Dark Sun - Player's Guide rendered obsolete

[AllisterH]

I don't think it was Darksun. I think it was Darksun, Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Spelljammer, Birthright, Mystara, Al-Qadim, Planescape, Dragon Lance, Ravenloft...

Ah, the good old days, when you could have 5 or 6 new D&D products every single month.

This is the one thing I always find assuming.

Claims that WOTC has an aggressive publishing schedule.

Have people forgotten the glory days of TSR when you literally had at least 1 new product a WEEK? (it was like comic books...every week I would check my FLGS to see what new comics and D&D stuff was in)

 

[Jack99]

I am surprised to even see a Dark Sun for 4th edition. The lavish and complex Dark Sun product line throughout the 90s was one of the major reasons TSR ended up in such a bad spot, as they kept pouring more money and development time into Dark Sun products that gamers largely just had no interest in.

I remember my christmas wish lists back then had the words "Do Not Buy ANYTHING with the word Dark Sun on the cover".

Birthright was similarly bad in that respect, but as I recall the products weren't so complex as the Dark Sun ones were.

I can't imagine the new Dark Sun will be any more popular than the old one (in fact it would have to be much less popular since less people play D&D now), and if they try to support it in a big way it can hurt them just as much as the old one.

Do you actually base these claims (bolded) on facts or just your personal opinion of Dark Sun?

 

[Umbran]

It used to be that 1 DM buys the Campaign Guide and then 1-2 players buy the Player's Guide.

Hm. As a DM, I want to have copies of all the material my players use. If I were to get into such a setting, as a DM I'd buy both the player's guide and the Campaign Guide. So, still buying two books.

 

[paigeoliver]

The claims come a combination of my personal experiences as a player of 20 years (specifically about what people were playing back then and still play today) and everything I have read about the subject. Feel free to research it, perhaps I could be wrong. However pricing of 2nd edition Dark Sun material on Amazon shows me that there isn't a lot of love out there for the setting, most of the products are priced like junk, a penny, 44 cents, etc. Only the main boxed set commands any sort of collectible price.

Do you actually base these claims (bolded) on facts or just your personal opinion of Dark Sun?

 

[DEFCON 1]

I would also not be surprised if the decision for 1 Dark Sun Player/GM book was also tied into the true member numbers of DDI. The WotC number-crunchers probably had many conversations about the relative numbers between old and new fans of Dark Sun who would actually buy the hardcover books versus the old and new fans who are already DDI members (and thus could get the DS crunch for "free".)

With FR and Eberron being the two most popular settings at the time of their releases... I would imagine the potential audience that wanted new 4E campaign material and were not yet DDI members was probably much higher than that same audience for Dark Sun. Thus you had more potential for higher book sales. If that isn't the case for Dark Sun... then they needed to figure out and decide if there was in fact enough interesting Dark Sun fluff to warrant printing both a Player's and DM's book and hope against hope that the current DDI members would buy them for it (rather than just use the DDI for their info.)

The fact that they chose not to do so and instead produce a single book leads me to believe that they think the DDI has enough members that overlap the Dark Sun audience that they would not be able to convince them to buy both books when so much of the info will be appearing in the Character Builder. Ask those folks to buy a single book however... maybe you'll get lucky.

(And as far as the question of whether the DS Creature Catalog will sell even though all of that info will be appearing in the Adventure Tools for DDI members... I would imagine that comes down to whether monster book sales are strong regardless of where else players might be getting their monster info from. Conventional wisdom seems to indicate that yes, monster books do sell better than most other books, so even one Dark Sun themed has a better chance to sell to everybody, DDI and non-DDI member alike, than what would have been a Dark Sun DM book.)

 

[Moon_Goddess]

Well Paigeoliver, I know my thoughts are naturally just my own opinion, but I've always had the opposite

My christmas list would always been, ANYthing that says Dark sun on it and under no circumstances anything that says forgotten realms on it.

So everyone has there own reactions to things.


As for the DDI thing, I have a DDI subscription, so I don't buy alot of the books, but I've already got everything dark sun preordered

 

[Jack99]

The claims come a combination of my personal experiences as a player of 20 years (specifically about what people were playing back then and still play today) and everything I have read about the subject. Feel free to research it, perhaps I could be wrong. However pricing of 2nd edition Dark Sun material on Amazon shows me that there isn't a lot of love out there for the setting, most of the products are priced like junk, a penny, 44 cents, etc. Only the main boxed set commands any sort of collectible price.

Fair enough. I was just curious. I can't speak of Amazon prices, since I never look at amazon.com. Way too expensive to use that over here. I can however point you do the large number of polls who have been held here on ENworld ever since 4e was released. After FR and Eberron there was an overwhelming majority that preferred DS as the next campaign. Now that's just here of course, and we all know that ENworld isn't a good indication of the D&D players, so maybe you are right.

 

[Jack99]

/quick derail

paigeoliver, is there a thread where your Red Box Fantasy is discussed? Search didn't turn anything up, but I could have sworn I read something, but forgot to bookmark it.

/rerail

 

[paigeoliver]

There is a brief review of it on the reviews page. Other than that there is not a thread about it. Heck, I would be glad to provide a few free copies of the (normally pay) Gamemaster's Guide and Big Book of Baddies to the first few people who ask me, provided they want to review or discuss them.

/quick derail

paigeoliver, is there a thread where your Red Box Fantasy is discussed? Search didn't turn anything up, but I could have sworn I read something, but forgot to bookmark it.

/rerail

 

[Obryn]

Like others, I'd suspect that most player-oriented cruch has been offloaded to PHB3. We'll certainly see some new races in the Dark Sun setting, but...

Races + Feats + Paragon Paths + a few Epic Destinies + a summary of how each existing race or class fits into the setting

...probably wouldn't fill a 64-page softcover...

So yeah. While I love the split Player/DM concept, it'll be interesting to see how this one works out.

-O