jedavis
First Post
You don't think that even if it was a perfect update of 4e that fixed the math and sped up play it would still only reach a portion of the audience of 4e? That many would dismiss it as 4.5 and say they already bought those books?
A retread of an edition will only every capture a portion of the original edition.
Plus, the 4e numbers were not good. They started strong but started sagging quickly. Hence Essentials in the first place. They'd didn't change the entire line and design of the game just for giggles. That was the attempt to save 4e. And it failed so bad it cost the head of the D&D brand his job.
Maybe a different 4e-style product might have worked. But trying that now would be doing the same thing they've done twice before and failed at.
I dunno, man. Does anybody still play 3.0 as opposed to 3.5, PF, or other 3.x+ derivatives (meant as an honest question, not as rhetoric)? The mistake Wizards made with Essentials (in my view) was marketing it as a supplement rather than an upgrade. Yes, there would have been much butthurt. But there already was a ton of butthurt about 'essentials being 4.5', and if they were going to generate that, they may as well have gone all the way and made it true. Rather than saying "guys we goofed, here's a better version, please buy it because it will fix things with your game (and we're shifting Encounters and other official events to it anyway)", they did something more like "here's a variant with some simplified options." Not as compelling a sales pitch.
And TSR hated having two lines, and only started Basic to reduce royalties to Dave Arneson.
Here's a basic principle of book publishing: it's better to sell a high number of one book than medium numbers of two books. If you have one book and you sell 5000 copies you will have made more money than if you sold 3000 copies of two books even though with the later you sold an extra thousand copies.
Books have a high print run cost and there is an extra production cost in the form of art, design, writing, layout and the like. The more books you make the more design costs you have.
If you have two parallel but competing product lines with a simmilar audience you're halving sales of each book, which more than halves profits for each book.
If D&D is going to survive it needs to have a single core book, a set of core products that sell gangbusters that everyone buys and uses. And those profits will subsidize the rest of the product line.
... who said anything about books? Sell me a cheap enough pdf and I'll eat the cost of printing it, throw it in a three-ring binder, and thank you for the ability to add, remove, scribble on, and reorder pages. This is especially true of adventures, which are likely to be used once or twice (rather than brought to the table every session for ten years) by exactly one person (not passed around the table for reference) who, after giving it a thorough read, probably only needs a small subset of the stuff in the module (couple pages of stats, maps, and abbreviated descriptions - just enough to jog the memory) at the table to run it, while the rest of a paper copy of the module just gets in the way when actually being played. Yes, laying out multiple versions of a pdf with varying stats is annoying and time-consuming, but it's definitely much cheaper than the overhead cost of printing multiple versions of a book. Hell, if you really want to be cheap about it, sell an edition-neutral main pdf of most of the adventure, and then sell edition-specific appendices of rules-relevant material separately at a couple bucks a pop. This minimizes layout disruption from different-size statblocks and other such variances.
But whether or not this would work for Wizards is immaterial, because they've committed to 5e and they're going to see it through, for better or worse. On a completely unrelated note, anybody want to help build an open-source cross-edition adventure template library?