Mearls announces end of Legends & Lore & New D&D Columns in 2015!

WotC's Mike Mearls has announced the end of the long-running Legends & Lore column, which was used during D&D Next playtesting to showcase ideas and concepts, and the start of the previously announced series of articles called Unearthed Arcana, "a monthly look at the art of tabletop RPG game design featuring insights into our philosophy, and examples of new and variant material to use at your table."

Additionally, series called Campaign Notebooks and Sage Advice will be launched. Sage Advice follows the old format of years past, and will be manned by Jeremy Crawford as he answers your rules questions. Campaign Notebooks will feature Chris Perkins and others -- "insights into D&D and tips for your games taken directly from the campaigns of Dungeon Masters here at Wizards."

 

[aramis erak]

About the need for a gaming magazine, does anyone know anything about Gygax Magazine? All I really know is it has Order of the Stick comics in it (continuing the Dragon Magazine continuity) and it's sort of like Dragon. I know you guys said Dungeon, but maybe Gygax Magazine has some of the things you're looking for?

Edit: Looking at one of the previews, this seems to have adventure ideas designed for the older editions, not 5e. I guess that makes sense, since it's made by TSR.

Noting that the TSR of Gygax Mag isn't the original TSR. The only connection is Ernie Gygax, who happened to have been a shareholder of the original TSR. They poached the Trademark when it lapsed from Wizards's registration.

Intentional brand confusion.

 

[Mr0wlington]

They want to keep the excitement alive but only announce 3 columns... two of which are re-hashes?


Well I hope they learn, and pull the best columnists and bloggers from the interwebs to fill content space. Would love to see Slyflourish, DungeonBastard, etc on the D&D site.

Wait, really?! Huh. The store I got it from must have broken street date, because there's no way their part of the (whatever it is that let stores sell early).

 

[Mistwell]

The difference being prior to 3e and 4e we had official Dragon and Dungeon content from WotC. We used to have smaller monthly doses to tide us over. And those same articles were already out.
Especially since the first dozen Sage Advice columns could already be written from questions thrown to Mearls and Crawford on Twitter.


That's the thing... we saw 3.5e because sales of 3e were too low for WotC so they released the planned update a couple years early. Sales of 4e and Essentials were also not "good enough".
If WotC looks at the numbers from D&D and decides that even now, with the best it's done in a decade, it isn't good enough the game could go away and the RPG department gets laid off while the game gets entirely licenced to some partner.

I selfishly want that content now because I'm not sure all the staff will be around to give it to us after the annual Christmas layoffs. Or six months after.

I think it's been 5 years now since a Christmas layoff...time to put that meme to bed,

 

[Jester David]

I think it's been 5 years now since a Christmas layoff...time to put that meme to bed,

Mari Kolkowski was laid off in 2013. And there were several in 2011, both late and early.
With a retirement and a couple voluntary departures, there was likely fewer people needed to be cut in 2012.
We'll see. They might just have cut down the D&D Team so small they can't cut any more.

 

[Mistwell]

Mari Kolkowski was laid off in 2013. And there were several in 2011, both late and early.
With a retirement and a couple voluntary departures, there was likely fewer people needed to be cut in 2012.
We'll see. They might just have cut down the D&D Team so small they can't cut any more.

I heard Mari was not really a lay off, and was not at Christmas. I believe Jon Schindehette, WotC's senior creative director, stepped down to go to a different firm, and his replacement needed someone else in that position since she worked closely with Jon. But I know it was in early November, and that was the rumor going around. They filled her position with the person the replacement wanted.

 

[delericho]

Unearthed Arcana sounds good - looking forward to it.

Sage Advice, eh. Given that one of the traits of this edition is that the rules are intentionally left open for DM interpretation, I frankly find the notion of 'official interpretations' counter-productive. All that means is that there actually is a 'correct' way to do things; they're just not telling us what it is.

(And where there are places where the rules are unintentionally vague, because they don't say what they were meant to say, then that should be fixed with errata.)

As regards the end of Legends & Lore, I'm torn. Way back when it first started, and was called Design & Development, it was by far my favourite column on their site. However, somewhere along the line it lost its shine. So, perhaps it is time for it to go away.

I'll echo what others have said, though: the big gap here is the lack of Dungeon (or similar material). I don't have a problem waiting, but that is the thing I'm most hoping to see in the nearish future.

 

[Henrix]

I think it sounds pretty good. I'm very interested to hear more about the thoughts behind the choices they've made.

A Dungeon with more adventures would be very, very good however.

I really hope they make one/license others to do it, or at least let it be made under a reasonably liberal OGL.

But we need to wait even longer for content they have finished that's just sitting around their hard drives, like the kender & warforged or the BattleSystem rules.

What on Oearth makes you think all that stuff is anywhere near ready for publication and not just loose notes lying around?

I don't think they've spent oodles of time finishing stuff that didn't fit into the DMG.

Why do they need pageviews?

To measure what stuff the audience is interested in. Seeing how many read which articles is a good and easy tool for that.

 

[vecna00]

They want to keep the excitement alive but only announce 3 columns... two of which are re-hashes?


Well I hope they learn, and pull the best columnists and bloggers from the interwebs to fill content space. Would love to see Slyflourish, DungeonBastard, etc on the D&D site.

The world will not be able to handle the Dungeon Bastard writing for the offical site!

Well, I think it would be beyond awesome, anyway!

 

[Trickster Spirit]

What on Oearth makes you think all that stuff is anywhere near ready for publication and not just loose notes lying around?

I don't think they've spent oodles of time finishing stuff that didn't fit into the DMG.

Oh, I've no doubt they've gotten considerably farther than loose notes lying around - they posted a relatively solid skeleton of the system in Legends & Lore earlier this year, and they were still talking about including it in the DMG just a couple of months ago - but the entire reason they gave for pulling it out was that it needed more playtesting, and THAT clearly hasn't happened yet. They've talked about doing more public playtests next year as well so I wouldn't be surprised if we actually see beta rules for it to provide feedback on in the spring.

 

[Jester David]

What on Oearth makes you think all that stuff is anywhere near ready for publication and not just loose notes lying around?

I don't think they've spent oodles of time finishing stuff that didn't fit into the DMG.

Until everything was finished and they started laying out the book and doing the art and tables they were possibly uncertain what would fit and what would not.
Plus, in the AMA Mearls said the kender and warforged were done and formatted.