D&D (2024) Greyhawk Confirmed. Tell Me Why.

[Micah Sweet]

While yes, not every book is for every person, you need people paying attention to your announcements for them to know which book they are interested in. If I decided to skip the January, February, March, April and May releases... am I even paying enough attention to know that June is a book I'd really love to have?

Additionally, there is an inevitable dip in quality, because the team would need to do three times as much work per year. You could maybe get that quality back by hiring more people, but considering WoTC just cut a bunch of people, that would be a hard sell, and if the products don't all sell at the same rate as the current books do, then each book needs to be more expensive to make back the additional money spent on the larger team... which makes people less likely to buy, especially since people say the current books are too expensive.

I agree, it could theoretically be done profitably, but after training the player base and the employees for the last decade on the current release schedule? I don't think it could be done in a practical sense.



Well two things.

1) You also need to account for how many books a person would need to carry with them. Traveling GMs are a thing, and the more books you need to carry, the less you will invest.

2) Again, especially for the Humanoids, Keith Baker has already released that book for 5e. I don't remember if he covered the orcs specifically, but the Ghaal'Dur were covered in quite a lot of detail. Now, this isn't true for all settings, but WoTC does have to weight the potential benefit of an "official" release against the fact that a highly respected creator is using DMsGuild (which makes them money) to sell the same product. Would they make enough money to justify the cost, especially in the face of an existing revenue stream for the same content?

I just don't think they would.

Do you feel WotC could improve their process at all, or is the status quo the best possible situation, which to me seems to be your argument here?

 

[SteveC]

Do you feel WotC could improve their process at all, or is the status quo the best possible situation, which to me seems to be your argument here?

I'm going to be honest and say: what process? There is very little WotC does that seems to indicate a controlled and managed process for their adventures. Compare that with Paizo who are planning far in advance to make adventures based on the rules and lore that's going to be released in the coming year.

And even with Paizo, there doesn't seem to be a strong sense of connectivity between a lot of the adventures that link them, so even they can improve the process.

I don't get a sense that there's much of a sense of "here's where the product line is going; let's line up adventures or other supplements to coincide with it." Even within an adventure, different sections are obviously handed to different authors who don't seem like they talk.

 

[Parmandur]

Yeah, I wouldn't be buying most of the stuff being released this year, but it IS the 50th anniversary and I AM a fanboy of DnD. If it was any other year? I wouldn't do it.

Thing is, if they put out 4 large products filled with a variety of material I am somewhat interested in per Quarter or so...I can make that binary decision. When they were putting out multiple products per Quarter, or worse per month, then it wasn't a binary review for each book, but a multi way competition that was always won by "get nothing."

 

[Chaosmancer]

Do you feel WotC could improve their process at all, or is the status quo the best possible situation, which to me seems to be your argument here?

What do you mean by process and what do you mean by improvement?

Do I think WoTC could increase the quality of their books? Sure.
Do I think WoTC could expand their team to make more digital or free content? Of course.

I'm not convinced more hardcover books is an improvement. Would it be nice? I suppose so, but only if it was more of the stuff I like. Which is kind of the problem with such an open-ended question. Would I like WoTC to make more of the things I like in a higher quality? Obviously yes. I'd also like car companies to make better, cheaper cars and the general quality of the food I buy improve. But would those things give me the desired result? Don't know. Would they be improvements overall? Can't say.

 

[Chaosmancer]

I'm going to be honest and say: what process? There is very little WotC does that seems to indicate a controlled and managed process for their adventures. Compare that with Paizo who are planning far in advance to make adventures based on the rules and lore that's going to be released in the coming year.

And even with Paizo, there doesn't seem to be a strong sense of connectivity between a lot of the adventures that link them, so even they can improve the process.

I don't get a sense that there's much of a sense of "here's where the product line is going; let's line up adventures or other supplements to coincide with it." Even within an adventure, different sections are obviously handed to different authors who don't seem like they talk.

That seems to be a very narrow definition to be carrying the weight of "WoTC has no process".

Yeah, they make stand-alone adventures that don't necessarily tie in with each other... that's not a bad thing. In fact, it could be an incredibly good thing, because if you are telling me that Paizo has created multiple, multi-book lines of interconnected adventures... congrats, you've killed any interest I have in trying to get a Paizo adventure.

I really don't like getting stuck in the middle of things without the proper context, and if I need to buy 8 books to run 8 different adventures to get the "full story"... not going to bother. I don't run adventures enough for that to be in anyway appealing to me.

Now, if you are instead saying WoTC's adventures are so different, they can't track trends or make improvements... I'd like to see your evidence that they cannot have such a process. Preferably something beyond "just look how bad they are, they are so terrible obviously they are incompetent" It may be a good point, and something they are likely to have considered, in light of their chosen strategy. Because it IS a valid strategy.

 

[Parmandur]

@pemerton
For more details from the announcement here is the rable of contents, note particularly the amount of pages for each Prime Material Setting:

And a paragraph in-character as Mordenkainen, comparing Greyhawk with the Forgotten Realms and Mystara:

 

[pemerton]

Not quite sure what to make of it, but TenSpeed Press is putting out a big "Worlds of D&D" artbook later this year, and they are covering FR, Greyhawk, Eberron, Dragonlance...and Mystara.

Based on the pages put out so far, they seem to be planning to use those 5 worlds as a foil for how different flavors of heroic fantasy can be used by a DM. So Mystara might make a little bit of a comeback, in some form.

Maybe it will? I mean, stranger things have happened!

If the Worlds of D&D book is focused on art, well there is art for Mystara, given the amount of stuff that was published for it, and that might be a reason to include it. It seems unlikely that including it will drag the book down; and it might prompt some purchases of PDFs on DriveThru.

As far as different flavour of fantasy are concerned, the differences between (1) Eberron, (2) DL/Krynn, and (3) the rest are reasonably clear. But the differences between FR, GH and M/KW are less clear to me. I know in this thread people have talked about GH including space ships and fighting robots and Murlynd, but how big a part of most people's GH play have those things been? They are not prominent in most published GH material (eg the original Gazetteer, From the Ashes, the CoGH boxed set, The Adventure Begins, the LGG).

Likewise, how much Known World/Mystara play has really focused on the more outre parts of that setting? Or hast it mostly been fairly standard D&D fantasy that uses Karameikos rather than Furyondy or Nyrond as its feudal realm, and that uses Specularum rather than GH as its version of Lankhmar?

What mostly seems to distinguish these settings is the amount of published stuff. FR has absolute truckloads, including billions of novels, that mean it is metaplot all the way down (at least for those into such stuff). Mystara/KW has its GAZs. And GH has a map and some famous names. (I'm not even going to call them named NPCs, because Mordenkainen isn't a character - it's a name that can be attached to anything, as the various publications that carry the name - Fantastic Adventure, Magnificent Emporium, Tome of Foes - illustrate.)

Sure there are aficionados who have more nuanced opinions about the strength of each setting. But I can't imagine the numbers of those people are enough to support a commercial publishing strategy.

 

[Parmandur]

Maybe it will? I mean, stranger things have happened!

If the Worlds of D&D book is focused on art, well there is art for Mystara, given the amount of stuff that was published for it, and that might be a reason to include it. It seems unlikely that including it will drag the book down; and it might prompt some purchases of PDFs on DriveThru.

As far as different flavour of fantasy are concerned, the differences between (1) Eberron, (2) DL/Krynn, and (3) the rest are reasonably clear. But the differences between FR, GH and M/KW are less clear to me. I know in this thread people have talked about GH including space ships and fighting robots and Murlynd, but how big a part of most people's GH play have those things been? They are not prominent in most published GH material (eg the original Gazetteer, From the Ashes, the CoGH boxed set, The Adventure Begins, the LGG).

Likewise, how much Known World/Mystara play has really focused on the more outre parts of that setting? Or hast it mostly been fairly standard D&D fantasy that uses Karameikos rather than Furyondy or Nyrond as its feudal realm, and that uses Specularum rather than GH as its version of Lankhmar?

What mostly seems to distinguish these settings is the amount of published stuff. FR has absolute truckloads, including billions of novels, that mean it is metaplot all the way down (at least for those into such stuff). Mystara/KW has its GAZs. And GH has a map and some famous names. (I'm not even going to call them named NPCs, because Mordenkainen isn't a character - it's a name that can be attached to anything, as the various publications that carry the name - Fantastic Adventure, Magnificent Emporium, Tome of Foes - illustrate.)

Sure there are aficionados who have more nuanced opinions about the strength of each setting. But I can't imagine the numbers of those people are enough to support a commercial publishing strategy.

Based on the passages from that book, I think they making use of having those multiple generic worlds on hand to demonstrate for newer DMs how they can subtly reflavor D&D various ways. Those "dufferences" noted in the passage in question honestly don't seem so much rooted in the history of the Settings, but a new approach they are taking to create room for some variety

 

[pemerton]

@Parmandur

We cross-posted.

I've seen that passage about magic in GH vs FR before, in some other recent thread over the past few weeks. As we both know, there is nothing in the actual published materials for either setting that makes it true, as far as the play of the game is concerned.

The page counts are FR (34), GH (32) , DL (30), Eberron (30-ish; there will be splash pages in the transition between sections), Mystara (24). That seems about right!

 

[pemerton]

Based on the passages from that book, I think they making use of having those multiple generic worlds on hand to demonstrate for newer DMs how they can subtly reflavor D&D various ways. Those "dufferences" noted in the passage in question honestly don't seem so much rooted in the history of the Settings, but a new approach they are taking to create room for some variety

We cross-posted again!

I agree about the "differences". They're made up now; they're not grounded in published material or the play it supports/leads to.

Or they're a metaphor for the difference between FR metaplot-ish play and GH "old school"-ish play (the inverted commas are deliberate there).