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

[Iosue]

We were selling a lot of Starter Sets and Essentials Kits through mass market stores like WalMart and Target. Short story is that Starter Set was old enough that both outlets were talking about no longer carrying. We didn't want to lose the shelf space so we agreed to produce a new version of the Starter Set. We were planning a more ambitious starter product to follow the new core books, but that was still several years away and there was no time to wait.

With the new core books, the plan was first to focus on driving adoption by existing fans in their debut year, then to push harder for new fans--with the new, more ambitious starter product--thereafter.

Thanks for the reply and insight. I figured there had to be reasons.

 

[Azzy]

It's now 2025 and they haven't released the Monster Manual. So they didn't even get the core 3 books out in the 50th year. And that's the bare minimum.

That has more to do with the limitation of the printers.

 

[MerricB]

I organize D&D at two large Seattle conventions, PAX and ECCC. As I've shared on my blog, the number of people interested in D&D is enormous. And a lot of them this past August had heard of '24 and were super excited about it. We had a pre-release copy of the PH and people were texting their friends pictures, wanted to hold it, etc. Out of many many hundreds of people I spoke to, exactly one person was negative on '24. Similarly, at ECCC earlier in the year, exactly two people were negative on D&D overall. (We helped them find one of the areas running other RPGs. I love all kinds of RPGs.)

But other RPGs don't have flumphs!

 

[Sulicius]

But other RPGs don't have flumphs!

Sounds like we cracked the reason for D&D's popularity!

But honestly, I am really appreciating the insight we are getting to the inner workings of WotC as a business from 5e's start and 5e's later years.

 

[Alphastream]

WotC hasn’t released a single D&D product after my departure that wasn’t initially planned by my team. (That will finally happen toward the end of this year.) We planned four years out, and those plans included long range forecasts that were reviewed by the print production team, among many others. Planning for the new PHB began in late 2020 and we were advised, even then, our forecast was large enough that the job would almost certainly require multiple printers unless we could send the book to press much earlier than usual. And yes, we usually reserved “slots” at various printers at least a year in advance. We didn’t know the final margin on any book until around a year before it was printed, but we made educated estimates of margins long before that (and those estimates factored in things like rising paper costs). In my time on D&D, these initial estimates significantly deviated from the final margins just once, and that was a dice product.

Ray, as the architect of the 2024 edition, can you speak to what the impetus was for launching the new edition in 2020? Were sales starting to lessen that early in, or was something else the driver? (To be clear, nothing historically wrong with sales flattening... it's amazingly positive relative to D&D's history.)

 

[Alphastream]

But other RPGs don't have flumphs!

This is the biggest impediment all other RPGs must contend with. It weakens every other RPG out there, and I admire the courage of those companies to live in a flumph-less world. I'm running a Deadlands campaign, and look, not a moment doesn't go by when I think, "that tumbleweed could have been a flumph."

 

[michaeljpastor]

It's now 2025 and they haven't released the Monster Manual. So they didn't even get the core 3 books out in the 50th year. And that's the bare minimum.

Technically they're only 3 weeks late from hitting the 50th year, as D&D was not released until the last week of January, if I have my dates correct. So we are just concluding the 50th year now.

 

[Clint_L]

Heh. I just had a dad donate TEN copies of the 2014 PHB . . . my afterschool group isn't switching up anytime soon!

Fair enough, but WotC effectively donated infinite PHB, DMGs, MMs and a bunch of other stuff besides to my club years ago.

 

[Alphastream]

Technically they're only 3 weeks late from hitting the 50th year, as D&D was not released until the last week of January, if I have my dates correct. So we are just concluding the 50th year now.

It is a bit hard to say, "the 2025 Monster Manual for the 2024 revision of D&D," as I did in today's video. Whew. I had to actually refilm it because I said it wrong and didn't notice.

 

[BigZebra]

That's wild! And a huge blow to the bottom line. I wonder if the product was so far behind schedule that they had to scatter printing across the world to get stuff out on time.

That might be where the idea of multiple print runs come in.

My 5.5 PHB is printed in Belgium (I live in Denmark).