D&D General Is DnD being mothballed?

[Micah Sweet]

First world problems man. The suffering you endure, I don't know how you cope.

WotC doesn't, nor should, cater to a small subset of fans who won't increase their bottom line. Why should they?

Your desires for a faster release schedule is fair, I too miss the days of the TSR firehose . . . so many good products. But that strategy killed TSR.

WotC's decision back in 2014 to keep D&D releases slow and steady was brilliant and a part of the reason for today's unprecedented success for the game. As the game has grown more popular than they expected, they have slowly experimented with changing up the release schedule, both in volume and type of products released.

Would some of us love MORE D&D products coming out at a faster pace? Of course? But WotC not rising to your expectations isn't a foolish business decision on their part, it's not them "leaving money on the table".

You need to learn to be okay with this not being all about you. And maybe start enjoying the many products put out by third party publishers . . . if you look at the D&D community as a whole, there IS a firehose of content being released currently, it's just not all coming from WotC. And a lot of it is GOOD.

You don't have to tell me about 3pp; I buy and use a lot of it, and have no illusions about WotC being better than anyone else in quality. Their quality in so far as I am concerned has decreased in the last few years, which is sadly coupled with them finally releasing content for settings I actually care about and which they own. This is very frustrating to me.

Assuming people are incapable of doing simple math and understanding your product unless its absurdly simple is a separate issue.

And for the record, I never agreed to the ideas that WotC is making bad business decisions (they only want to make lots of money, and they are), or that they are leaving money on the table (at this point, I don't trust them to make content I'd want to buy).

 

[darjr]

Apparently Perkins had Witchlight on the back-burner since late 4E. That's a big reason why they don't go into this stuff: they did hunt that theybhad plans for Eberron way.early in 5E, but that took years to come to fruition. They have years worth of products just percolating.

Yea. It's sometimes interesting when a book comes out and people talk about some sudden shift or change based on it, not realizing how many years that book may have been around inside of WotC.

 

[Parmandur]

Yea. It's sometimes interesting when a book comes out and people talk about some sudden shift or change based on it, not realizing how many years that book may have been around inside of WotC.

Another benefit of the slow-burn schedule is that books can be (emphasis on "can be") a little less half-baked because of time stewing and brewing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yea. It's sometimes interesting when a book comes out and people talk about some sudden shift or change based on it, not realizing how many years that book may have been around inside of WotC.

Public facing is public facing. You want people to be less surprised? Post more updates.

 

[Morrus]

Last.time @Morrus out a study in the topic, it was true, I believe.

Nope. There are small companies which pay more.

 

[mamba]

Pretty easy way to see this is to examine the book credits from, say, 2016 (Curse of Strahd, Storm King's Thunder, Volo's Guide to Monsters) and then looking at the credits pages for 2022 and 2023. There have a huge number more people working on the game, to the point that different books have wholly different design teams now.

More contributors tells me nothing about how much each one contributed. Let's say they have 10 pieces of art and initially it was all one guy while now it is 10 artists with one piece each, that increases the number of names without reflecting a bigger investment.

It is better than nothing, but I was looking for number of employees working on D&D material (minus VTT and DDB). No idea if that is available though.

 

[Parmandur]

Nope. There are small companies which pay more.

Ah, my mistake for skimming: I was focused on the mean and mode, which were higher.

 

[Parmandur]

More contributors tells me nothing about how much each one contributed. Let's say they have 10 pieces of art and initially it was all one guy while now it is 10 artists with one piece each, that increases the number of names without reflecting a bigger investment.

It is better than nothing, but I was looking for number of employees working on D&D material (minus VTT and DDB). No idea if that is available though.

Forget like the artists and people just credited as contributers: I'm talking about the bigger roles like staff Designer or art editor. Each book in 2024 seems to have a different Art Director, whereas in 2016 there was like just one.

 

[darjr]

More contributors tells me nothing about how much each one contributed. Let's say they have 10 pieces of art and initially it was all one guy while now it is 10 artists with one piece each, that increases the number of names without reflecting a bigger investment.

It is better than nothing, but I was looking for number of employees working on D&D material (minus VTT and DDB). No idea if that is available though.

wait, I thought this was about investment of the D&D team and creation by wotc?

 

[mamba]

Each book in 2024 seems to have a different Art Director, whereas in 2016 there was like just one.

That leaves the following options

• each one is working less, so the total is basically constant
• there is a corresponding increase in releases (there isn't, at least not that much)
• there is a lot more art in each book (maybe in the 2024 core books, we will see, but you are talking about 2022/23 books, and I do not think they had noticeably more art)
• they spend more time on it per book (not sure why they would, but not impossible)

I am not seeing 2 and 3, at least not at the pace you are suggesting. 1 is no increase, 4 would be one, there is no way to tell which of the two it is however. Maybe they have a deeper queue now and take longer per book, not sure why they would though.

In any case, I am not seeing a strong increase in releases and I am not expecting WotC to invest considerably more in one release now than in 2017 or so, but that is all speculation at best.