D&D 5E Escapist article on SCAG is Brutal.

[Hussar]

Was it Defenders of the Wild that was godawful, then? I don't think it's Tome and Blood.

Can we all agree that Complete Divine was a book full of terrible, terrible ideas?

Ah!

Tome of Magic. Tome of bloody Magic. I will never forgive that book for promising me not one, not two, but three REALLY AWESOME sets of character concepts then being designed in such a way that none of them, y'know, worked.

Really? I loved ToM (3e). Played a binder for quite a while that was an absolute blast. Had an NPC Truenamer for a long time that worked rather well too as I recall. Got a ton of mileage out of that book.

 

[Celtavian]

Honestly? I think the current setup is actually better for the game than when the focus of WotC's money-making efforts was selling D&D books. 3.5's massive pile o' books and 4e's... well, 4e (I loved 4e, and I desperately needed it to renew my interest in the game as a whole when burn-out on 3e hit, but it was a mess and kept growing into a bigger one) were the outcome of WotC needing to sell books to turn a profit on the brand.

Because if you need to sell game books to make money, you're going to keep putting game books out. Quickly - too quickly. And each one is going to need to have something in it to sell it to every group of players, because you need to make as many sales as possible of each book.

Now they don't need to do that. Now, D&D makes money by being something people want to license and use to make other media, and it does THAT by providing high-quality ideas and inspiration and by being a brand that people want to be associated with. "Hey, look at us. We inspired basically the entire fantasy genre. We're objectively the best. Come, pay us to use our name and our IP in your work, for you will profit and we will happily take some of your money to let you."

I much prefer that over Sword and Fist.

I much prefer higher quality books. There were duds. We're getting a lot of duds right now, at least in my group's opinion. We haven't liked much they've put out. No one is excited about the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. Our entire group felt Tyranny of Dragons and Princes of the Apocalypse were lackluster. I do like Out of the Abyss.

I much prefer when WotC was putting out great books like Faiths and Avatars, the Forgotten Realm Campaign Setting, and many other high quality books. Sure, there were some duds. That's bound to happen when you produce as many books as they produced. At the same time you had a lot of high quality material mixed in with the boring.

I guess we differ. I came up from way back in the day. There was huge amount of high quality material produced when making a volume of books. Same as Paizo with all their books. I'm not seeing the effect you seem to think is occurring: lower volume leading to higher quality. I'm just seeing less of a focus on tabletop materials. A much smaller, almost skeleton staff, and generally lower quality adventures and splat books that don't have me interested in spending my money on them. I used to love to buy RPG books from WotC. I'm not feeling that way at the moment.

That "objectively the best" is not true. World of Warcraft is objectively the best in fantasy video games. There are tons of other video games that outsell D&D. D&D has not made a high quality video game that has dominated the fantasy market in the same way their tabletop RPG dominated the tabletop RPG market. Their making money, no doubt. They're not making as much as they could or should using the intellectual material they have at their disposal. Their movies have been failures, absolute and complete failures, not even close to the best. Their book lines are hit or miss. Their video games have had some winners. Sword Coast Legends isn't looking like a winner. Neverwinter the MMO is a weak MMO compared to Everquest or World of Warcraft. So we will have to disagree on them being "objectively the best." They certainly inspired the genre, but they've never dominated any aspect of it save for the tabletop RPG market. And Paizo took market share from them to the point they had to shrink the tabletop RPG part of WotC and move in a different direction.

We'll see how Mearls does at keeping the tabletop RPG part of D&D alive and flourishing. So far I'm not overly impressed with their offerings other than the PHB, the MM, and Out of the Abyss. Doubt I'll buy the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. It's just not a very high quality book compared to what I am accustomed to from FR books. FR books used to be a guaranteed buy. This one is not.

 

[Tia Nadiezja]

I remember the old days. I remember enough product coming out of TSR that no store could stock it all. I remember the market being divided to the point that per-book sales plummetted. I remember TSR ceasing to exist, and us being on the edge of losing D&D for good.

I remember Third Edition and the quick turnaround to 3.5. I remember a few really good books. Then I remember quickly hitting the point where every single book had a pile of options that were either independantly broken or just plain didn't work - prestige classes or feats ot whole classes that promised to do a thing then failed to do that thing.

In every. Single. Book.

And I remember that happening FAST.

 

[darjr]

Originally WotC plan for D&D seems to have been much like WotC plan now.

 

[gyor]

Oh, the shadowcaster worked. It just didn't work well, and it failed utterly at its design goal of being substantially different from the existing magic system.

I was not not the right author to try writing a class based around a new magic system, at that point in my career. Sorry.

(I thought the binder--which I think was written by Matt Sernett, IIRC--really worked, though. It wound up not being quite to my taste, since it was more a "jack of all trades, master of none" class, and that's not my playstyle, but I thought it was the most interesting and mechanically sound of the three options. I never played with the true namer, so I can't comment there.)

If it makes you feel any better I liked the Shadowcaster, it may not have been overpowering, but it had interesting flavour.

 

[gyor]

I remember the old days. I remember enough product coming out of TSR that no store could stock it all. I remember the market being divided to the point that per-book sales plummetted. I remember TSR ceasing to exist, and us being on the edge of losing D&D for good.

I remember Third Edition and the quick turnaround to 3.5. I remember a few really good books. Then I remember quickly hitting the point where every single book had a pile of options that were either independantly broken or just plain didn't work - prestige classes or feats ot whole classes that promised to do a thing then failed to do that thing.

In every. Single. Book.

And I remember that happening FAST.

3.5e was a very flawed system, 5e is far, far better.

And I'm not asking tons books, I'm asking for 1 proper FRCG, that all. I'm not greedy.

 

[Shasarak]

Paizo, not to get too off-topic, is in the business of keeping the dead corpse of someone else's product twitching along at a reasonably attractive shamble, and the best that I can say for them is that I've always been impressed by their art and their willingness to portray diverse NPCs. Their actual game design has always struck me as uninspired at best and iteration for the sake of iteration at worst. I much prefer WotC taking its exceptionally sweet time with releasing material by comparison, no matter how annoying it is.

I have always been impressed by the fact that the "corpse" has had its effective life doubled (and counting). But then when you have a fantastic base to work with there is no logical reason why you would throw that away.

 

[ZeshinX]

I found SCAG to be a massive disappointment. I find what it presents to be quality stuff (mostly), it's just not enough. It's too scattershot and unsure of what it is (to me). It isn't particularly good at being anything. It's just...stuff. Like a series of Unearthed Arcana articles put together in a codex, then printed.

Awesome there are those getting some joy from it, and those who just like it for what it is...but this just disappoints for me. Definitely not worth dropping more than $20 on.

 

[Shasarak]

We'll see how Mearls does at keeping the tabletop RPG part of D&D alive and flourishing. So far I'm not overly impressed with their offerings other than the PHB, the MM, and Out of the Abyss. Doubt I'll buy the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. It's just not a very high quality book compared to what I am accustomed to from FR books. FR books used to be a guaranteed buy. This one is not.

As Mike said, year three is usually where they run out of ideas and start to produce a rehash.

 

[gyor]

I found SCAG to be a massive disappointment. I find what it presents to be quality stuff (mostly), it's just not enough. It's too scattershot and unsure of what it is (to me). It isn't particularly good at being anything. It's just...stuff. Like a series of Unearthed Arcana articles put together in a codex, then printed.

Awesome there are those getting some joy from it, and those who just like it for what it is...but this just disappoints for me. Definitely not worth dropping more than $20 on.

Good analogy.

There are enough nuggets of gold to torment you with what this book could and should have been had it gained the support and page count it deserved.