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

[BryonD]

Thing is, there's a difference between "what I want" and "what's good for the hobby". Ten years means that WOTC doesn't have to sink massive resources into developing a new edition every few years. Say 5e has a 5 year run. That means 6e development starts next year. Late 2016 or early 2017 anyway. After all, it takes two or three years to develop a new edition. Surely we can agree on that.

So, you get two years of focus on the current edition and then split attention for the next three years as the next shiny gets developed, marketed, play tested, etc. That's not a winning business strategy. I mean, even Pathfinder won't likely see a new edition for another two or three years, unless they're going to do most of the development in house and no public play test (which I really don't think they'd do). And Pathfinder has a much larger staff than WOTC does for it's TTRPG division.

If Pathfinder can find enough life in a 3.75 D&D system to keep running things for eight or nine years, I very much hope WOTC can do the same.

But they also get the most revenue from new launches. It doesn't follow that less investment means less goodness. The relaunch could very likely be the windfall part of the cycle. WotC would prefer a 20% return on $1,000,000 to a 12% return on $100,000. (These numbers being nothing but examples out of the air)

Not that I even agree this is meaningful to the overall point because I still strongly believe that a light release schedule will accelerate the decline of 5E (whether that leads to a stand down or to a quicker 6e would be a separate matter). "Light" meaning as currently advertised. There is certainly room for "lighter than 3E and 4E" without the current circumstance I see as bad.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

OD&D + Supplements → AD&D → AD&D 2nd Ed.
OD&D LBB → Holmes → Moldvay → Mentzer → Rules Cyclopedia

There were changes. Sometime big changes, like the boost to dragons in 2nd Ed. But no one will ever convince me that these changes over the years are the same as WotC's rebuilding of the game for 3e → 4e → 5e. I used to play with a Mentzer Basic book and a Marsh/Cook expert. You could use the AD&D adventures and even Monster Manual with D&D. You can't use a 3e MM in 4e. Or a character created for 4e in a 2e game.

Star Wars d6 had three editions that were more or less the same. (I've counted "Second Edition, Revised and Expanded" as the third here.) And Star Wars d20 had both the original and Revised versions which, again, were much the same - Saga wasn't a huge shift either, but was a bit more significant.

Shadowrun 1st, 2nd, and 3rd all used the same engine, with the range of material being expanded each time, but it wasn't until 4th that the really changed the rules.

And almost all the original WoD games had a second edition that was little more than an edit-job on the first.

There have been quite a few games that did new editions without a fundamental rewrite.

Alright, alright! I might have been a little wrong, alright!