D&D 5E Light release schedule: More harm than good?

[Fildrigar]

I found the 3e launch list. Here's where we were through 2 months after the release of the 3 core rulebooks…

Character Sheets
Dungeons & Dragons Adventure Game
Player's Handbook
Dungeon Master Screen
Dungeon Master's Guide
*Gazetteer
*Pool of Radiance: Attack on Myth Drannor
*Sunless Citadel
*Into the Dragon's Lair
Monster Manual
*Forge of Fury
*Living Greyhawk Gazetteer
*Diablo II: Diablerie
*Hero Builder's Guidebook

In comparison, here's 5th edition…

Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set
Player's Handbook
Hoard of the Dragon Queen
Monster Manual
The Rise of Tiamat
Dungeon Master's Guide
Deluxe DM Screen

I've starred the ones that are directly in common.

Gazetteer was a 32 page preview of the later Living Greyhawk Gazetteer.
Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury were 32 page adventures.
Pool of Radiance and Into the Dragon's Lair were clearly 2e products hastily and sloppily converted over to 3e.
Diablo 2 was best completely ignored. Waste of paper.
Hero Builders Guidebook ( Look, extra details about the things you can buy from the PHB! Look, a small handful of feats that you're not going to care about once the OP feats of the splat books start coming out! )
A lot of the early 3e releases were pretty underwhelming.

 

[delericho]

Gazetteer was a 32 page preview of the later Living Greyhawk Gazetteer.
Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury were 32 page adventures.
Diablo 2 was best completely ignored. Waste of paper.
Hero Builders Guidebook ( Look, extra details about the things you can buy from the PHB! Look, a small handful of feats that you're not going to care about once the OP feats of the splat books start coming out! )
A lot of the early 3e releases were pretty underwhelming.

And a fair number of people have found the two "Tyranny of Dragons" adventures underwhelming. Because quality is so subjective, in comparisons of this sort it's best to stick to the volume of releases and leave qualitative assessments aside.

Pool of Radiance and Into the Dragon's Lair were clearly 2e products hastily and sloppily converted over to 3e.

Where I will agree here is that if these two adventures are to be counted with 3e, then the four 5e 'playtest' adventures should also be included in the latter list - in both cases they're products that exist for the edition but have imperfect rules content (and understandably so, in both cases).

But, for me, the biggest lost for 5e is the two magazines. Simply restarting those would go a very long way to correcting any perceived lack of support.

(Well, I say "simply"... I rather suspect it's something that's easily said but not so easily done.)

 

[Iosue]

While there are probably other issues as well, such as Chris Perkins being busy getting their major storylines worked out, one major problem holding up the magazines is figuring out a delivery system. With DDI, it was simple: subscribe to DDI and you get the magazines. Now they have figure out what they want to do: expand DDI to cover 5e? Use D&D Classics? A new, separate subscription system, and if so, what other goodies could and should they package with it? This is another area where the deal with Trapdoor falling through might have given them a set-back.

 

[Hussar]

I have to admit, I think that using the DDI to produce dungeon and dragon is likely the way we will see those magazines again. We are not going to see a print version again, it's just too much money for far too little return. I mean, heck, even Paizo doesn't produce a magazine. If you ever want to watch someone's head explode, tap [MENTION=42043]Eric[/MENTION] Mona on the shoulder and ask him about magazine distribution. It's pretty funny in a rather alarming sort of way. So, no, print mags are not coming back. But maybe a DDI type setup with POD would work nicely.

 

[Dire Bare]

What I'd love to see is the new "Dragon Monthly", a hybrid between classic magazine style and the Pathfinder Adventure Path monthly product. One adventure a month, several other articles that expand D&D game elements and/or story, some short fiction, and advertisements to make the whole thing more affordable. Put it into FLGS's, offer print and/or ebook subscriptions, and POD options.

Dungeon Magazine becomes simply "Dungeon Adventures" and is an online collection of every single official D&D adventure ever, with frequent updates of print/ebook adventures (like Tyranny of Dragons and Elemental Evil) and other adventures released only online (with POD options available).

Yeah, I'd love to see that!

 

[delericho]

I have to admit, I think that using the DDI to produce dungeon and dragon is likely the way we will see those magazines again. We are not going to see a print version again, it's just too much money for far too little return.

I generally concur on both these points. Unfortunately, the more time that passes the less confident I am that we'll see them back in any form - and I started from a position of doubting they'd return from the hiatus. (I didn't doubt WotC's intentions to bring them back, but there's always a gap between intention and execution.)

The big issue, as I see it, is that you need a certain critical mass of subscribers to make something like this work. I don't think individual issue sales from dndclassics would do it. And while the 4e DDI did have the numbers, the truth is that lots of people subscribed for lots of different reasons - some wanted the mags, some wanted the tools, some required everything, and for some it was just inertia - they'd subscribed and never bothered to unsubscribe.

But a new subscription service will therefore have problems, because at present there aren't any 5e tools. So will there be enough new subscribers to justify having a couple of people working full time on just the mags? Especially when they could be working on other, more valuable, things?

(Forgot to say: while they can set this up as a continuation of the 4e DDI, and get to the required subscriber base that way, the 4e DDI surely must be gradually bleeding subscribers by now - heading downwards towards a point where only the remaining 4e fans (who won't be interested in 5e mags anyway) and the 'inertia' subscribers are left. The longer they go before resuming the mags, the more of the rest they'll lose, and so the harder it will be to build it back up.)

 

[Zardnaar]

Gazetteer was a 32 page preview of the later Living Greyhawk Gazetteer.
Sunless Citadel and Forge of Fury were 32 page adventures.
Pool of Radiance and Into the Dragon's Lair were clearly 2e products hastily and sloppily converted over to 3e.
Diablo 2 was best completely ignored. Waste of paper.
Hero Builders Guidebook ( Look, extra details about the things you can buy from the PHB! Look, a small handful of feats that you're not going to care about once the OP feats of the splat books start coming out! )
A lot of the early 3e releases were pretty underwhelming.

Also had Dungeon and Dragon+ 3PP.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I'd love a print Dungeon and Dragon. But that isn't happening most likely. So I'll accept a PDF that I could read on my tablet or laptop. Something that I have to subscribe to in order to keep access is much less appealing and I'd probably pass on it.

 

[Hussar]

I'd love a print Dungeon and Dragon. But that isn't happening most likely. So I'll accept a PDF that I could read on my tablet or laptop. Something that I have to subscribe to in order to keep access is much less appealing and I'd probably pass on it.

To be fair, that's exactly what DDi Dungeon and Dragon were. You didn't have to keep subscribing at all, except to get new issues of course. You could easily download everything to read offline. I have pretty much all the articles I wanted on my hard drive. It was only the tools that you needed to be subscribed to to use.

Now, if they would print in single column format so that it reads easier on a text reader, that would be fantastic.

 

[chriton227]

To be fair, that's exactly what DDi Dungeon and Dragon were. You didn't have to keep subscribing at all, except to get new issues of course. You could easily download everything to read offline. I have pretty much all the articles I wanted on my hard drive. It was only the tools that you needed to be subscribed to to use.

Now, if they would print in single column format so that it reads easier on a text reader, that would be fantastic.

They initially said you could download everything to save offline, but they quickly stopped producing the monthly compilations PDFs, meaning you would need to download everything as HTML and hope that the images, styles, etc. didn't get messed up in the process.