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

[delericho]

But if it comes at the cost of focus on the table top game then I don't want it.

Ah, but there's the rub!

WotC want to do what makes them the most money. Which means growing the brand, mostly via licensing. Hence their prioritisation of board games, video games, movies, toys, etc etc.

Which is all fine, except for those of us (like me) who are RPG games pretty much exclusively - sure, I'm happy if they do all those other things, but I don't much care. I care about what they're doing in the RPG sphere. (I suspect, though obviously don't know, that you're in much the same boat SM.)

Problem is, though, that WotC aren't going to tailor their offering to me. It's just not going to happen - even if they produced 30 books in the year and I bought every one of them, that's still nothing compared to many of the other avenues.

So, as an RPG gamer, it does indeed suck - and will lead to me giving my money to Paizo and MWP (Firefly) instead. But it's understandable, it's just business... and, ultimately, it's their call to make. I wish them luck, even if I'm not going to be going with them.

 

[Trickster Spirit]

For a whole year? Is the fact that I'm expecting slightly more than a couple of adventures so hard to believe?

It's not hard to believe you're expecting that at all, but that doesn't mean they will actually release more than that.

It comes down to which of the following is true: WotC has plans for more products coming out soon and they just inexplicably aren't talking about them, justifying the "Wizards is horrible at communicating with their fan base" arguments, OR what's been announced so far is pretty much it for spring and summer and they'll start promoting the late-2015 adventure path and possibly a campaign setting book closer to the release date.

Given that everything that's been released for 5E so far was announced months in advance, and that time and time again WotC has said, no, seriously you guys this time we really are going to slow down on the edition churn and put out fewer books, I'm inclined to see the latter as far more likely.

WotC is communicating just fine at the moment, it's just that hardly anybody on the forums believed them when they said they were going to avoid a bloated product line, and now that it turns out they WERE telling the truth about that everyone is shocked.

Wizards is not going to just drop books on us unannounced. They've told us exactly what's coming out in the next few months, and they're currently working on stuff for the couple of months after that, which they're not ready to talk about just yet. The pace for releasing new books might pick up a little eventually but not this spring, or we'd have heard about it by now.

It's actually something they've tried before with DDO. I could understand if the MMO was a blockbuster hit WoW but it's not. I feel like WoTc are trying to do too many things at one time to the point where there is a feeling of everything being incomplete.

They need to focus on their strengths.

Their strengths are the D&D brand name and the nostalgic reminiscences of 40 years of tabletop gamers. D&D used to be the only RPG in town, but that ship sailed well before the White Wolf days even. D&D used to be THE outlet for hack & slash dungeon crawling, but video games have pretty much cornered that market. LotR does high fantasy better, Game of Thrones does gritty historical realism better and frickin' Settlers of Catan has us beat when it comes down to the ease of just sitting down and playing a game with friends around a tabletop.

So what makes D&D unique - truly unique, gives it the itch that Dungeon World or 13th Age or FATE just can't quite scratch? It's the Gygaxisms and the forty years of collaborative weirdness. It's the flumphs, and the Vancian spellcasting, and the Deck of Many Things. It's Drizzt Do'Urden and Elminster in all their resplendant Mary Sue glory and the surprisingly good stories that have been told about them and their companions (maybe especially their companions). It's the mind flayers and Beholders and putting down the giant raids once and for all at the Hall of the Fire Giant King, only to discover that sexy spider worshiping dominatrix elves from deep underground were behind it all along. It's going through the wrong door and suddenly there are buildings wrapping around the sky overhead and everyone's calling you "berk". It's a legendary Tomb of Horrors no one has ever survived before, but I just found this map and we could be the first...

THAT's their strengths. And yeah, an MMO or a movie or a video game or a TV show might suck, or even be passable but not your or my cup of tea. I'll happily &!$(# about it with you if it is awful. But if it's good, maybe even great, that's a far better usage of the D&D brand, and not just in the financial sense - it would introduce millions to the above and lead people by the hand back to the tabletop game. Rising tides lift all boats, etc. etc.

 

[chriton227]

Video game licensing could be an excellent revenue stream for them. Look at the Baldur's Gate game, it sold 2 million copies for the original game and almost 5 million copies for the series. If they get licensing revenue on each copy sold, that is a nice source of income where someone else (the game developer) is doing the vast majority of the work. Even if they were only getting 10 cents per copy in licensing, that is still $500k. How many adventures and splatbooks would they have to produce and sell to get that amount of revenue, and how much would they have to invest to produce those books relative to the investment required for the video game license?

 

[chriton227]

To everyone who isn't happy with the release schedule and/or communication and/or direction WotC is taking D&D, have you tried communicating your feelings to WotC? Contacting them directly is much more likely to be productive than voicing your concerns and complaints on a fan-site forum with no official connection to WotC. On the WotC site there is information for contacting them via email, telephone, and snail-mail, plus there is an official Wizard_DND twitter account, several of the developers have twitter accounts, and there is an official Dungeons & Dragons facebook page.

 

[Hussar]

For a whole year? Is the fact that I'm expecting slightly more than a couple of adventures so hard to believe?

You can expect all you want. But, they've been pretty upfront here. Light release schedule was clearly announced. It is the title of this thread after all. But, yup, you're going to get a couple of adventures and that's about it.

 

[Hussar]

Speculation aside, WotC is on the verge of losing my attention, possibly for good. I increasingly just don't care. They've given me nothing to care about.

5e -is- a good system for expansion and tweaking and customizing; if WotC's plan is to ignore all that and have their RPG designers making plushies and MMO's (which I don't actually believe, btw), then I don't care about WotC. I'm not in the market for MASSIVE CAMPAIGN ADVENTURE PATHS, so if that's all they've got, then 5e is a bust as far as I'm concerned. And that's disappointing.

Did you buy the core 3? Then that's pretty much all they're expecting you to do. That's the point of a light release schedule. They aren't trying to sell to you. If you get the core three and you're done? Then join the club of the overwhelming majority of D&D gamers throughout the game's history.

 

[Gecko85]

I'm so pissed at Black & Decker right now! I bought a set of tools...and they're fine tools, don't get me wrong. Sturdy, well built, versatile. But since I bought them, I've received NOTHING from B&D! Not a thing! Where's my coffee table? My back fence isn't going to fix itself! I'm *this* close to jumping ship and giving my money to another company. Possibly Craftsman, but I'm not sure.

</ sarcasm>

Seriously, though, with the tools WotC has given us (in the core books), I could play for years without them releasing another thing. I hope they do release things, and of course we *know* they are, but it wouldn't really matter if they don't. I have the tools to play pretty much any adventure from any previous version with minimal conversion. The game doesn't stop being useful if WotC only puts out a handful of adventures a year. The core rulebooks of D&D have always been tools, and they've always been all you need to play. Adventure modules have *always* been optional.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

The core rulebooks of D&D have always been tools, and they've always been all you need to play.

Nah, we don't even need them do we? All we need is our imagination, a piece of paper, possibly a pair of dice. Really we've been spoilt with what Hasbro has given us so far. When they started talking about a light release schedule I didn't expect them to release anything at all, and people who would like the company that holds the rights to the D&D role playing game to release D&D role playing products are clearly delusional.

 

[Parmandur]

Nah, we don't even need them do we? All we need is our imagination, a piece of paper, possibly a pair of dice. Really we've been spoilt with what Hasbro has given us so far. When they started talking about a light release schedule I didn't expect them to release anything at all, and people who would like the company that holds the rights to the D&D role playing game to release D&D role playing products are clearly delusional.

They are releasing one, in April. Probably another in the Fall. Possibly one or two other things, maybe not.



Also, free stuff on their website; they've already released new rules for general usage, and are offering a monthly fix.



Pretty healthy release schedule. No splat is good, video games are good, comics are good, movies are good, board games are good.



If they give us more like Lords of Waterdeep, that would be fantastic.

 

[Sailor Moon]

Video game licensing could be an excellent revenue stream for them. Look at the Baldur's Gate game, it sold 2 million copies for the original game and almost 5 million copies for the series. If they get licensing revenue on each copy sold, that is a nice source of income where someone else (the game developer) is doing the vast majority of the work. Even if they were only getting 10 cents per copy in licensing, that is still $500k. How many adventures and splatbooks would they have to produce and sell to get that amount of revenue, and how much would they have to invest to produce those books relative to the investment required for the video game license?

And how many other games have they come out with that wasn't great?

Baldur's Gate was just one of those great games that people enjoyed. Nothing else with the D&D name on it has been great since. Some things just can't be repeated and Baldur's Gate is one of them.