Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6128263" data-attributes="member: 1465">Might be... let's hope so!I am just a customer among hundreds of thousands, and I don't know what is best for WotC, but I know (or think I know) what I would buy and what I wouldn't.I've never actually bought any published adventure, but that could have been because I had other DM friends who collected shelves of D&D/RPG books, so it was always easy for me to borrow from them. Plus there were free short adventures on the WotC website during 3e years, and of course I also like making my own adventures. I guess the main selling point for a published adventure for me would be the price... I don't mind paying rulebooks a premium price. That's because I don't really collect them, but rather cherrypick rulebooks that I think I'd like to keep and use repeatedly, so it hardly makes a difference if it's 30e or 50e. OTOH knowing that I am only ever going to use an adventure once, makes me feel skeptic of spending more than 10e for an average-sized adventure.In a way, I've always thought that an essential part of RPGs is the DIY work... making up your own character material, adventures, world settings, and sometimes even custom rules, it's all part of the RPGing experience and fun. And this in a way makes it harder to have a large business for it, because a lot of gamers realize that there is not so often a real need for buying books.As for edition-bound vs edition-free adventures, I am still undecided. On one hand, it would be great to have adventures that you'd buy because of the story, maps, artwork, characters, but could then use in different editions. However, ready-to-use stats are also one reason for buying it, and if you had to stat everything yourself, you'd be tempted to think it's not worth spending the money. It depends on what is more difficult or tedious for you, writing the adventure or writing the stats?A different thing for campaign settings. In this case I'd much much prefer to have edition-free campaign setting sourcebooks, meaning the first MAIN book about a setting. A book that would remain in print forever, or be reprinted every few years with only slight editing. Such book would have all the stuff that doesn't and shouldn't really change with editions: the world layout, the history, the maps, the description of cities and kingdoms, the characters stories, the religions, the groups of power, the creatures existing in the world... all the parts that don't need stats (yes, monsters need stats, but unless they are unique to the settings, you'd find their stats in the Monster Manual of your favourite edition anyway).Then campaign supplements could be divided between edition-free fluff books detailing specific regions, and edition-specific books with NPC character stats, monster stats, spells/feats/whatever, magic items...It's not going to happen, because WotC will always prefer selling mixed fluff/crunch books so that those who want the fluff will also have to pay for the crunch and viceversa. But as I say I can only speak from my own customer's point of view, not a business point of view, and personally I know that if e.g. the FRCS and all Forgotten Realms regional books were edition-free, you could easily buy ALL of them ONCE in your lifetime, and then use them with whatever system you prefer, instead with the current edition-specific publishing habit you'd have to buy them again at every edition, and furthermore you'd have to eat up whatever butchering they do to the setting each time, exactly because they need to push unnecessary changes to the fluff and setting in general in order to follow the rules changes of a new edition. There really shouldn't be need to do like this... if "Planescape" is a great setting, it doesn't need to be re-designed just because the rules of D&D get a new edition! They just need to reprint older Planescape books. If the setting worked, change is only going to split the fanbase. Eventually, it would make more sense to re-design settings that originally failed to become popular, and see if they can fix them, instead those get dropped, while settings that succeeded get changed...But back to adventures, this is less of an issue. Take the famous "Temple of Elemental Evil", it should be a piece of cake to publish a 5e version of it, where the only thing that changes are the NPC and monsters stats, while the story remains the same.Now think of what would happen if instead they changed the story significantly, remove some NPC and add new ones, change the temple layout, modify the plot, replace magic items with new ones... would it be the same adventure? Thus why they have to do this with campaign settings?</blockquote>

Verification