D&D General Ray Winninger on 5e’s success, product cadence, the OGL, and more.

[DEFCON 1]

I just don't get why they don't invest in the guild. It's literally free money and free product. There are so many products on that guild that should be on D&D Beyond, including expansions to published adventures, a huge amount of setting and character materials, even more monsters, and some legit good campaigns.

For example, the adventure Chains of Asmodeus, or Heroes of Baldur's Gate, would do so, so, so well on D&D Beyond. Both are fantastic at expanding the game and tie directly into BG3 (well, indirectly, but you know).

I'll never comprehend it. I don't know what the problem is.

Probably that the more product on D&D Beyond, the more lost in the shuffle some of that product gets (including their own).

They have only begun dipping their toes into 3rd party publishing... there's probably a whole bunch of sales metrics they are looking at to know at what rate to publish new material. Its probably for the same reason why WotC didn't publish tons of product every year at the beginning of 5E-- they wanted the few products they had to stand out on their own. 3rd party D&D Beyond is following a similar path to WotC's publishing schedule of 2014/2015 in a lot of ways.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm finally watching Delicious in Dungeon (I'm not a big anime consumer) and while there is a dwarf and, I guess, an elf and a halfing in the main group, the latter two haven't ever been name-checked as such.

Falin is a half-elf actually, which becomes very relevant later in the story; I won’t say more for fear of spoilers cause the show hasn’t gotten that far yet. Chilchuck’s race is mentioned a few times, most conspicuously because Senshi mistakes him for a human child. Cue the amusing banter about how he’s in his 30s thank-you-very-much and the longer-lived members of the party take that to mean he is, in fact, a child.

Notably, humans are called “tall-men” in the series. I think the implication is meant to be that elves, dwarves, gnomes, half-foots, and tall-men are all subspecies of human, so it would be weird to call one of them “humans” and not the others.

Meanwhile, the dog people in the other adventuring parties are clearly the most interesting non-human species I've seen so far, including having a better-than-human scent ability.

They don’t focus too much on species differences, but there is an episode where they all get magically race-swapped, and are surprised to see how differently the others must experience the world. For example the tall-man becomes a dwarf and is at first impressed by how much stronger it makes him, but soon realizes he has to expend more energy just to keep up with the taller party members’ pace. The elf becomes a half-foot and is overstimulated by her more sensitive hearing, and also finds herself frustrated by having smaller reserves of magical energy. Etc.

If I were someone coming to D&D through Delicious in Dungeon -- which seems like a likely vector for some new players -- the dog people would be what I'd be looking for in the PHB. (Insert standard bafflement about why 5E seems to have zero interest in dog people.)

D&D is really weird about anthropomorphic animals. I don’t get it, they’re incredibly popular, but D&D seems super averse to making them playable except as “monstrous races.” And the attempt at an umbrella anthro species in the 2024 PHB seemed super misguided, they didn’t seem to understand that making them also be celestials was distracting from the actual cool part about them, that they were human-shaped animals.

 

[darjr]

in yon olden days if you got published in Dungeon or Dragon magazine was the understanding that you owned the content you produced or WotC did? Not talking reality here, I think that turned out complicated for WotC.

Also you could use WotC IP.

 

[SkidAce]

WotC deciding to trap all those women in a cave full of mutants was way out of line, though.

I don't understand the context.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm not sure why it matters; demographics for 5E have never indicated that older players outweighed younger players, neither now nor 11 years ago.

Yeah, that’s the thing. The largest portion of the D&D player base has always been teens and young adults. The interesting insight here is that the explosion of growth in 5e was not from young folks outnumbering older players by even more, it was from women and girls (presumably of all ages) suddenly taking more of an interest.

 

[eyeheartawk]

Probably that the more product on D&D Beyond, the more lost in the shuffle some of that product gets (including their own).

Having accessible self-publishing is both the best and worst thing about the hobby simultaneously.

 

[Reynard]

Having accessible self-publishing is both the best and worst thing about the hobby simultaneously.

No, it is just a good.

 

[eyeheartawk]

No, it is just a good.

I don't really think this thread is the place to dive into this. But suffice to say, I think there is alot of "noise". Imagine being new to to the hobby and wanting a short D&D adventure so you pop into the DM's Guild, where do you start? How do you know what's any good? And that's limiting it to just DM's Guild. Imagine looking at all of Drivethru. How many self-published OSR dungeon crawls are on there? What makes them different or better than the 75,000 other ones on the site alongside them?

I'm not arguing it's all bad, I said it was a good and a bad.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Having accessible self-publishing is both the best and worst thing about the hobby simultaneously.

Which is why I cannot generate any concern about any of this.

 

[mamba]

I don't understand the context.

it’s a movie reference

The Descent - Wikipedia

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