"Are the Authors of the Dungeon & Dragons Hardcover Adventures Blind to the Plight of DMs?"

[robus]

In my mind WotC should focus on simple linear stories set in fantastic locations. Players layer on complexity with their wild guesses and wild goose chases. There's no great need to make the adventure complex for the DM.

I find running the hardcover adventures difficult because they've packed in a lot of characters with a lot of motivations (or, worse, no motivation!) and need you to keep them all straight.

In my mind the perfect campaign + setting book would be divided in two parts (like SKT) where the first part would be getting the players immersed in the setting. Basically a homebase of sorts and a variety of quests to gain levels. The players very much in the driving seat as to what they want to do when (but of course with suitable challenge). The second half would be the main adventure tied to a character to whom they've become attached in the first half.

If it's not a setting book then a pretty linear adventure all the way through would be best. Simple and straight.

But something that's been bothering me a lot is that the published adventures don't indicate whether an encounter is intended to be easy, medium, hard or deadly. This, to me, is a key piece of information. With that I can easily adjust the encounter up or down to suit the current level of the players. Without that I'm left scrambling to reverse engineer the math and adjust if necessary. A simple icon next to an encounter would be all that's needed.

 

[Guest 6801328]

If they did that, they'd either have to be less successful as a business by having significantly higher costs without significantly higher income (by hiring enough people to perform at the current pace and level of quality, but not raising sales by the same factor because people would still be only buying the book that is "for them" enough to justify the purchase, so any book "not for them" goes unpurchased), be less successful as a business by splitting the current number of man-hours into more pieces and thus inherently reducing the time spent on each project which would impact quality, or be less successful as a business by putting out products at the current pace and with the current quality - but with each being so focused on a particular "who they're for" group that others don't buy it, thus making some potential purchasers more likely to lose interest or get frustrated because literal years could pass by design before a product comes out that has anything they are interested in included.

By this logic Toyota should only make one model of car. Because otherwise they would be...well, just cut & paste everything you wrote.

It's certainly possible you are right, but in general the business model of offering several products tuned for specific market segments, rather than a single one-size-fits-all product, has been known to be successful (dry understatement intended). When you write:

but with each being so focused on a particular "who they're for" group that others don't buy it

you are presuming (consciously or otherwise) that this currently isn't the case. It's quite possible that a lot of veteran gamers find that the current adventure paths are too targeted at beginners, and a lot of beginners find that they are too complex.

Without data on current market saturation, and why potential purchasers are not buying supplements, we can't conclude anything. Sure, it may be that saturation is near 100%, in which case they shouldn't change a thing.

But to make all of your sweeping claims as definitively true without offering any supporting evidence is a bit...cocky.

 

[SkidAce]

The early 2nd Ed Monstrous Compendium folders used this format. There are some pretty good reasons they haven't repeated that experiment.

I agree....like going to the office store and getting ring hole repair stickers....oy....

 

[Warmaster Horus]

Even with APs you need to put in some time adjusting them for how YOU want to run them. I haven't yet run into a fully plug-n-play adventure I would want to run as a home game without some significant personal DM revision.

 

[Azzy]

On that note, itd be cool to see more aps with 5l6 pregen characters that can be used as npcs should the players choose not to use them. This can be great for new players as they can choose something done for them and specifically tailored and tied into the ap at hand, and they can provide great backup characters should the first characters...ahem....retire

There are a bunch of pregens on the WotC site.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

By this logic Toyota should only make one model of car.

Actually, my logic translated to Toyota would be that they shouldn't greatly expand the number of different models of car they currently offer.

you are presuming (consciously or otherwise) that this currently isn't the case.

No. What I am actually assuming is that, given WotC reports the current model is doing well for them and that they've chosen it over methods more matching to what you've asked for, that the number of people that currently feel the books coming out aren't for them is smaller than the number of people that would feel that way if each book weren't trying to include something for everyone.

But to make all of your sweeping claims as definitively true without offering any supporting evidence is a bit...cocky.

I will admit it sounds cocky to not provide the evidence myself - but I was skipping that part of the conversation because I assumed that you, with your clearly regular visitation of a gaming news website, would already have all of the evidence I could provide (specifically, all the various times that WotC representatives have talked about how well 5th edition is doing, quarterly reports from Roll20 that show how many folks are using that site to play the current edition, and so forth), rather than because I intended to be cocky.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Never had this problem with 4th Edition, even during Encounters. We had maps, tokens, full stat-blocks on the page, online tools, and,... Oh yeah! Dungeon magazine was still around, even if it was published exclusively online. Say what you want (because you will), but 4e made running and prep for DMs easy, fun, and satisfying. Best part of 4e, first thing to be forgotten. Oh well.

Especially during encounters. Encounters adventures were these little magazine format things, like old modules, and dead easy to run. You could read the intro, read the 2-4 pages of a given encounter, and not even need to worry too much about what was between or coming up. Very linear, simplistic, scenarios. Brand-new players would sometimes step into the DM slot after only a season of play.

But easy has it's downside, too. I did not run nearly as good game sessions when I was phoning it in after a long day at work or having run a different scenario for a different table for two hours already, right before, as I do when running 5e and having to pay attention to what I'm doing...
... and, having gotten back into the swing of Empowered DMing with 5e, the 4e campaign I'm finishing out through Epic levels has also benefited from better DMing.

Does DMsguild not fill the niches for you?

No, it really doesn't.

Trees must die for my entertainment!

Seriously, though:

I've enjoyed all kinds of interesting gems from it. Abeit, there is a fair amount of wading through the drek.

We can't all go prospecting in the slush pile.

It always amazes me how often folks are concerned about the accessibility for new gamers. Perhaps the undue taint of shallowness leads me to only be concerned about my home game, but I do admire the concern so many have for openness of the hobby.

...yeah... I'm not so sure about that. Sometimes it's just an undercurrent of "back in my day..." given a little spin and a bit of polish. For instance, back during the playtest, Mike made a comment about wanting to make the game more accessible to new players, and it was something along the lines of looking/thinking back to when we were new players and what made the game appeal to us.

Because, obviously the same thing that appealed to cynical Gen-Xers listening to Pink Floyd on the new Walkman in the 80s will totally appeal to politically engaged Millennials immersed in social media on their phones, today.


yep... still cynical. ;(

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Look at the flowers . Whack. Whack. Whack. DIG. DIG. DIG. Bury. Bury. Bury.
I must say I hate the ring binder idea. I hated ring binders when pull maintenance in the army. Now you want to reboot the idea to sell me content that will go flying down the hall out of my trapper Keeper when Morrus gives me a wedige between classes. NO.

Well our personal experiences differ. I use a ring binder fore my DM's notes anyway, so it would be more convenient to interleave published material than having to flip back and forth between folder and books.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

For me the AP's are more pretty than functional in form and layout and use. You have to read the entire thing make a crapload of notes so you don't do something that contradicts with something that has to happen in 6 months. You have to work with maps in the books that are again pretty to look at not as functional as an old blue and white map that was in the detachable module cover that you could lay out flat and make clean copies of easily. Of course they don't offer the maps as a free module download to help out, you can buy a copy though fro the artist. No thanks.

Though making them in a very useful and functional format that has handouts, separate map books, etc, adds to cost and probably hurts the "I buy RPG books to read" market.

Of course I'm a fan of them creating an interesting encounter location and I'll write any story necessary into it. So I'm not the primary audience for these.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Actually, my logic translated to Toyota would be that they shouldn't greatly expand the number of different models of car they currently offer.

No, because they would still be selling just the Corolla (or whatever car it was that was their first hit.)

No. What I am actually assuming is that, given WotC reports the current model is doing well for them and that they've chosen it over methods more matching to what you've asked for, that the number of people that currently feel the books coming out aren't for them is smaller than the number of people that would feel that way if each book weren't trying to include something for everyone.

I will admit it sounds cocky to not provide the evidence myself - but I was skipping that part of the conversation because I assumed that you, with your clearly regular visitation of a gaming news website, would already have all of the evidence I could provide (specifically, all the various times that WotC representatives have talked about how well 5th edition is doing, quarterly reports from Roll20 that show how many folks are using that site to play the current edition, and so forth), rather than because I intended to be cocky.

I'm sure Toyota's early reports...when all they had was the Corolla...read something to the effect of "we're doing great and smashing all our previous records." So...by your logic...they should have stopped there.

You have very curious notions of how product lines are built, but let's think this through: If great sales are a sign that product lines should not be diversified (out of fear of increasing costs by not increasing sales) then when should companies expand their product line? When they are doing badly? That doesn't make any sense either: if you don't have profits to invest you should be focusing on making one great product, not spreading yourself thin.

Again, it's possible that WotC has data that shows their market is saturated and they're not leaving much money on the table. But that's not the same thing as their public announcements that they are selling more books than ever.