D&D 5E Mike Mearls Dungeons & Dragons 5e interview, 6/26/14

[Wolfskin]

Man, I hope WotC isn't going to just quietly drop the magazines.

My best guess is that they don't have the manpower at the time to devote time to the magazines, so they'll wait for the core books to be finished before bringing them back in 2015.

I hope so, at least!

 

[the Jester]

Man, I hope WotC isn't going to just quietly drop the magazines.

Yeah, taking them back in-house for the 4e launch turned out to be a terrible idea. I miss my print mags that I could read on the toilet. All the ones I have now have been read and read and read until I feel like I virtually know every word!

 

[Thaumaturge]

Man, I hope WotC isn't going to just quietly drop the magazines.

I don't think they will. If they were going to, now would be the time to tell us. We've already gotten used to not having them, and they know we're asking for info.

Instead they keep telling us they have nothing to announce about them. That pretty heavily implies they will have something to announce about them. Eventually.

Of course, that could be that the magazines are dead.

Thaumaturge.

 

[an_idol_mind]

I don't think they will. If they were going to, now would be the time to tell us. We've already gotten used to not having them, and they know we're asking for info.

I don't know...if I was in WotC's place, I'd probably want to avoid negative backlash from fans, and the announcement of no more magazines ever would probably meet with a lot of negativity. Better to keep people hyped up about the pending release of a new edition.

Hopefully, they'll open up submissions to the magazine in early 2015. That way everybody's read the material and run a few games, so the incoming material should be consistent with what the game actually is. They could tie this announcement in with whatever their OGL equivalent is.

Of course, knowing how WotC/Hasbro operates, there might be solid plans in place and those solid plans might get dashed due to the typical post-edition release layoffs.

 

[GravyFingerz]

I don't think they will. If they were going to, now would be the time to tell us. We've already gotten used to not having them, and they know we're asking for info.

Instead they keep telling us they have nothing to announce about them. That pretty heavily implies they will have something to announce about them. Eventually.

Of course, that could be that the magazines are dead.

Thaumaturge.

I feel like, with their goal of not churning out supplement after supplement, that the Dragon is going to be the main way that players will see additional options in publication.

 

[Thaumaturge]

Hopefully, they'll open up submissions to the magazine in early 2015. That way everybody's read the material and run a few games, so the incoming material should be consistent with what the game actually is. They could tie this announcement in with whatever their OGL equivalent is.

This is a really good point. Mearls has said numerous times they don't want people writing stuff until they see the whole system. We can't see the whole system until November. Their team is way too small to pump out magazine articles on top of everything else.

Well said.

Thaumaturge.

 

[Thaumaturge]

I feel like, with their goal of not churning out supplement after supplement, that the Dragon is going to be the main way that players will see additional options in publication.

It certainly seems like a good place to put out bite-sized chunks of things they don't want to wait for a proper book to print.

But maybe they consider the magazines as contributors to rules bloat issues from previous editions and don't want to use them that way.

Maybe they'll be reborn as adventures, rules advice, and worldbuilding articles with very little additional rules content.

Thaumaturge.

 

[Iosue]

Just to note that in the video, concerning the magazines, Mearls says, "Nothing to report yet; we're still working on that." Take it for what you will, but that implies to me that the magazines are not dead.

Also, something that I don't has been mentioned yet is Mearls said that the adventure that comes after Tyranny of Dragons is finished, and they're currently working on the one after that one. So they may be working on getting a full year's worth of adventures prepped (while also finalizing the MM and DMG) before they can turn their attention back to the magazines. Chris Perkins is the Editor in Chief of the mags, and we know that he is hella busy at the moment.

 

[Agamon]

Thanks for posting and for summarising. Yay. I got into a thread b4 it spirals off into an argument b/w two posters regarding 1 tiny part of the video. I am sure there is something there

It's not a tiny part of the video, it's a slightly bigger than tiny part of the video! I know I'm right, let's argue about it for a few pages!

 

[Thaumaturge]

It's not a tiny part of the video, it's a slightly bigger than tiny part of the video! I know I'm right, let's argue about it for a few pages!

As long as I get to occasionally pop in and make wiseass remarks.

Thaumaturge.