D&D 5E 5E: Planning to Last?

[Tony Vargas]

3.5 was annoying, and the entirety of third edition lasted, what, seven years? (~2001-2008). 4E at four years? I hope part of the design is building something that will last.

How long an ed goes is more a matter of marketing and corporate goals than design. 2e and 3.5 were tottering under a surfeit of supplements years before they ended. 4e is still mechanically viable, in spite of Essentials. It's business factors that are forcing the rev-roll. WotC over-promised with 4e, and are doing so again, with 5e.

5e may very well be the last edition of D&D, at least for a while, when it fails to meet the impossible goals its been set and Hasbro shelves the line.

d20, OTOH, thanks to the open-gaming strategy, will always be there...

 

[FireLance]

No, should not be planned to last. 4e was planned to last, and look what happened!

 

[Sadras]

Along with the usual if they produced some books that dealt with
- Waterborne (focussing on underwater mechanics for spells, combat, environments,
hazards, fluff, transport underwater, fauna & flora, expanded themes )

- Currency & Economics (types of serviuces & related costs, mundane equipment
lists, furniture and grocery costs, markets & trade, merchant guilds, economic
hazards, transport costs, expanded themes)

- Open Seas (design & cost of ships, naval artillery, sailing & hazards, maintaining a
vessel, expanded themes, carrying cargo, docks and ports, heraldry, naval equipment, expanded skills)

- Knights & Castles (design and cost, staff compliment, costs, castle defenses,
maintaining a castle, expanded themes, courtly events, banquets, titles & knighting, armour preservation, hosting jousting competitions, heraldry, expanded skills)

- Cities, Towns and Villages (design, population, hazards, militia role, guilds, rogues place in society, inn and taverns, places of interest, festivities/carnivals, stalls & stands, expanded themes, expanded skills, laws & judgement, religion, education)

they would have me buying every single one, especially since silver will be the main form of currency.

 

[ren1999]

WOTC needs to put out a new stack of books every 3 years, they said. I just think that they can do it without radically changing their existing role-playing core mechanics too much. They just have to clean up, rewrite, and consolidate what they've learned. They need to remove all those duplicate powers and feats.

Now they can put out a new stack of books all the time if they'll just do an OGL the way Pathfinder does it.

 

[Yora]

How much is a stack?

 

[Transformer]

I genuinely believe that the 5e designers want it to last for a very long time. Obviously, whether 15 years from now they're still making enough money without a new edition to keep Hasbro happy is a whole other matter.

If 5e is (extremely) successful, then ideally is could be sustained for more than a decade via branching out to other genres and systems. Once the possibilities for normal splatbooks start to dry up in 4 or 5 years, WotC could make a 5e-ified D20 Modern, a 5e-ified Gamma World, a 5e-ified Scifi RPG, and so forth, with attendant splatbooks.

 

[tomBitonti]

Kind of rambly, but anyways:

Well ... do we mean "D&DNext" as a strategy for delivering evergreen content is meant to be an enduring strategy, or "D&DNext" as a set of core products is meant to remain in use for some time?

From a sales point of view, how to produce a stream of products which match the demand curve and which is enduring?

One strategy, which was partially tried with 4E, is to work very hard to capture the market (so kill 3E, kill the open license) then provide a value limited stream of products with a goal to maximize profits. When the product reaches saturation, drop it, and create a new edition.

Whether any of this is value optimizing to players is an open question.

TomB

 

[Herschel]

4E was designed to be (and is) a VERY modular system but part of the problem was that a large portion of their target market is too impatient to see a system release enough material to show all it can do and too cheap to buy it all up front were it available. How does a company balance against those issues?

 

[bloodtide]

So while you get a spike in sales every 5 years, that spike will likely dwindle, putting D&D in the death spiral it seems to be in now.

I think they simply need to figure out how to get more revenue than just from re-selling rulebooks over and over.

But I think the real problem is that RPGs just aren't big enough to generate the sort of profit Hasbro expects.

It's clear that RPGs will never make enough money for 'them'. It's 'only' a low million dollar business, not a super mega million dollar business.

They want a 'must have' product that you, well, 'must have' all the time. In short they are locked into the trading card thing: You put out a new deck of ultra rare cards every so often that everyone must go run and buy. But with an RPG once you have the core rules, you don't really need to 'must have' anything. So all the company can do is put out the core rules...again. And that is exactly what we have seen from 3e and 4e.

 

[Ratskinner]

EDIT: I forgot to say that I think it's entirely possible, if 5E doesn't meet whatever fiscal targets Hasbro has set for it, that 5E is the last iteration of D&D Hasbro puts out for a good long while. Whether they sell off the property or simply shelve it for some other time I have no way to predict.

This, I think, is what I sometimes feel/fear 5e is. I think its a "last ditch" attempt to keep the game alive as a property long enough for the community to unite for the long darkness as Hasbro shutters the tabletop RPG. Of course, I anticipate the Board games and other venues will continue to utilize the imprint in the mean time. I hope I'm wrong, but somedays I just can't shake the nagging impression that "D&D Next" is actually "D&D Last".

....where's my antidepressants?