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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6929396" data-attributes="member: 37579">"General release" is an odd term to use. It sounds more like the scope of the release. Something released to general audiences (or the general public) rather than a limited release like a game store or web exclusive. I'd use "general release" to describe most of their products except stuff like the Elemental Evil Player Companion or Cloud Giant's Bargain, which are "limited release".But your usage I've been assuming you're using "general release" to mean "setting neutral". Or something combination of "setting neutral" and "fluff light". But that's a personal usage limited to you, which inherently makes it awkward to understand.However... few D&D releases are truly setting neutral. 4e assumed the Nerath/Nentir Vale setting while 3e has Greyhawk as the default setting. The Realms setting is a little more obvious in a product like SCAG, but that book did include advice on converting the provided subclass options to other setting. And mechanics, by their very nature, are setting neutral. SCAG can say whatever it wants about the lore of bladesingers, but you can do what you want with the class. I adopted that subclass and made it an integral part of my world: an elite order of wizard-knights serving the Queen of the elven court. SCAG made my homebrew world richer and more interesting.I asked for specifics. That's as general as you can get. What type of optional rules would you like to see? Could you give some examples?Also, when you look at the amount of space optional rules take up in the DMG, it actually isn't a lot. There's not *that* many desirable or useful optional rules or subsystems. Like any other type of new rules content, you need a finite amount before additional content becomes superfluous. Plus, optional rules are content that will always see limited use in campaigns. Because you only typically change optional rules at the start of a campaign. They're not something you can easily add halfway through a campaign. Additionally… for players, how is having a book full of optional rules fundamentally different from a book full of flavour text? It's still content that is not usable. They'd be at least 160 pages. So just two of them would very much have "hundreds of pages". The only way to avoid releasing "hundreds of pages" of new mechanics would be to limit the crunch content to a smaller number of pages and fill the rest with fluff. But that's the kind of book you sound like you're uninterested in.Money doesn't enter into it. You can't buy more hours in the week. Besides, D&D has a set operational budget. They have a cap on the money they can spend. Because WotC is a business out to make money and not a charity doubling as a book publisher. They're not going to increase the operational budget without a significant increase in profits. Even just recouping those expenses isn't enough: they need to make *more* money. A crunch heavy splatbook isn't necessarily going to sell significantly more copies that a crunch light splatbook. The last two books sold very, very well for WotC. Spending more money to hire more developers and freelancers for no related increase in profits is wasting money. And that's bad business. As far as playtesting goes… not so secret fact: WotC IS running private playtests. The people in the 5e friends-and-family playtest are still testing new content. They're testing new subclasses and options right now. And have for over a year. Because playtesting takes time, you can only test so many classes at a time. You need to test the class in actual play situations across multiple levels. And you can only test so many options at once. If your entire group is new subclasses you've invalidated the playtest as there are too many variables to provide decent feedback. Is a character dominating play because it's too strong or the other new subclasses are too weak or because the new spells and monsters are weak? You need a control group of base rules content. Kinda. But they did so through smaller focused books that spread out the content. Rather than release "Complete Heroes" that covered all four major roles, they released the four books, likely with a significant amount of padding.  Do you think people will be happy if they released a class focused book every year? If arcane spellcasters had to wait three years for their book while WotC worked through the divine, roguish, and martial classes? (Would *you* be willing to wait those three or four years for any support for your class of preference?) Heck, just asking people to wait four months for all three core books almost caused rebellion. There's also the risk of priorities changing at WotC and those products being altered or restructured before completion; WotC has a terrible track record of changing or cancelling those types of product lines before completion. Or deciding that they want to "shake up the line" and do something different rather than release a book identical to what they've done two or three times prior but with different classes. For those reasons, for annual products it's generally better to release an all-in-one books that appeal to all types of character. But that just means pushing things to "fall apart" amounts of content that much faster. It's not about books the same size as the PHB. Did you even READ what I wrote? Most of the PHB is classes, rules, and other content. A book 1/2 the size of the PHB could have close to the same level of options (subclasses, races, feats, spells, etc). A book just 160 page length could double the options available for most characters. Even if you filled half the book with optional rulesets and half with crunch, that just delays the doubling by another year. BUT IT DOES NOT NEED TO BE A TON OF BOOKS!!!*sigh* One last time…It doesn't need to be forty books like 3e. Or twenty books like 4e. Or ten books like Pathfinder. It really only takes a ones or two large all-encompassing book. Two books aimed entirely at players. That's it. Just two 160 books that are 75% player crunch. At that point, once you have six or seven options for every single class in the game and all the most common character archetypes are covered, you have hit saturation. At that point you have more options that the game needs. You have all the content needed for multiple campaigns - more 5e campaigns than anyone will ever run. At that point you will hit diminishing returns for future content, as fewer people will feel the need for more content. Everything after that is just bloat...</blockquote>

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