D&D 5E The Audience - Do you feel like you're the target audience?

[Quickleaf]

My observation: Yeah, 5e products are better designed for usability than 1e products. But compared to stuff being produced by indie/OSR designers today, WotC's 5e products have a loooong way to go before they're as usable to me as those products.

I like the big concepts behind their work. I think many of their fantastic locations are superbly designed. I love much of the art/maps. Those things save time.

BUT... Having to write in 30-40% new content because an adventure isn't sufficiently fleshed out? Not having an index and missing an important chart in table of contents so I have to hunt it down? Gaping holes in the narrative that require in-depth reading, note-taking, reworking, and creating new connective tissue? Taking 500 words to say something that could be distilled to a paragraph? Referencing other books or other pages on the same book, requiring flipping about, when a tidbit of info could have been included inline in the text? Monster stat blocks bloated with combat info while the essential character of the monster is hidden in text? Those things require more time.

So far, the WotC products I've used have been fighting themselves in terms of usability.

I feel I'm much MORE the target audience of indie/OSR products than I am of WotC currently – largely because of (Certain) indie/OSR's products better usability. Not all indie/OSR products think about this, so I still need to be selective, but have had better luck than with WotC's products which consistently have mediocre usability.

I still have the alt cover of Witchlight and look forward to running that some day, but as a huuuuuge Planescape fan after reading the reviews for Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse I decided not to get it, so Witchlight was my last WotC purchase back in Sept/Oct 2021.

 

[Parmandur]

You know what I really miss? The module.

Most of the adventures sold by WotC are not adventures. They are campaigns. "Let's go in these goblin cave rescue our friend" you do at level 2, that's an adventure. "we need the trident of awesomeness, this pirate has it, let's infiltrate his ship and steal it!" That's an adventure. Starting at level 1-2 helping people deal with unatural weather and ending at level 10ish fighting the goddess of frost? That's a campaign.

I used to run a lot of modules - stand alone adventures, sometimes came in a series, sometimes not - that I would insert in a campaign.

Thing is, all of WotC "Campaigns" are really juat collections of modules with some semblance of a suggested order. Most individual chapters can juat as easily be removed and inserted.modularly somewhere else as any old module. Make for nice thematic sets, too. Storm King's Thunder provides modular Giant settle.ent dungeons for each type, don't need to be involved in the "story" at all.

 

[Parmandur]

Yes: I've sold a bit over $1k in stuff on the DM's Guild, with Castle Dracula (Castlevania) being over 125 copies. I've made more money on 5e than I've spent on it, as long as you count my time as free! WOTC's cut is 20%, so they've made over $200 in profit on me. If their profit margin on a book that goes to the distributor at $20-$25 is 40% ($8-$10), then they've done the equivalent of selling me 25 hardbacks. That's pretty good!
Also, I watched the D&D movie in a theater, and then again on streaming rental with my wife.

I think this is a very good example of how WotC approaches the game: they don't need to sell everyone everything, but of folks are playing the game, stuff like this will happen.

 

[Umbran]

I think this is a very good example of how WotC approaches the game: they don't need to sell everyone everything, but of folks are playing the game, stuff like this will happen.

Which is part of what made the licensing fiasco so baffling, and gives credence to the idea that it was instituted by some typical retail chucklehead who didn't understand how the community interacts with the products they create.

So glad more understanding heads prevailed after we shouted at them.

 

[overgeeked]

My observation: Yeah, 5e products are better designed for usability than 1e products. But compared to stuff being produced by indie/OSR designers today, WotC's 5e products have a loooong way to go before they're as usable to me as those products.

I like the big concepts behind their work. I think many of their fantastic locations are superbly designed. I love much of the art/maps. Those things save time.

BUT... Having to write in 30-40% new content because an adventure isn't sufficiently fleshed out? Not having an index and missing an important chart in table of contents so I have to hunt it down? Gaping holes in the narrative that require in-depth reading, note-taking, reworking, and creating new connective tissue? Taking 500 words to say something that could be distilled to a paragraph? Referencing other books or other pages on the same book, requiring flipping about, when a tidbit of info could have been included inline in the text? Monster stat blocks bloated with combat info while the essential character of the monster is hidden in text? Those things require more time.

So far, the WotC products I've used have been fighting themselves in terms of usability.

I feel I'm much MORE the target audience of indie/OSR products than I am of WotC currently – largely because of (Certain) indie/OSR's products better usability. Not all indie/OSR products think about this, so I still need to be selective, but have had better luck than with WotC's products which consistently have mediocre usability.

I still have the alt cover of Witchlight and look forward to running that some day, but as a huuuuuge Planescape fan after reading the reviews for Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse I decided not to get it, so Witchlight was my last WotC purchase back in Sept/Oct 2021.

So much this. So many OSR and NuSR products are designed as reference manuals and it makes a huge difference in usability. 4E has similar monster stat block bloat, but at least the adventures were laid out in a usable way.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Real Talk: I should not be the "target audience". I'm an entrenched gamer in their late 40s. It's my take that about half of all material should be aimed at either onramping people to take on gaming, or geared to help people start GMing. I dont have much need for published adventures, but if its been found that they are the best way to help expand the hobby, I am fine with them being the focus. I'm aided by the fact that I buy multiple games over the course of a given year, so if even 1-2 DnD releases for example scratch my itch, I am going to be fine.

It's funny, I'm a fan of 5th Edition, but I'm a terrible customer. I'm such a DIY / anti-consumer that once I have the core three books, I rarely buy anything else. The last book I bought was Tasha's!

Plummeting towards 50 and with shelves (plural) of gaming material, I'm feeling that way too. At this point, I don't need any more material, so IMO all the better if the primary game system producer is focused on onramping people to the game. There are plenty of smaller groups publishing stuff that can scratch my itch for something to read, collect, or mine for ideas.

There's a kind of academic question about whether the target audience has changed, or if they've found a format that better serves the audience.

I think 5e is singular in how well it worked, but not in the effort. I think there has always been both people new to the hobby and people well entrenched in it, and they (WotC, but also TSR) have been all over the board in serving them. TSR had some absolutely arcane basic rule sets (oD&D, B, AD&D), and some more accessible ones (staking BX as the best, even though I'll be a BECMI kid until the day I die). For WotC, 3E and 4E really felt to me like they were trying to recapture their old audience more than bring new people to the game, but I know others that feel strongly that this isn't the case.

 

[Quickleaf]

So much this. So many OSR and NuSR products are designed as reference manuals and it makes a huge difference in usability. 4E has similar monster stat block bloat, but at least the adventures were laid out in a usable way.

Yeah, definitely. I forget if it was Marshall Miller who pioneered the two-page "dungeon starter" concept that I've seen adapted and reworked in different ways (I really like Beyond the Wall's adventure playbooks), but the idea is capturing an adventure on a two-page spread. Sometimes it's imperfect, like having a "floating" list of clues without guidance/knowing how or when exactly to apply them, but you can capture a lot of information on two pages.

Most of the OSR/indie products I have are shorter than the 256-page WotC hardcover adventures, though, so while a shorter product can implement just a few usability measures well, I think there's more of an onus on larger products to incorporate even more usability features really well.

Even though I find Mork Borg to be a disturbingly chaotic masterwork of insane layout – not something I find more usable at the table by any stretch – I can see how the layout designer was looking at print magazines as inspiration. And I think that's a great idea to look outside of the RPG-sphere for layout & usability features. Since RPG adventures/campaigns are meant to be references that are actively flipped through and used at the table, I would love to see or be involved in project where the sources of inspiration are travel guides, magazines, museum/park maps, or other forms of print that we don't usually see emulated/borrowed from in RPGs.

Physical production is an issue too... if I have a book I'm going to be opening/closing/tagging a lot, I probably want that stitch-bound and not only glue-bound, and if it's big would be nice to have some color-marking on the page edges or something to help visually navigate, an included ribbon bookmark would be nice too.

But it's an economies of scale issue – when you're smaller and need X amount to hit profit targets, you can take risks that might alienate certain folks cause your audience is smaller. At WotC's scale where you want 100,000X to hit profit targets, being conservative about the risks you take makes a lot more sense, because if you lose you lose big.

Edit: Basically, I think that when it comes to usability of print products, RPGs should be setting a silver or gold standard that other non-RPG fields/publishers look to as great examples.

 

[el-remmen]

I don't think of myself as in an "audience," even though I probably in some micro one that overlaps with others.

I don't buy WotC adventures (I have everything I can ever need from previous editions and my collection of Dungeon mags) and I have never bought lore books unless there was something in there I wanted to directly lift for my own setting - and even then I look for them used and don't care which game or setting it is for. I think the last lore/location book I can remember buying new was Pirates of the Fallen Star, a Realms book from 2E days. Heck, the only reason I own Ghosts of Saltmarsh (or any of the other 5E adventure anthologies) was because it was gifted to me. That said, if they came out with another Ghosts of Saltmarsh-like revision of older adventures for 5E I'd check it out. I didn't like the maps in Yawning Portal, so I'd want to make sure it did a better job than that.

 

[el-remmen]

The other note I want to make - and this has a lot to do with my approach and game style - but I have never found that running an adventure "out of the book" to take me less time in prep than making up my own things through a mosaic of sources + my own secret sauce. That is probably because I am the type to change out treasure hoards, re-skin or rebuild or simply replace monsters and npcs to fit the setting and the ongoing sense of the campaign, and to make sure I add material directly related to character backstory and/or player interest - and also because my brain has an easier time retaining what I have constructed than what I have simply read.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I do not want setting books. I truly hope that WotC continues to produce books that are practical for running the game, rather than books that are meant to be read. I don't need books to read. I HAVE books to read. I want books to use.

So, finally, after decades of being told that nope, D&D books should be these lore tomes building massive libraries of material - what we got for most of 2e, 3e and 4e - I'm FINALLY dead square in the middle of WotC's target audience. Please excuse me for being really happy about that.

I mean, if you're happy, be happy.

I don't see how not putting things out at all makes the game better for you, tho. (and I'm sorry if others have already said that & you've answered, perhaps repeatedly.) You could always just not buy whole libraries of setting tomes, no matter how many are offered.
That's what I've always done.