D&D 5E (2014) Lord of the Rings 5E Is Coming Next Month

For those who prefer to adventure in Middle Earth using the D&D 5E ruleset rather than Free League's The One Ring game (which made over $2M on Kickstarter in 2021), the 5E-powered version is coming in May!

This will be a 236-page hardcover book containing 6 new classes, journey rules, and magic which represents the more low-key magic of Tolkien.

Additionally, Shire Adventures is a 104-page book with 5 short adventures and setting details for The Shire region of Middle Earth.

That's not all though -- there will be a RIvendell compendium, and a Loremaster's Screen too.

These will be landing on May 9th.

 

[dave2008]

I'm willing to roll the dice. New as most popular is hardly a guarantee where D&D is concerned!

There is a trend for every odd edition to be the big success, so maybe 7e will bring you back!

 

[UngainlyTitan]

If 6e was an incompatible game there's no reason to assume all 3pp will follow them into it. Unless you're WotC in the 4e era, who apparently believed D&D walked on water.

This depends on 6e, a 6e with no CC licence would not attract any third party support. However, a 6e that brought most of the fans with it would also bring along the third-party market as the WoTC D&D would still be the biggest market and the one with the most niches that a third-party creator could exist in.
This brings up another thought, as more and more third-party creators are selling product on D&D beyond and presumably WoTC is getting a cut of those sales the greater the incentive to WoTC to be conservative in changes to the core game.
To put it another way, the more third-party content drives Beyond subscriptions the lower the support costs for the game to WoTC become and the more profitable to not change the base game.
Except perhaps to make official their take on broad trends that are already popular.

 

[mamba]

This brings up another thought, as more and more third-party creators are selling product on D&D beyond and presumably WoTC is getting a cut of those sales the greater the incentive to WoTC to be conservative in changes to the core game.

This could go either way I believe, releasing a new version offers the opportunity for the 3pps to release a lot of updated material and for WotC to make money from it a second time.

As long as 5.x is selling well, there won’t be a 6e. Once that is no longer true, the 3pp stuff will also not sell that well any more, so 3pp sales won’t be an incentive to stick with 5e when it would matter.

A bigger issue for WotC might be what changes they would have to make to DDB, to me that might be the real obstacle for drastic changes

 

[UngainlyTitan]

This could go either way I believe, releasing a new version offers the opportunity for the 3pps to release a lot of updated material and for WotC to make money from it a second time.

As long as 5.x is selling well, there won’t be a 6e. Once that is no longer true, the 3pp stuff will also not sell that well any more, so 3pp sales won’t be an incentive to stick with 5e when it would matter.

A bigger issue for WotC might be what changes they would have to make to DDB, to me that might be the real obstacle for drastic changes

Making Beyond a better tool for the users, the third parties and for themselves is something that they should be putting a lot of thought and effort into.

As for a new edition, of course, you make a strong point but one of the things that really strikes me about 5e is that even though there has been 10 years and a revision there is less power creep in 5e across the revision than in 3.x within each version in each splat book (sometimes even within a splatbook).