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

[Iosue]

It's still crazy to me that 2024 5E did not launch with a starter set -- or even AS a starter set.

I’m sure there reasons internally that made some kind of sense, but from the outside the timing just looks weird. Stormwreck Isle released in 2022, the same year they made the OneD&D announcement. Had sales of Lost Mines plummeted so much that a new starter set had to be put out then? But then Phandelver and Below was put out the very next year.

Why not let LMoP stand as the 2014 5e starter set for the life of those rules and introduce DoSI as the 2024 starter set? You could still release the Shattered Obelisk as a sequel to LMoP without reprinting it in the new book.

But let’s say this is something they had to do. Okay, fine. Now there’s a new starter set, using the old rules, that’s only two years old when the new rules drop. I can understand not wanting to cut that off. It might still be selling well.

But then why release a new starter set only a year later, some 8 months after the core three are released?

I’m always willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t wrap my head around this. Especially when thinking about how much LMoP drove interest in the new edition in 2014.

 

[Sulicius]

-snip-
Finally, a few other random data points:

• The new books are still behind 5e on Roll20's overall sales ranks.
• On Amazon, they are averaging far fewer reviews per day than the 5e books
• The Barnes & Noble sales ranks are 400 for the PHB and 2,000 (!) for the DMG as I write this

So, as someone considering putting a lot of money into publishing a TTRPG book, do I feel comfortable betting on 5.5? Not at all. Outside of WotC, I'm not seeing any data that shows that the game is surging. If anything, it looks like it is on a steady to strong downward slope.

Oof, that doesn’t sound great!

Where can I find Roll20 sales rankings? I am curious!

 

[mearls]

Oof, that doesn’t sound great!

Where can I find Roll20 sales rankings? I am curious!

A couple of links:

Roll20 Most Popular

Roll20 Hottest

5.5 is ahead on the hottest, which I believe looks at sales in a shorter time period, but still behind on the most popular list.

I interpret that to match my overall sense of 5.5 - it's doing fine, but it's not doing anything to fire up the audience or shift the TTRPG landscape.

 

[mearls]

But the real question for anyone else in particular about any of this is "Does it actually matter?"

Now perhaps for someone like you or Mike Shea... designers who have to decide whether or not to hitch your future designs to the 5E24 wagon or not... trying to forecast 5E24's future is only doing your due diligence. That makes sense. But for the rest of the playerbase? Does it matter ultimately whether or not 5E24 lasts as long or does as well as 5E14 did? I don't know that it does. So it's more a discussion of curiosity rather than necessity.

Exactly. I love working on TTRPGs for exactly that reason (and tabletop in general). You can never force the audience to do anything by shutting down an app or sell a game based on graphics. It's all game play.

The biggest competitor in the TTRPG space is the game that someone is already playing, even when it is an earlier version of your own game.

 

[darjr]

A couple of links:

Roll20 Most Popular

Roll20 Hottest

5.5 is ahead on the hottest, which I believe looks at sales in a shorter time period, but still behind on the most popular list.

I interpret that to match my overall sense of 5.5 - it's doing fine, but it's not doing anything to fire up the audience or shift the TTRPG landscape.

I stopped looking at Amazon rank because it is now hidden. But Barnes and Noble I should look more at.

Do you have any historical B&N data?

 

[mearls]

I stopped looking at Amazon rank because it is now hidden. But Barnes and Noble I should look more at.

Do you have any historical B&N data?

Unfortunately, no. It seemed to roughly line up with the Amazon numbers, so I never tracked it. It might be a good proxy for Amazon rank, but I'm not confident enough in it to use it that way.

 

[dave2008]

So, as someone considering putting a lot of money into publishing a TTRPG book, do I feel comfortable betting on 5.5? Not at all. Outside of WotC, I'm not seeing any data that shows that the game is surging. If anything, it looks like it is on a steady to strong downward slope.

I don't know why you need to even consider that though. As a 3PP I can put out one product that is compatible with 5e14 or 5e24. It is not like I have to chose a lane, they are in the same lane!

 

[dave2008]

I interpret that to match my overall sense of 5.5 - it's doing fine, but it's not doing anything to fire up the audience or shift the TTRPG landscape.

Honest question: does it need to? I always understood the goal of 5e24 more than anything was to maintain the status quo, not to light a fire or shift landscapes. Isn't that really the whole point of changing so little?

 

[Echohawk]

Dndbeyond numbers may be the best overall indicator but only people at wizards know what those look like.

See, that's not entirely true.

D&D Beyond's order numbering system (both the current one, and the previous one) runs sequentially, so if you buy enough digital things from WotC it is possible to track order numbers by date and come up with an estimate of the number of orders placed over time. Obviously the number of transactions isn't the same as the dollar value of those purchases, but it also isn't no data. If I do that, I get the following graph:

Those are my estimated number of orders placed per day for each of those years, subtracting my first order number from the last and dividing by the number of days in between. In the first year, 2017 (which was really only 3.5 months because they started taking orders on 2017-08-15) there were ~380 orders placed per day. That grew year-on-year before peaking at ~9320 orders per day in 2022. In 2023 it dropped slightly, down to ~8310 orders per day.

It is important to note that WotC moved to a new ordering system at the end of April 2024, and it is quite possible that the drop is simply because their ordering system now works differently. As far as I can tell, it still seems to be issuing sequential order numbers, but I can't be sure. Also, if I look closely at the order numbers on the new system, there is a peculiar disjunct at the beginning of December. From May 2024 to the end of November 2024, there appear to have been ~580,000 orders placed, which is only ~2680 per day—a massive drop from the first few months of 2024. However, in the first three weeks of December 2024, the order numbers climbed at an average ~15800 per day, which seems to indicate something odd going on. I note that that doesn't seem to coincide with the availability of the core books, since those went on sale in June 2024, during the period where orders seem to have been abnormally slow. Given that, it would probably be prudent to take the 2024 number with a pinch of salt.

 

[mearls]

Interesting data for the order numbers! You can also look at the number of registered users online at any given moment via the DDB forums. Here's what that shows for 2024, by month:

And using the Internet Wayback Machine, you can see what the registered online users looks like by year. This data is a little rougher, but I'm confident enough in it to share the general shape of the curve. First data point is 2018. I'll clean this up when I have time, maybe later today: