available to them.

Which in this particular case will have a big change that WotC is looking for at this moment in history, which is the word 'Race' removed from its gaming vocabulary and replaced with 'Species'... done in an effort to try and distance potential negatives and miscommunications of meaning with those new players. Personally, I think even if they didn't revise the game itself fully for 2024... at barest minimum they were going to print a new version of the 2014E rules with indeed that word switch. That was happening regardless. So at that point they figured if they were going to make that big of an obvious change, they might as well make big changes to other issues of the game at the same time.

But they know perfectly well that some players won't embrace that particular change (and some will out-and-out rail against it)... so they aren't expecting all of us to follow along and buy the new books. They'd like it if we did... mainly because those of us who have been whining about the same crap rules for the past 9 years might finally get our complaints taken care of and we'll finally just shut up about them... but if not, so be it. Those who don't move on to the newer books can stick with what makes them happy and/or irritated... and all the new players can start their D&D career from the place WotC would like them to start from.

 

[OldSchoolGamerGirl]

I was going to share my store's sales numbers for 3.5, 4e, and 5e, but I can't find my old sales-tracking file from 4e days or earlier. Suffice to say, I can tell you that my store sold more of 4e than I did 3e, and much more of 5e than I did 4e, but I think that may be down to overall growth of my store, and in particular growth of my gaming section (we were more like 80% comics / 20% games until we moved ~9 years ago and had more space for games. Now we're about 60/40. I have all my 5e numbers if anyone is interested in how the 5e books have done relative to each other.

I'm disappointed that it's missing. I can find my sales for Magic sets back to 2005! But no 3e or 4e. I can find all my Pathfinder sales, but it's lumped into one number that includes core books and adventure paths, so it's kind of useless...

my understanding is that your experience is common but not universal, in general each edition has outsold the one before it.
With info coming out about TSR era that was not always true, but my limited knowledge is that 3e did outsell 2e (but maybe not 1e).
In general the hobby has been growing for 30 years.

 

[OldSchoolGamerGirl]

Imagine the uproar if they had called it 6e but then claimed backwards compatibility!

IN my fantasy world they would have called it 6e with more 4e influence but then say that they are keeping the monsters levels (instead of CR throw that out) close enough that all the 5e adventures will work with just taking the DCs and the monster stats from the new books.

 

[Parmandur]

You aren't alone, but you also probably aren't part of any sort of majority. There will be plenty of players out there that will look at 2024E and see little difference from what they currently have, except for some edits to features that they could easily port to their 2014E game (re-written Great Weapon Master feat, re-written stealth and Hidden rules etc.) and just choose to snag those few things and incorporate them into their own game, rather than buy new books. WotC most likely knows and understands this, and is fine with it. All along they've known that not all players will pick up all the books.

But I do not believe they are doing these new books with the expressed purpose to "re-sell" to current players and get more of their money... they are doing it to get new versions of their books on their shelves that new players coming in will have as a baseline D&D that the designers are happier with. They've been doing this exact thing this entire time by incorporating errata in every new printing (and have never once implied they expected current players to "re-buy" the books now that they had these updates)... and the same could be said about 2024E. WotC will not care if a handful of players choose to just stick with 2014E... just like they said upon the publishing of 2014 5E that they were completely fine if players continued to play previous editions of D&D and not upgrade to 5E.

WotC doesn't need all our money, so they don't really care if some of us do not buy the new 2024E game. All they really are happy about (and it has been this way since 5E's release) is that we are playing some type of D&D. Because that is the best advertising for them. Happily playing any version of D&D (or indeed ANY RPG) is the best way to inspire other players to start playing as well. And no one who doesn't play the game knows what version any of us are playing, all they know is that we are playing 'D&D'... so what we ARE playing doesn't matter. And thus when those people make the choice to jump into the pool, they will pick up the current version of the books that WotC wants to be out there because it's the easiest and most talked about version available to them.

Which in this particular case will have a big change that WotC is looking for at this moment in history, which is the word 'Race' removed from its gaming vocabulary and replaced with 'Species'... done in an effort to try and distance potential negatives and miscommunications of meaning with those new players. Personally, I think even if they didn't revise the game itself fully for 2024... at barest minimum they were going to print a new version of the 2014E rules with indeed that word switch. That was happening regardless. So at that point they figured if they were going to make that big of an obvious change, they might as well make big changes to other issues of the game at the same time.

But they know perfectly well that some players won't embrace that particular change (and some will out-and-out rail against it)... so they aren't expecting all of us to follow along and buy the new books. They'd like it if we did... mainly because those of us who have been whining about the same crap rules for the past 9 years might finally get our complaints taken care of and we'll finally just shut up about them... but if not, so be it. Those who don't move on to the newer books can stick with what makes them happy and/or irritated... and all the new players can start their D&D career from the place WotC would like them to start from.

People sticking to the old rule may even still buy other new books, like Adventures, so they aren't being cut off as potential customers as they were with older big fat Esition changes.

I remem wr years ago, in some Dragon+ stream where Crawford and Bart Carrol were discussing Sage Advice, and Crawford admitted that from years of collecting the same set of rules questions he had a pretty good idea of what clarifications he would want to make in new books. So smoothing over the common points of misunderstanding of ROI is a big consideration for the designers.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Are we sure that 1dnd came about because 2014 5E isn't profitable anymore?

2014 5e is quite profitable, as far as I know. I'm actually not sure why 1dnd came about, at least in the form we've seen. They could just as easily have made a "5e Essentials" style release, creating a new starting point for the game and creating new classes that re-worked existing concepts.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Imagine the uproar if they had called it 6e but then claimed backwards compatibility!

But I get what you mean - I'd have loved to see a totally different take on each of the classes, but designed to play alongside the 2014 ones interchangeably. I don't really care if you can mix-and-match elements between them (in that I'd be happy if that answer was "No") but it would be good for them to keep their primary goal of being able to run them at the same table and the same adventures as 2014.

Even more than PCs - I'd like to see a completely different take on Monsters, mechanically. If they kept the same (well, actually better would be good, but roughly the same) relative balance when it comes to Monster NAME to Monster THREAT, then the adventures would still work, too, even if the monsters "ran" differently.

But their current plan is much SAFER, which might lose people like you, who are more interested in experimentation for a chance of improvement, but it'll probably bring in higher numbers their way.

This is what I'm saying. I would have bought 5e Essentials, if only to see what I could add to my Frankenstein 5e game.