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

[Parmandur]

Why spend money to adapt scenarios they are currently selling in their original form, when they are preparing rule conversion already. Return on investment just isn't there.

 

[Mark CMG]

The contracts they had for the artwork, excepting as PDFs or straight up reprints in their original form, might prohibit selling collections and revised versions of older material. Once they get into needing some, most, or all new artwork, it becomes less attractive for them to revisit the older material in a new form.

 

[Parmandur]

The contracts they had for the artwork, excepting as PDFs or straight up reprints in their original form, might prohibit selling collections and revised versions of older material. Once they get into needing some, most, or all new artwork, it becomes less attractive for them to revisit the older material in a new form.

As I understand it, TSR was a bit shady on creator's rights, so maybe less than one might hope.

 

[guachi]

Yikes, no thanks. Reboots and remakes are bad enough in Hollywood.

New stuff, please, not the same 80s stuff over and over again. New settings! I would love new settings!

Doesn't D&D suffer from too many settings? How does a new setting that has no discernable IP attached to it help Hasbro at all?

Jurassic Park just pulled in $200+ US domestic in a weekend. People love old stuff. People want old stuff. People pay lots of money for old stuff. I can't imagine there is a business case for multiple new settings.

 

[painted_klown]

Being a new comer to D&D (with 5E), I would LOVE to see WotC do an update/compilation of all the old (1E anyway) modules to 5E. To be honest, I would RATHER they keep the original artwork, and simply update the crunch to fit 5E.

IMO, 5E seems to be selling itself on the idea of a return to "old school". Since I missed it the first time around, I would love to catch it now.

Give the books the updated look on the outside, to fit in with the rest of the 5E material, but keep the inside as old school as they can...

IMO, YMMV, Etc.

 

[CrusaderX]

OK, I get that you want to focus on the D&D franchise as a whole and story first and foremost. I get that if we ever see splats or campaign settings, that they'll be rare. I'm OK with that. I also get that you want your stories to be big, and that for financial reasons the 200+ page hardcovers work better than 32-page modules. OK, fine. But there's still a massive gap in the D&D line that I'm worried you won't fill, which is one-shot, shorter adventures - building blocks for larger campaigns, but not campaigns in and of themselves.

I have one possible solution for you. Leaving aside an OGL, here is the idea. How about produce a series of hardcovers - maybe one per year - that compile, adapt, and update the classic adventures of past editions. I'm not talking about re-writes or re-visionings like the 4E Giants book or Tomb of Horrors. I'm talking about taking the exact same adventures, re-formatting to modern standards, and converting to 5E - and then compiling them in a series of annual hardcovers. Now honestly, I'd just as much--even more--like to see new stories. But you already have a wealth of excellent adventures that could use a paint job and be presented to a new generation.

Each hardcover would have 6-8 modules, or around 200-300 pages (maybe more, but let's not be greedy). There are any number of possible themes, but the idea is that every year you'd produce a nice book that included many adventures. You could also provide guidelines on how to play them as part of a larger campaign. Some of the work is already done for you in that the adventures are already written. It would still require a lot of work, but not as much as just creating new content. A mix of old and new art would be nice.

Some possible books:

Basic D&D Classics - Keep on the Borderlands, Castle Amber, Lost City, etc
Dangerous Dungeons - Tomb of Horrors, Tamoachan, White Plume Mountain, Tsojcanth, etc
Giants and Drow - the famous Giants-Descent-Drow-Demonwebs sequence

Etc.

Now ideally we'd still see new stories, but this idea just seems like it would work on many levels, would appeal to old and new fans alike.

Make it so, Mearls.

I would love this, and I would buy every one.

 

[77IM]

This sounds like the kind of work that could very cheaply and efficiently be farmed out to a 3rd party. I love this idea, because I want my children to play Isle of Dread and not have to muddle through the mediocre presentation and a clunky manual-conversion process.

 

[Morrus]

Doesn't D&D suffer from too many settings? How does a new setting that has no discernable IP attached to it help Hasbro at all?

I wouldn't know. I wasn't talking about helping Hasbro; I was talking about what I'd like to see.

Jurassic Park just pulled in $200+ US domestic in a weekend. People love old stuff. People want old stuff. People pay lots of money for old stuff.

And that's great for them. I, however, would like to see new stuff. New movies. New TV shows. And, of course, new D&D settings.

 

[delericho]

The contracts they had for the artwork, excepting as PDFs or straight up reprints in their original form, might prohibit selling collections and revised versions of older material.

That's a good point - one of the discussions around the Dragon archive was that a lot of the contracts involved simply weren't available any more, as TSR had disposed of or lost them. Which meant they could do an archive that was, essentially, a reprint, but they couldn't do anything new with much of that material because they didn't even know how much of it they had rights to.

(This was separate from the lawsuits from Kenzer and the rest that came after the archive was put out.)

It's not hard to imagine that TSR might have been much more careful with contracts for their adventure modules (which were probably considered more valuable than Dragon magazine), but it's also not hard to imagine that they might have suffered an accident with these, too. So WotC may or may not be able to reformat (rather than reprint) some of these.

 

[halfling rogue]

I think what this thread (and others) really indicates is that, regardless of the content, be it old or new, the real hole right now, and a real demand right now, is the shorter adventure. The module. Something that spans something like 3 to 5 levels a pop. Give us something retro or give us something brand new, give us 32 or 64 pages, whatever, just so long as you give us something.

That's what I'm hearing. (Though, that's also what I've been saying so maybe I just see it more?)

I mean, why not hire 3rd party if need be and release a year's worth (like 4-6?) of modules? You're already hiring outside help to write one big AP, why not do the same for something more bite sized? Or if AP is the only way you want to go, why not let one or two modules serve as satellites to the major AP? Or for the love of all things, why not just make public your AL encounters for home play?

Maybe we should start beating the drum. I feel like we have in a sporadic way via forums and off the cuff survey remarks, but something more organized might get heard.