D&D General Ben Riggs interviews Fred Hicks and Cam Banks, then shares WotC sales data.

[Alzrius]

What are APs and advice videos and other RPG ephemera that aren't strictly "rule books" yet still strongly contribute to the RPG industry and hobby?

Auto-Tune.

 

[mamba]

The point being, if you look at things like adventures and AP's and other stuff that isn't rule books, what innovations do we see?

are we talking about rules or adventures? Novels are completely recognizable for over a hundred years, add to this that WotC frequently rehashes earlier modules and you being able to recognize them as adventures is not a surprise, I would be concerned (about WotC’s ability to produce something useful) if you couldn’t

WotC tried to do something different with the Delve format - an attempt to make modules easier to run at the table, and it was completely rejected.

what is the Delve format? The Dragon Delves one? How was it rejected? How is it even different?

 

[Hussar]

it wasn’t a comparison to what WotC does, it was trying to see where @Hussar draws the line on


It means nothing assembled from preexisting parts can ever be innovative, even if they never were assembled in this particular way in which they now serve a different purpose or better meet an existing purpose, and I disagree with that notion of ‘innovative’. If we accept it there were basically 0 innovations in the last 50 years across the world

I'm not interested in pedantic one upsmanship. I've explained what I meant. You understand what I meant. You just now want to insist on arguing terminology.

Fair enough. You win. You are 100% right.

 

[Hussar]

what is the Delve format? The Dragon Delves one? How was it rejected? How is it even different?

The Delve Format was a 4e innovation where the formatting of adventures was changed so that everything you needed to run a given encounter was always on a single page. Errr, that's not quite right. Two facing pages (whatever that's called). Meaning you never had to flip pages or reference another book during an encounter. All (or at least almost all) relevant information was right there.

Compare that to how many adventures put NPC stat blocks at the back of the book or just tell you to look in the Monster Manual without even giving you a page number reference.

 

[Dire Bare]

The Delve Format was a 4e innovation where the formatting of adventures was changed so that everything you needed to run a given encounter was always on a single page. Errr, that's not quite right. Two facing pages (whatever that's called). Meaning you never had to flip pages or reference another book during an encounter. All (or at least almost all) relevant information was right there.

Wait . . . I thought D&D has not innovated over the past 50 years . . .

 

[Reynard]

Auto-Tune.

I was initially going to balk, but actually, that is pretty spot on.

 

[Parmandur]

I think the instrument vs music analogy breaks down way too easily to be useful for RPGs.

So the rules are the instruments and the group is the jazz band. Fine. What are adventures? Sheet music? What are APs and advice videos and other RPG ephemera that aren't strictly "rule books" yet still strongly contribute to the RPG industry and hobby?

Well, yes, Adventures are like sheet music or more accurately, cookbooks.

They are tools, gjides for artists, not a final artistic product. The analogy is very apt: Yamaha, Gender, Kawai...these companies publish sheet music and product lead instructional videos for using their tools.

 

[Reynard]

cookbooks.

I think cooking is a much more apt analogy overall.

 

[Umbran]

I was initially going to balk, but actually, that is pretty spot on.

Not really. I mean, even if we ignore the insult...

Auto-tune takes a performance, and corrects it. Adventures give you material around which to base a performance.

The best musical analogy is probably sheet music - it provides the content, but the nuance still comes from the performer.

 

[billd91]

I think the instrument vs music analogy breaks down way too easily to be useful for RPGs.

So the rules are the instruments and the group is the jazz band. Fine. What are adventures? Sheet music?

Yes. It's pretty spot on as an analogy. And the people who do improv adventures would be like an improv jazz odyssey/jam session.

What are APs and advice videos and other RPG ephemera that aren't strictly "rule books" yet still strongly contribute to the RPG industry and hobby?

Music teachers, mentors who share techniques, wahwah pedals, filters, custom pickups, whammy bars, fuzzboxes, everything else that helps a musician produce the music they want to produce but isn't one of the other aforementioned things.

See, you're showing the analogy isn't really breaking down that much.