D&D 5E 5e most conservative edition yet? (In terms of new settings)

[Parmandur]

That UA (and the accompanying article that adapted parts of d20 Modern to 5e) was from 5 years ago and was written by a contractor who no longer works for WotC.

Yeah, anything over 12 months old that is not in a book is dead as a door nail...

 

[Mercurius]

Generally speaking it is the most conservative in terms of product output. But it also seems that's a major factor in its success.

The logic is pretty simple. Let's say the typical buying gamer (meaning, serious fan and/or at least occasional DMs) spends $250 a year to spend on D&D stuff. Two hypothetical scenarios.

A: You put out one hardcover ($40) and one softcover ($20) and an average of $10 a month on miscellaneous stuff. That's $70 a month, $840 a year.

B: You put out one hardcover ($50) four times a year and another $100 worth of miscellaneous stuff. That's $300 a year.

In scenario A, you sell 36% of your product. In scenario B you sell 83% of your product.

Now I know that is a huge oversimplification, but I think the basic logic applies: Produce fewer things, sell a greater proportion of it, equals less "waste" and thus a more efficient business.

 

[Parmandur]

Generally speaking it is the most conservative in terms of product output. But it also seems that's a major factor in its success.

The logic is pretty simple. Let's say the typical buying gamer (meaning, serious fan and/or at least occasional DMs) spends $250 a year to spend on D&D stuff. Two hypothetical scenarios.

A: You put out one hardcover ($40) and one softcover ($20) and an average of $10 a month on miscellaneous stuff. That's $70 a month, $840 a year.

B: You put out one hardcover ($50) four times a year and another $100 worth of miscellaneous stuff. That's $300 a year.

In scenario A, you sell 36% of your product. In scenario B you sell 83% of your product.

Now I know that is a huge oversimplification, but I think the basic logic applies: Produce fewer things, sell a greater proportion of it, equals less "waste" and thus a more efficient business.

Personally, I've bought every hardcover minus one for 5E. In the entirety of prior editions, I bought 2: the 3.x PHB (honestly don't remember if it was 3.0 or 3.5...) and the 4E PHB. The current release model has gone a long way towards making each release an attractive purchase.

 

[Marandahir]

I'm still curious why Wildemount doesn't count.
Yeah, it was originally created by a non-WotC employee for their home game. But the exact same could be said about the Forgotten Realms. Does that mean it's not an original D&D world either?

You could just as easily make the argument Eberron doesn't count as it was created for a contentest and wasn't done by WotC staff.

I agree with you that Wildemount should count.

To be entirely fair to WotC, even Keith Baker would defend the enormous input Bill Slavicsek and others at WotC had in the creation of that world.

Keith may be the parent and ongoing steward of the world, but it wouldn't be Eberron without WotC's R&D working with Keith to turn it from a one-page pitch "Thrilling Tales of Swords and Sorcery" into the expansive world it is today.*

You can hear it from the horse's mouth below:
The Origins of Eberron: Bill Slavicsek

Ultimately Eberron was a collaboration between WotC and Keith, while Exandria is a world created by Matt Mercer that has been adopted by WotC. WotC certainly gave input into the mechanical crunch in the Wildemount book, but the Exandria world details were from Matt's home & streaming campaigns. Eberron didn't emerge the same way as say, Greyhawk or Mystara. It was developed and workshopped for the sake of selling 3.5e, not for the sake of being someone's private game world that spread by word of mouth (or streaming video channels, per Exandria).

*I say 1 page pitch, though it did become a 10-page revised pitch before working with Bill to refine it into a 100-page story bible. And even then, that story bible was far from what we know today as Eberron. A LOT went on in developing it once Keith got to Seattle and got to sit down with Bill, and James, and Chris.

 

[Parmandur]

I agree with you that Wildemount should count.

To be entirely fair to WotC, even Keith Baker would defend the enormous input Bill Slavicsek and others at WotC had in the creation of that world.

Keith may be the parent and ongoing steward of the world, but it wouldn't be Eberron without WotC's R&D working with Keith to turn it from a one-page pitch "Thrilling Tales of Swords and Sorcery" into the expansive world it is today.*

You can hear it from the horse's mouth below:
The Origins of Eberron: Bill Slavicsek

Ultimately Eberron was a collaboration between WotC and Keith, while Exandria is a world created by Matt Mercer that has been adopted by WotC. WotC certainly gave input into the mechanical crunch in the Wildemount book, but the Exandria world details were from Matt's home & streaming campaigns. Eberron didn't emerge the same way as say, Greyhawk or Mystara. It was developed and workshopped for the sake of selling 3.5e, not for the sake of being someone's private game world that spread by word of mouth (or streaming video channels, per Exandria).

*I say 1 page pitch, though it did become a 10-page revised pitch before working with Bill to refine it into a 100-page story bible. And even then, that story bible was far from what we know today as Eberron. A LOT went on in developing it once Keith got to Seattle and got to sit down with Bill, and James, and Chris.

On the other hand, a lot of Exandria started as official material that Mercer adapted to his home game: the gods, the races, etc...

 

[Jester David]

I agree with you that Wildemount should count.

To be entirely fair to WotC, even Keith Baker would defend the enormous input Bill Slavicsek and others at WotC had in the creation of that world.

Keith may be the parent and ongoing steward of the world, but it wouldn't be Eberron without WotC's R&D working with Keith to turn it from a one-page pitch "Thrilling Tales of Swords and Sorcery" into the expansive world it is today.*

You can hear it from the horse's mouth below:
The Origins of Eberron: Bill Slavicsek

Ultimately Eberron was a collaboration between WotC and Keith, while Exandria is a world created by Matt Mercer that has been adopted by WotC. WotC certainly gave input into the mechanical crunch in the Wildemount book, but the Exandria world details were from Matt's home & streaming campaigns. Eberron didn't emerge the same way as say, Greyhawk or Mystara. It was developed and workshopped for the sake of selling 3.5e, not for the sake of being someone's private game world that spread by word of mouth (or streaming video channels, per Exandria).

*I say 1 page pitch, though it did become a 10-page revised pitch before working with Bill to refine it into a 100-page story bible. And even then, that story bible was far from what we know today as Eberron. A LOT went on in developing it once Keith got to Seattle and got to sit down with Bill, and James, and Chris.

Mercer AND the trio of freelancers who worked on the book, all of which have worked repeatedly with WotC. And then edited by WotC, who likely also gave some input and did some rewrites.

And, again, if Wildemount doesn't count, neither does the Realms...

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

You shouldn't forget Tal'Dorei was published as setting by Green Ronin. This means Exandria wasn't an original product by WotC.

Now WotC is working for the perfect crunch, but the fluff/lore/background is practically frozen. If something we learn with 3.5 Ed is to add new crunch (feats, classes, spells, PC races, monsters, game mechanics..) is harder to be added to previous settings... I guess WotC will continue the metaplots when they start to make enough money with the multimedia projects (videogames, cartoons, some action-live production, comics..).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Early 90s, mid-90s - is there really that big a difference?

I mean, we're talking like 1992 vs 1998 so six years, yeah that's a difference. Culturally and in terms of what RPGs were being played it was huge, because that's "before the world wide web" to "huge numbers of people have the internet", and RPGers were particularly likely to.

And I don't think a single other person here has admitted that it was an extremely difficult time in the RPG industry during the 1990s. Everyone wants to pretend TSR suffered solely because of incompetence, because its a much neater, cleaner story, and features villains and has WotC as lovely bunch of saviours.

But that's not the whole story. TSR were an messy and often-incompetent company, for sure, but the double-blow of the rise of other RPGs which captured the zeitgeist of the 1990s and the "youth" of that era (such as myself), and the rise of Magic: The Gathering, which both impinged on RPG profits, and caused RPG companies to think that they had to find an equivalent of it (WW did this by licensing VtM stuff to WotC for Jyhad/VTES, god knows how much money they'd have made if they'd figured out how to do it themselves, it was pretty successful, unlike Dragon Dice), meant they were dealing with a much harder situation, more fluid, more complex, and evolving than people in the '80s or in the '00s.

I mean, all that said, the basic competence of WotC, in so many ways (not least the genius of the OGL) was an incredible contrast, so there is that. I do feel like Dancey hyped the incompetence of TSR a bit - some of what he described in shocked terms was fairly normal for a company in its death throes (warehouses full of unsold stock and so on), and he was always really good at telling a story (probably be a great DM though I dunno if he was into that).

I'm sorry if this all seems a bit needlessly contrarian, btw. I'm not intending to be. I just don't like it when stories get simplified and things which were big at the time (the rise of WW, the challenge of MtG, and so on) get removed from the story.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

post 94 TSR was definitely badly hit by the collectable card game craze, but they also made some bad decisions and had been running on the fumes of their late 70s early 80s boom for quite some time. The problem was that they were not that nimble a company, and pretty much all their attempts to diversify outside of D&D and books failed*.

I know there was the D&D cartoon, but was much else achieved by paying for Gygax to hang out in Hollywood for all that time? Cool that he got to sit in a hot tub with young starlets, I guess.


* James Lowder came on to say that novels were always profitable for TSR and WoTC. So why did they can them? His explanation was that the WoTC execs never really understood why they should be publishing books.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

You shouldn't forget Tal'Dorei was published as setting by Green Ronin. This means Exandria wasn't an original product by WotC.

Now WotC is working for the perfect crunch, but the fluff/lore/background is practically frozen. If something we learn with 3.5 Ed is to add new crunch (feats, classes, spells, PC races, monsters, game mechanics..) is harder to be added to previous settings... I guess WotC will continue the metaplots when they start to make enough money with the multimedia projects (videogames, cartoons, some action-live production, comics..).

There will be no more metaplot, trust me. With the demise of the novels, the sole remaining source of it has disappeared into dust. Remember, the Dark Sun revamp wasn't driven by the needs of the RPG. It was driven by the novels. Dragonlance's drive through sixty years of post-War of the Lance history was driven by novels too. Ravenloft is about the only setting i know whose metaplot was chiefly through the RPG. The ravenloft novels were almost all backstories for the main darklords.