Mearls says adventures are hard to sell [merged]

[kenobi65]

It was said at D&D Experience 07 that the Fantastic Locations line is a failure.

As I said, "they're trying different things"...I didn't say that all of them were successful.

I don't disagree with your assessment; as adventures go, they're fundamentally just combats linked together with the sketchiest of story, and pretty battle maps. The only reason I bought one (Fane of the Drow) was because Living Greyhawk's done "adaptations" of some of them for LG play, and it turned out to be a very lucrative dungeon crawl.

OTOH, I know quite a few folks who are currently playing Red Hand of Doom (LG has also done an adaptation of that module), and all of them have had nothing but praise for it.

 

[Henry]

Before anyone thinks I'm disparaging FR, however, I take Ed Greenwood's view of the Realms: I'd like nothing better than to see a score of Realmslore volumes, leather bound, lavish endpapers and fabric woven bookmarks, with color illustrations and maps... for $25 each. However, because the profit-horse drives the gaming-buggy, I recognize they need to concentrate on the books that would bring in AT LEAST 40,000 or 50,000 units or so in sales. The other print companies would call half those figures a miraculous runaway success... WotC would call it a failure.

 

[Sammael]

All these are likely considered by WotC to not be "Mainland" regions, and hence why I suggest they probably haven't been covered yet.

Henry, see my reply regarding Western Heartlands and Dalelands sourcebooks (or lack thereof) above. Aside from those, we haven't had a 3.x sourcebook on the Cold Lands (Vaasa, Damara, Impiltur), Cormyr or Sembia (both extremely popular regions), Lands of Intrigue (Amn, Calimshan, Tethyr), or the Vilhon Reach.

I am apparently not WotC's target audience. I've bought every single FR regional sourcebook within two months of its release, and I even bought the FR rules supplements (which I didn't like) for lack of other products to buy. But I will not buy FR adventures unless I can get them for 70% off the cover price.

 

[Shroomy]

Why would WoTC decide to print adventures now?

1. Both to support and advertise supplementary material that cannot be used in OGL/d20 licensed content.

2. To increase marketshare and brand-loyalty.

3. Insuring longterm health of game by actually getting people to play it, especially with the trend of a "campaign in a box" style adventures.

4. They've figured out a way to make it profitable or at least a way to minimize losses, making it an attractive loss leader.

 

[Sammael]

Hmmmm...

"Attractive loss leaders" seems to be the best explanation I've seen thus far. It makes actual business sense.

 

[WhatGravitas]

He didn't say they wouldn't sell. he said they were a hard sell -- hence the changes in format and the big push on them. One thing that adventures provide that other kinds of products don't is the "shared experience". How many times do you see people posting about/hear people talking about their times in the "iconic" modules of old. Chatter, especially in a small industry, has a significant effect on sales. note that most of the big adventures WotC is pushing are revisitations or reimaginings of those same classic, iconic modules.

Yeps. See the full quote:

I wonder if that's why adventures are notoriously hard sells. The designer is writing a story to an audience that might not exist. By the same token, site based, classic adventures might resonate so well because the group and the DM simply use them as the set for the stories they want to experience.

And Wizards is selling classic adventures, or - in the case of RHoD - longer adventures, that are rather "Campaign Kits" (just as the adventure paths). These things have a large appeal, because they have about any group as possible audience. They're large enough to "make audience". Other adventures are harder to sell, because they must be "shoehorned" into an existing (probably homebrewed) campaign, where as these "Mini-Campaign Kits" don't have this need, and are therefore easier to use.

 

[Mean Eyed Cat]

I've read author's posts regarding the three mega-adventure books (Cormyr, Shadowdale, Anauroch), and they were trying to emphasize that the three are not sourcebooks and have the bare minimum amount of descriptive text simply to enable the DMs to get a feel for the region. So, that argument doesn't hold.

Well, I haven't been privy to that information. I'm just going by the product description which states "this book contains detailed source material on the land of..." Heck, that must be a pretty good marketing ploy, because I fell for it

Even if it did, it's practically impossible to pack a semi-decent adventure and semi-decent FR regional book into 160 pages, so both would suffer. 160 pages is simply not enough.

The last FR adventure they put out was Twilight Tomb at 32 pages. To me, it seems like 160 pages should be enough for regional information and a semi-decent adventure. And 3 of the 4 adventures coming out are part of a series. Maybe we're looking for different components in adventures.

Contrary to (obviously) popular belief, most of FR has not been covered by regional supplements in 3.x. Heck, two of the most popular regions, Western Heartlands and Dalelands, haven't had a sourcebook devoted to them in 15 years or so.

While a lot of the FR hasn't been covered in 3.x, a good chunk of it has been covered in 2ed. Trust me, I would love to have all that information updated to 3.x, but from a business standpoint, WotC probably doesn't want to make the same mistake TSR did. Especially nowadays when one can buy a pdf copy of the 2ed stuff for $5 and yoink the material for their 3.x game [which I do all the time].

 

[Reynard]

RHoD is new and was published after a long draught. I managed to suppress my own disgust with spawn of Tiamat enough to read through it in a store, and it read like a stereotypical hack'n'slash-fest with some Heroes of Battle war-encounter-type stuff added for good measure. Not bad (as far as pre-made adventures go), but not something I expect to be remembered 10 years from now, either.

I think you are confusing your preferences for actual quality.

 

[delericho]

"Attractive loss leaders" seems to be the best explanation I've seen thus far. It makes actual business sense.

I concur. There are several reasons that adventure modules are a good thing to have in the market, but none of them are likely to generate huge sales numbers or big profits.

(The reasons I can think of include: adventure modules show new DMs what to do with all those exciting new rules they've just bought, allowing them to get a handle on what the game is for. Additionally, with the player base aging, the free time available to DMs decreases, which increases the attractiveness of having much of the prep done for you. Then there's the shared experience of lots of groups playing through the same adventures. And I'm sure there are some others, but they're not springing to mind.)

However, it does raise the question: why have WotC been slow to approve an "Age of Worms" hardcover? Surely, if the goal is just to get quality adventures out there, it doesn't matter much who produces the adventures? And while it might look like Paizo's adventures would be competing with WotC's, they're not really... since the goal is "sell Core Rulebooks", not "sell adventures". (Of course, this could be a case of the left hand not communicating with the right hand about what it's doing. Happens all the time in business.)

 

[Sammael]

Well, I haven't been privy to that information. I'm just going by the product description which states "this book contains detailed source material on the land of..." Heck, that must be a pretty good marketing ploy, because I fell for it

Actually, that counts as "false advertising." I posed a question to one of the authors of Anauroch elsewhere, hoping that the book would be good as a sourcebook on the region, and he crushed my hopes saying that the book is strictly an adventure with just a little bit of setting info, and that the product description was wrong.