"Core" and Business Models

[Paraxis]

The good side to this is.
A: We will have fun stuff to play the game with, if the MM1 has 100 monsters in it who cares what the names of those monsters are as long as they are fun to fight and encounter.
B: By making a subscription-based game model, they are making sure a stong majority of the customer base will keep buying "Core" books, it makes them more money, if you haven't figured it out yet let me enlighten you ---The more money Hasbro makes, the more they have to support the game, the better products they produce, the nicer books look, the time before they need to put out a 5th Edition is put off.

Corporations making money is a good thing. Capitalism is a good thing.

 

[Desdichado]

So... we don't actually know that this is what they're doing after all, then.

I mean, it's not like the 3e MM had all the "classic" monsters in it either; many of them got dribbled out much later. Some of them never appeared at all except in the Tome of Horrors.

 

[hazel monday]

Corporations making money is a good thing...

...for the corporations.

 

[Desdichado]

...for the corporations.

For everyone. If corporations don't make money, that's a bad thing for their employees. It's a bad thing for the regions in which the corporations are located. And ultimately, it's a bad thing for the customers too.

 

[hazel monday]

For everyone. If corporations don't make money, that's a bad thing for their employees. It's a bad thing for the regions in which the corporations are located. And ultimately, it's a bad thing for the customers too.

That's true. I guess my point was that what's good for Hasbro's shareholders isn't automatically a good thing for me and my gaming group.

 

[Desdichado]

Ah, well that I'll grant you.

 

[an_idol_mind]

The whole leaving frost giants, etc. out thing reminds me of the early days of 2nd edition AD&D. The first volume of the Monstrous Compendium was drastically incomplete, to the point that the DM's Guide assumed that you owned the first two volumes (and the Fiend Folio, IIRC).

The silver lining to the cloud is the fact that TSR eventually realized the mistake and came out with the Monstrous Manual, which is probably the most complete collection of monsters the D&D game has ever had in one place.

So it's not like WotC can't back up and release a compilation later on if their annual core books idea doesn't work out. What they're apparently trying to do may be annoying, but it's not going to doom the game or anything of the sort.

 

[Irda Ranger]

For the PH1 in particular, though, they're not going to try this stunt to any significant degree. They're not going to leave out dwarves or wizards just so you have to buy the PH2 for their rules.

They're leaving out Druids, Gnomes, Bards and Monks though. Of those mentioned, I'm really going to miss the Bard and the Druid. They're key to my campaign setting.

Just out of curiousity---from where do we know this business model and how it will work exactly? I try to keep up with the news items, but somehow I've missed this one. Linky please?

The most recent podcast which discusses the MM.

Corporations making money is a good thing.

Corporations making games is a good thing. Money is just part of the incentive structure.

I guess my point was that what's good for Hasbro's shareholders isn't automatically a good thing for me and my gaming group.

Mmmm. Tastes like cellphone contracts ...

 

[Aust Diamondew]

Legitimate gripes are, IME, few and far between. Wizards would have to miss out some pretty fundamental monsters to call the 4e MM1 "crippled".

If the 4e MM doesn't have beholders I'll be very disappointed. But in all honesty about 2/3rds of the monsters in the 3e MM I could do without.

 

[Intrope]

This concerns me, too. 3E addressed some of the perceived problems of the 2E era. One of those problems was picking up a module and having it reference you to some book you needed to own in order to use it - this was a particular problem with Planescape, IIRC, and one of the reasons I never bought any Planescape product after the first boxed set.

I'd like to see this concern directly addressed. I'd hate to think that WoTC was in danger of making some old mistakes all over again.

It occurs to me that, if monsters/villains all have well-defined archetype roles it may be relatively easy to swap them around. Especially if MMI has a broad selection of Types x Roles. In which case, this may not be all that bad for modules.

I suspect PHB 2+ will require only PHBI to be useful; and I haven't any ideas on what they're going to put into DMG 2+ so I don't know how 'required' they'll be.

For that matter, the Digital Initiative may help here too: what if you can print any creature in any module you unlock online, whether you have unlocked it's MM? And we already know that the character generator will allow you to select things from books you haven't unlocked (you just won't get the inline explaination of what it does).

Like a lot of things, we really aren't going to know fully how this will all work until we have books in hand.