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Let's take a look at the final battle in The Sunless Citadel. Per the module, the characters should be 3rd level when they have this fight. The NPCs and monsters - Belak, Sir Braford, Sharwyn, the giant frog, and three twig blights - add up to 775 XP. Under the 5e model, the number of monsters...

Thank you so much for pointing that out! Completely missed it. I have some errands to run, but when I get back I'll do a little more analysis with that in mind.

Going back to the level 12 encounter, let's pit a party of 4 12th level characters against 4 critters of equal XP value. In 5.5 that's very easy. We have 4700 xp per character. That's roughly 4 CR 9 creatures. In 5e, it's trickier. We have to halve the monsters effective XP to stay within the...

Great point! I'm literally cleaning my garage right now, but later today I'll take a look at some comps for some typical fight models.

It's interesting to consider how both the individual monsters have changed and how the encounter guidelines have changed. This is for 12th level characters. A hard encounter in 5.5 has 4700 xp of monsters per character. Let's assume a party of 4, for 18,800 xp In 5e, you'd have 12,000 xp for...

Don't know why someone would be so mad at Jeremy Crawford, but so it goes.

I honestly don't know enough to say. It all comes down to their business model, how they expect it to monetize, what kind of users they are targeting, and what users do with it once it launches.

When people are working on a game they love, in an economic environment where games are shrinking, with the message that a new product has to be added or cuts will be made, tend to just do more work. I worked on 4e while on my honeymoon because we had deadlines to hit. I spent my Christmas...

I can break things down in detail when I have time, but there are several areas in the 5.5 books that show the team was incredibly rushed. As a starting point, compare how the PHB explains interaction, exploration, and combat. How rules are explained in each section, and how each section uses...

Adding a little more texture to the new products: WotC's budgeting starts in early September. It's a process where managers submit their plans for the following year, along with how much money they need to execute those plans. Head count is a big part of that. The fact that we saw a wave of...

I think in terms of predictions, my main worry would be something like the chain that led to 4e. Here's what went down with that: 3e launches in 2000 and sells incredibly well. Star Wars d20, also released that year, is also a huge sales hit. By the end of 2001, sales have trailed off. Work on...

Oh boy, yeah. Reading about Ray's experiences just confirms that moving over to Magic back in 2020 was one of the best career decisions I've ever made.

We'll know sooner, because we'll see it based on how Wizards acts and what we see from the quarterly results calls. They just added two more products to the schedule for '25, bringing them up to six products and hitting a product per month from July onward. I have consistently heard and...

Here's a point of comparison that underlines how important it is to remember that situations change: https://icv2.com/articles/games/view/12654/d-d-4e-back-press https://icv2.com/articles/games/view/13174/d-d-board-games-keep-game-category-solid It might seem hard to believe, but there was a...

Maybe, but remember that the new rules have been heavily marketed as fully backward compatible. Things could change over time, but that's why it's important to keep updating sources and looking at how things change. It'll be interesting to see how/if things change once the 5.5 MM is out.

OK, I took a look at Drivethru. I couldn't get data for '23 yet, so right now I have only a '25 vs '24 comparison. Remember, this is for new products from January 1 to January 27: DTRPG 2025: 1,471 DTRPG 2024: 1,400 5% growth. Interesting to compare to the Guild's 14% drop. That fits into the...

This is one of the many things I love about TTRPGs and tabletop in general - there's no easy, one stop reference to figure out how the community has reacted to something. I popping into Alphastream's comment with because it dovetails nicely with my process for figuring out what's going on in the...

No hostility intended at all! I am genuinely curious to hear the answers. My experience in game dev is that it is very rare to have a plan detailed to the point that you have print slots and paper ready to go two years ahead of time, especially when you haven't yet launched the playtest for a...

Great question! I'd love to hear the thinking behind that decision.