D&D 5E Here's a (great) product idea for you, WotC

[Jester David]

I don't see a huge market for this.

When they release something new, even if it's a sequel, they have a potential market of everyone who buys adventures for 5e. That's "X".
If they release a conversion, then they lose people who already have that adventure and don't need a second copy, and anyone who likes to convert things themselves. That's "Y".
So the audience is always going to be X - Y, making it smaller than just X and thus reducing potential sales.

They're not really adding anyone other than people who really want hard copies of old adventures. But those can be reached through PDF sales, or even Print on Demand. The extra work of conversion and reformatting doesn't seem to guarantee sales as it's an unknown how many people will buy that second copy.

I imagine if the deluxe reprints did gangbusters they would have kept making them, especially when they were releasing no other books. The fact they stopped suggests sales were not great.

 

[MerricB]

I think they learnt in the last couple of year exactly how many people would be interested in these, as they reprinted the S-series and A-series and had conversion notes in the playtest documents.

I don't think they sold well enough.

 

[Henry]

I think they learnt in the last couple of year exactly how many people would be interested in these, as they reprinted the S-series and A-series and had conversion notes in the playtest documents.

I don't think they sold well enough.

Thank you for reminding me about that! It'll save me some work. I'd still buy a proper treatment, though, just to have it all in one good-looking product, even if to give it proper treatment would also mean rebalancing treasure, too.

 

[bgbarcus]

I'd rather see print on demand from RPGNow/DnDClassics. Those old modules are trivial to convert to 5e, most of the work can be done on the fly if you have to.

 

[Warbringer]

Here's what I want.

Take The Temple of Elemental Evil Boardgame - now develop that for that the below, but keep all the boardgame stuff, drop the monster stats and rules, just have scenario objectives, motivations, goal

- Giants (G-Series) like adventure
... Give me Orcs, Giants, Dogs, Orges, and prisoners figures (exactly the same scale as the boardgame)
... Give card terrain squares for Hills terrain, Castle Terrain, Caverns
... Trap tokens, door tokens, monster stats

- Descent of Drow (D-Series) like adventure
... Drow, driders, duegar, demons, spiders, kuo-toa
... more caverns, drow city, kuo toa shrine
... some other clever little traps
- Red Hand of Doom like adventure
... Hobgolins, Orcs, Giant, Treants, Elves, Humans
... City Cards - Brindol, Forest, Abandoned Fort, Hills - maybe the cool bridge scene

Yeah, price point is back at boardgame price point ($60 ish), but I'd love these...

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

I would absolutely buy hardcovers that were collections of adventures. 320 pages would be ten 32 page adventures. A nice mix of classics and new content would go over well.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I don't think the conversion, balancing, art direction, editing, formatting, and cartography necessary to bring modules from the 70s and 80s up to the modern style worthy enough of bring printed and sold in a hardcover book is really as cheap and easy as people think. Not when compared to just making an entirely new short module that needs all of those things too, plus just additional writing.

 

[delericho]

I think they learnt in the last couple of year exactly how many people would be interested in these, as they reprinted the S-series and A-series and had conversion notes in the playtest documents.

I don't think they sold well enough.

That's a good point. If the S- and A- series had indeed done extremely well, I would have expected to see a G- or GDQ reprint. That it hasn't happened is telling.

 

[halfling rogue]

That's a good point. If the S- and A- series had indeed done extremely well, I would have expected to see a G- or GDQ reprint. That it hasn't happened is telling.

Were the S and A series' reprinted for 5e? as books? for sale?

 

[DEFCON 1]

That's a good point. If the S- and A- series had indeed done extremely well, I would have expected to see a G- or GDQ reprint. That it hasn't happened is telling.

Although to be completely fair... we should point out that the hardcovers were printed in the "throwback era" reprint design that they used for the 2E reprints, Unearthed Arcana reprint etc.-- so you wouldn't actually think of those module books as '5E' adventures... especially considering I don't think the D&D Next conversion docs are included in the products.

So *if* you were to do a G series reprint but included a conversion doc in the book *and* had the cover be in the same style as the other current 5E books, there's a chance it could do better than the S or A series, if only because more people would think it was directly compatible to 5E. Personally I don't think it would still sell enough to be worth their time doing-- especially considering Perkins just did a conversion of all of them to 4E a couple years ago-- but I do think it would probably sell better now than either the S or A series did at the time.