Chris Perkins: Reintroducing Settings in Ways that Surprise People

WotC's D&D Story Manager, Chris Perkins, was the subject of an interview by a chap called Chris "Wacksteven" Iannitti. One of the topics covered is campaign setting books; Perkins says that they want to reintroduce settings in "surprising" ways, and that they're not guaranteed to be books. (thanks to Mistwell for the scoop)

The video is below, but if you can't watch it right now, here are the highlights as listed by pukunui on WotC's website:

• He can't talk about products that haven't been announced yet
• They value all of their worlds, as each one has "tons of fans"
• They are focusing on specific areas within settings to detail and "codify" via their story bibles
• Their goal is to "challenge people's expectations" re: sourcebooks
• They're "not interested in releasing books for the sake of releasing books anymore"
• They want book releases to be events that will "surprise and delight people"; they also want to put out books that people will actually use rather than books that will just get put on a shelf to "stay there and slowly rot"
• "One of our creative challenges is to package [setting] material - reintroduce facts and important details about our worlds - in a way that we know that DMs and players are going to use, that's going to excite them, that's actually going to surprise them. We may get that content out, but I'm not going to guarantee it's going to be a book. I'm not going to guarantee that it's going to be anything that you've seen before. But it will be something."

[video=youtube;alnwC34qUFs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alnwC34qUFs&feature=youtu.be[/video]
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[Kramodlog]

I think it's likely that most players aren't willing to buy a book more often than once or twice per year.

I think it is more.

So far, most of the products have been focused on getting people playing. That is wise at this point.

The limited places you can play in the AL is not wise. I would focus on people buying. Right now, there lackluster APs is not helping.

When a new product does get released, they want it to be useful. Thus Perkins's comments on campaign settings.

Campaign settings are useful. Perkins comment relates more to cross-branding release, I would believe.

 

[Kramodlog]

Why are you so concerned about making sure WotC makes money?

I care about D&D. It found me abandonned in the woods and raised me into the man I am today. I do not want a repeat of 4e's debacle and the two years on the shelve it spent. From the Crawford interview, it took some convincing to get executives on board the 5e train. The next shelving will be longer.

 

[Kramodlog]

It's time to either pee or get off the pot. We know, and have known for over a year, what the release schedule is going to be. It's not going to change. It's been this way for several years now. So, exactly what are you trying to accomplish? I asked [MENTION=55961]goldomark[/MENTION] exactly this question in another thread and never got an answer. So, I'm asking you. What is it you are trying to accomplish?

I gave you an answer, you just ignored it. Being critical of D&D on forums works. Look how some of the traditional fluff is back. How they changed the mechanics from 4e to more traditional D&D mechanics. Essentials was an attempt to answer those critics.

 

[DongMaster]

No it doesn't!

Look at GW as the prime example.

 

[timbannock]

Oh, no, this is absolutely true. PotA is supremely modular. But that's actually my problem. I'm smart enough to port anything to my homebrew world, should I choose to do so -- what I wanted was for the book to tell me more about interesting parts of the Realms where the adventure takes place, or more about the threat of Elemental Evil to D&D as a whole, or both, and I don't feel like it effectively does either.

The adventure is set in back country inland from the Sword Coast, and yes, it's back country that could just as easily fit into a homebrew world, Krynn, or Oerth. But who cares? It's back country, of course it is generic. It's /great/ for a homebrew game, but it tells me nothing of value about Toril.

Similarly, the villains of the adventure are cut from whole cloth. They've never appeared before. That's a good thing, but the problem is that they are citizens of Faerun in support of a threat that is entirely new to Faerun, so their backstory comes off as ungrounded. And that's a bad thing.

I'm not learning anything /new/ about Elemental Evil because the portions of the adventure devoted to the threat spend all their time developing new ties for Elemental Evil to exploit in Faerun. This does not interest me, because these ties were unnecessary to begin with. Faerun has plenty of well-grounded threats of its own; it didn't need another one.

If I'm buying a sourcebook it's because I want to learn more about its setting, but my interest in 10,000-foot-view geopolitical information is limited. It is useful to a point, but I learned a long time ago that campaign setting books are not really smart buys for me, because they don't tell me a whole lot about what's going on on the ground, which is what I really want.

This AP strategy could be a great way for dungeon masters looking for modules and dungeon masters looking for campaign settings to meet in the middle, but in order for that to happen the format has to change and we need to see more granular setting-specific content, not setting content that is so bland it could fit anywhere. The latter option only serves the module-seeking dungeon masters. Sure, it's Toril, and sure, it's detailed, but it doesn't matter.

I hope that my position is clear; my feelings are pretty complex and I think I jumped between streams of consciousness a bit in there.

This position makes sense to me; thank you for explaining!

And not to poo-poo that position at all -- it's entirely valid, nay, inescapable for some amount of the existing (and thus realistically largest) part of the audience to feel this way -- but I think FR specifically, and most of the classic D&D campaign settings in general, are pretty much as complete a product line as they can realistically be without drilling down so deep into the niche that it's just completely vanity press, fan-support style material. Maybe I'm wrong -- hopefully I am! -- but with dndclassics.com and other sources of obtaining older edition material, Wizards probably realizes that there's no sustainable way to keep saying "new" things about any given setting, so appeal to the widest audience possible to make thrilling, useful-at-the-game table scenarios.

I think Wizards is effectively done catering to the audience that wants every inch of land detailed, every member of every organization statted out, etc. etc. They want a game that gets played, because that brings in a bigger *potential* group of consumers over time, even if it necessarily kills off some of the rabid-fanbase side of their consumers. By "rabid" I mean the collectors and readers of RPG books, as opposed to the people actively playing the game. Sure there's lots of overlap there, but I for one am a fan of the reading and collecting, but am perfectly happy also not being one of those people if they aren't catering to that, so they've targeted me (an edge case) plus anyone seeking published material to plunder (DUNGEON readers, FR gamers, Adventurer League gamers, people-willing-to-do-the-porting-to-whatever-their-campaign-is gamers) which is likely a bigger group. True, they may not be as diehardly consistent a buying group...but with the publishing schedule Wizards seems to be sticking to, that's not really a problem at all.

Just my thoughts, not really a position on whether this is good or bad for the future.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I care about D&D. It found me abandonned in the woods and raised me into the man I am today. I do not want a repeat of 4e's debacle and the two years on the shelve it spent. From the Crawford interview, it took some convincing to get executives on board the 5e train. The next shelving will be longer.

And therein lies your problem. 4E wasn't a "debacle". It was a very popular game that many people enjoyed (and still do.) Just because you didn't like it and keep insisting it was a "debacle" doesn't make it true, regardless of the number of times you say it. Did the game make enough money to last 10 years on the market? No. But did the game make any money for Wizards at all? Absolutely it did. One of the issues though was that they not only released the three core books in Year One, they released the second set of three core books in Year One as well. So they shot their wad in Year One in order to get as much great stuff out to people as quickly as possible... which left Years Three, Four and Five even thinner (and thus shortening the game's publication lifespan)

And yet the idea that they're trying in 5E to at least get to Year TWO before releasing the same amount of stuff and people are giving them crap about it is amazing.

 

[Kramodlog]

4E wasn't a "debacle".

Heh. If we still need to establish that, I can understand why you won't even entertain the idea that 5e's release schedule is problematic.

 

[Mistwell]

I gave you an answer, you just ignored it. Being critical of D&D on forums works. Look how some of the traditional fluff is back. How they changed the mechanics from 4e to more traditional D&D mechanics. Essentials was an attempt to answer those critics.

Let's be utterly clear - NOBODY from WOTC reads this message board. Moderators, including the owner of this site, have repeatedly said that if your goal is to send a message to WOTC, posting messages in the forum is not the way to do it. You have so many good avenues to communicate a message to WOTC - Twitter, email, the WOTC boards, in person at conventions, letters, phone calls to customer service, Facebook, just on and on in the means to communicate with them.

If the purpose of your constant negativity and frankly vitriolic tone towards your peers on this message board is so that you can communicate something to WOTC, I am begging you please stop. It's not working. It CAN'T work. And even if it could, the success level you'd achieve would be so poor relative to the success you could see using one of those other methods I mentioned above that it simply would not be worth it due to the inefficiency of your chosen method. Plus, it's contributing to poisoning the well. It drives people away form discussing the things they like about the game, because they have to deal with a guy constantly harping on anything and everything.

 

[timbannock]

Heh. If we still need to establish that, I can understand why you won't even entertain the idea that 5e's release schedule is problematic.

4e's only point of "debacle" is that it was not a great long-term business plan for a company OF THAT SIZE. By any other RPG publisher's measure, 4e would have been a smash success that unequivocally changed the course of the roleplaying industry forever. Wizards of the Coast operates at a scale that requires long-term, smash-hit success with every single release, and that's just not sustainable for them. But *for them* is a very, very specific, highly unusual, completely unrelatable phrase to the rest of the RPG publishing industry.

 

[Umbran]

I gave you an answer, you just ignored it. Being critical of D&D on forums works.

Let's be utterly clear - NOBODY from WOTC reads this message board. Moderators, including the owner of this site, have repeatedly said that if your goal is to send a message to WOTC, posting messages in the forum is not the way to do it.

We know that nobody from WotC publicly posts here any more. But reading? Anyone could come as a guest and read these forums.

However, if your goal is specifically to get WotC to change its policies, we do ask you to stop. It means that you're not actually discussing with other users in good faith, and annoying EN World users to further your personal agenda is just pretty darned rude. If you want a soapbox, get a blog, or go e-mail WotC directly, please, and leave users here alone.