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

[BigZebra]

So happy to have you active and chatting about things again!

Yeah it's amazing.

 

[BigZebra]

what design is improved by / requiring a subscription? Not sure I can think of one

As for ‘designed for online play’, that to me mostly means ‘make stuff overly complicated, so you need automation’, which is the opposite of what I want

To me the real solution is make a great VTT instead of making your game unplayable without one…

Pretty much agree. But I do fear that something akin to Apple's walled garden is hard to resist for business suits. But I do hope they don't go that way.

 

[Zardnaar]

Thanks for that. We very consciously built a cycle that started with the public playtest, fed into the free rules and starter set, then segued into the annual release cycle. We built a machine to juice up D&D's marketing and make it more attractive for licensing. It turns out that when you get people excited about what you're doing, they'll also buy your stuff.

A lot of things contributed to D&D 5e's run, but fundamentally it came down to WotC's ability to get all of you <gestures at D&D fans all over the world> excited about what we were doing. The root of it all was the community. Without motivated, excited DMs, none of it works, and D&D dies.

That's the hidden, crazy superpower of TTRPGs that folks sometimes forget: A DM is the world's best brand advocate, a person motivated to go out and spread their love for the game.

Sucked me in along with the idea to go play the older editions again (all of them except OD&D).

 

[dave2008]

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.

Clearly your are wrong. That is what you may feel like was the bare min., but that just wasn't the case. Not that it really maters but he 1e MM was published in 1977, the PHB in 1978, and the DMG in 1979, so nothing new about staggered releases!

So maybe a true 50th celebration would have released the MM in 2024, the PHB in 2025, and the DMG in 2026! FYI, they said they did consider releasing the MM first as a nod to it being the first of the core books published.

 

[dave2008]

Why would this be preferable to playing Call of Cthulhu?

For me lots of reasons, but for others perhaps nothing. But that wasn't the question. The question was can it (D&D) work as horror game. And my answer is yes, easily.

Also, people flaunt Cthulhu as some bastion of horror RPG, but I didn't find that to be true when I played it. Now I admit that was like 30 years ago, but it just seemed a bit silly and ridiculous to me. I never feared my character was going to die because it was inevitable I was going to die or go insane or both! So it became much more Shawn of the Dead than at the Mountains of Madness of us.

 

[Iosue]

I just wanted to say that I really appreciated this discussion, and all its participants, for 474 enlightening replies of diverse perspectives, civil disagreement, and debate. If only every thread could be like this!

 

[Spellslinging Sellsword]

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

Because they planned poorly and got the files ready for print too late.

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 was released in January 1974, you don't celebrate your 50th anniversary on the 51st anniversary.

Clearly your are wrong. That is what you may feel like was the bare min., but that just wasn't the case. Not that it really maters but he 1e MM was published in 1977, the PHB in 1978, and the DMG in 1979, so nothing new about staggered releases!

So maybe a true 50th celebration would have released the MM in 2024, the PHB in 2025, and the DMG in 2026! FYI, they said they did consider releasing the MM first as a nod to it being the first of the core books published.

Clearly? rolls eyes

 

[eyeheartawk]

Ok, I disagree with that. If powerless is the goal that is incredibly easy to do in D&D and in 5e in particular. I can do it with no rule changes, but if you are going for a Cthulhu style horror I would make two simple changes to start: death at 0 and no magic using classes.

What classes would be left? In 5E pretty much every class uses magic. There's only a few subclasses that don't at all. Plus, like, the idea of a modern D&D party (An Aasimar, 2 Tabaxi, gem Dragonborn and Larry's Tortle/Sonic OC) is absolutely hilarious in a "horror" game. That's not a critique. It's like a post-modern performance piece really.

You know what? Scrap my criticism I want to see that.

 

[AlViking]

Right, so it's possible with the right DM, the right players, narrow bands of play and often some modified rules.

Alternately, one could just play a horror RPG that doesn't require having all the stars align to make the experience work.

D&D is really good at delivering a heroic fantasy experience. It's not a criticism that it's not as good at other genres as games designed around those genres are.

Horror always requires buy-in and the proper attitude from players and the right GM so saying it also requires it for horror is kind of meaningless to me. I think there are many ways to run the game and while DnD is usually heroic and all that, I've had games where people were paranoid, questioning everything they thought was real, running away from monsters both real and perceived. Were people actually frightened? No, of course not; it's a game. They also wouldn't have taken a horror game any more seriously.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

It's a shame they couldn't get the MM released this month, they could have at least claimed that everything came out in the Year of the Dragon.