D&D 5E Mike Mearls interview - states that they may be getting off of the 2 AP/year train.

[Shasarak]

I don't want them wasting precious limited resources on that.

You know that WotC does not actually have to waste their own precious resources to get it done, right?

Right?

 

[Shasarak]

I think that they deeply regret the century jump, and would have undone it if they could. Having a world as close to 2e as possible is apparently the next best thing, even if it means no new shops have opened in a century

And the even more ironic thing is that you get posters like [MENTION=16728]schnee[/MENTION] for example that sincerely believe the century jump means Ed Greenwoods characters are gone.

 

[Staffan]

People like stories and interesting stories and relateable characters help buy in a lot and also deepen the setting and shows the setting through the eyes of it's inhabitants, thus making it more colorful and again, living and "real". Salvatore did a lot to make drow interesting, Cunninghan wrote a lot about elves, Evans about dragonborn and all of it made the setting more interesting.

Oh, I don't mind stories and interesting characters. Novels are fine. But they don't all need to be about changing the world.

For example, take Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's an amazing film. The stakes are high - if the Nazis get the Ark of the Covenant things will get real bad (well, except that the Ark doesn't seem to like being used by anti-semites, but they don't know that until the finale).

But Indy doesn't stop the Third Reich or win WWII. He fights against these particular Nazis. He might have saved the world, but he didn't change it.

In the same way, RPG tie-in novels don't have to change the setting, at least not on a large scale - and the changes they do make don't have to be acknowledged outside direct sequels. Finding who's kidnapping Cyran refugees and experimenting on them is a perfectly worthwhile plot for a novel, and doesn't alter the setting. Stopping a plot by the Lords of Dust to incite a new war between Aundair and Karrnath would make for a cool novel. Racing for an artifact to get to it before the Emerald Claw does would be awesome.

Paizo does something for good, because they don't really have a big metaplot, but still manage to have a steady stream of novels, comics and such.

I'm not sure about what they're doing with novels and comics, but they do have some meta-plot going on with the Adventure Paths, albeit at a slower pace than TSR used to have. It's mostly countered by all the APs taking place in different parts of the world. The Varisian ones (Runelords, Crimson Throne, Jade Regent, Shattered Star) do build on one another to some extent, but mostly along the edges. For example, in Runelords a particular NPC loses her family due to circumstances, which leaves her available to go traveling in Jade Regent. But that NPC is a minor character at best in Runelords - she doesn't do much after part 1 or 2. Shattered Star, I am told, also references some things from the previous APs.

 

[Shasarak]

All of that is still there. Since the launch of 5e, Realms heroes have faced Tiamat, the Elemental Evil, an invasion of demons in the Underdark, and giants in the Sword Coast. All of those adventures had their issues, in my opinion, but I fail to see how they could be improved with more Elminster, more Drizzt or more Azoun XLVIII, and I don't think they could be improved by making them less timeline-agnostic either.

I believe that the official view point is that, like Schrodingers Cat, they may or may not have had any of those things happen because now Forgotten Realms from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint is more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.

 

[PMárk]

Oh, I don't mind stories and interesting characters. Novels are fine. But they don't all need to be about changing the world.

For example, take Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's an amazing film. The stakes are high - if the Nazis get the Ark of the Covenant things will get real bad (well, except that the Ark doesn't seem to like being used by anti-semites, but they don't know that until the finale).

But Indy doesn't stop the Third Reich or win WWII. He fights against these particular Nazis. He might have saved the world, but he didn't change it.

In the same way, RPG tie-in novels don't have to change the setting, at least not on a large scale - and the changes they do make don't have to be acknowledged outside direct sequels. Finding who's kidnapping Cyran refugees and experimenting on them is a perfectly worthwhile plot for a novel, and doesn't alter the setting. Stopping a plot by the Lords of Dust to incite a new war between Aundair and Karrnath would make for a cool novel. Racing for an artifact to get to it before the Emerald Claw does would be awesome.


I'm not sure about what they're doing with novels and comics, but they do have some meta-plot going on with the Adventure Paths, albeit at a slower pace than TSR used to have. It's mostly countered by all the APs taking place in different parts of the world. The Varisian ones (Runelords, Crimson Throne, Jade Regent, Shattered Star) do build on one another to some extent, but mostly along the edges. For example, in Runelords a particular NPC loses her family due to circumstances, which leaves her available to go traveling in Jade Regent. But that NPC is a minor character at best in Runelords - she doesn't do much after part 1 or 2. Shattered Star, I am told, also references some things from the previous APs.

They're doing exactly what you wrote about the Lost Ark. The stories, be they as epic as they are sometimes, don't really change the overall setting in big ways.

I know about the AP connections, but they are very minor, more just connections, really, than a metaplot. Despite nearly a decade passed, the setting didn't really change much.

 

[Staffan]

I believe the line of "splitting the fan base" is really so much bs when you consider that you rarely, if ever, see any other company selling a one size fits all product.

You usually do in the software business, which is a pretty good analogy for the game publishing business in that most of the cost to make a product is in the design of that product, not in the production of any particular copy. For example, you don't see Microsoft making another word processor - they're happy with Word. You don't see Blizzard making another fantasy-themed MMORPG, they're happy with World of Warcraft.

 

[Shasarak]

Oh, I don't mind stories and interesting characters. Novels are fine. But they don't all need to be about changing the world.

For example, take Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's an amazing film. The stakes are high - if the Nazis get the Ark of the Covenant things will get real bad (well, except that the Ark doesn't seem to like being used by anti-semites, but they don't know that until the finale).

But Indy doesn't stop the Third Reich or win WWII. He fights against these particular Nazis. He might have saved the world, but he didn't change it.

I guess that sums up my problem with the arguement against having a "living" setting. Here you are calling out Raiders of the Lost Ark as being such an amazing film and yet it is based in the middle of an intrinsically "living" world (by definition).

Using this example if Eberron did make a call on what plot hooks happened and jumped forward in time until after the next war with the Lord of Blades, you could still have an adventure set in the middle of the war just as Steven Spielberg was able to set his movie 50 years earlier then his current day.

 

[Mistwell]

You know that WotC does not actually have to waste their own precious resources to get it done, right?

Right?

Yes, they do. Limited shelf space with their retailers, limited cash flow and budgeting to pay a third party, limited time to spend reviewing third party products and checking them for conformity with the rest of their products, limited playtesting resources, limited time and resources to check printing and shipping and distribution and returns and sales reporting and accounting, limited focus time for PR and marketing, limited customer service resources, etc.. These are all resources they have to manage. And I don't want the spending those resources on that product.

Even using a third party contractor involves all those things I just mentioned. Those are all expenditures of limited resources, even on the ones third parties wrote.

That doesn't make it my way or the highway. But it does mean that's not a product I personally want them focusing on and therefore nobody should be speaking for me concerning making "everyone" happy.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

I believe the line of "splitting the fan base" is really so much bs when you consider that you rarely, if ever, see any other company selling a one size fits all product. I mean I guess it could work in the Soviet Union where you have one state run company making one product but where else is it going to work? Now I realise that it may be more profitable for the company if everyone buys one product every six months; the old "You can have any colour you want as long as it is black". But in that case all we get is the bog standard generic "black" fantasy and never ever get to see the Ebberons or Dark Suns or Spelljammers because they do not make the same profit as Forgotten Realms.

I'm no marketing expert, but I still hold my personal belief that the real fanbase splitting happened when TSR decided to publish Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Mystara, and Birthright (maybe there's something else, I honestly can't remember). Also dropping the settings that allowed you to go in different directions and tested the limits of the system was just WotC throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Obviously, this is just the opinion of someone whose whole investment in RPGs can be put in a bookshelf, so I'm probably wrong and Dancey is probably right.

 

[Shasarak]

Yes, they do. Limited shelf space, limited funds to pay a third party, limited time to spend reviewing third party products and checking them for conformity with the rest of their products, limited time and resources to check printing and shipping and distribution and returns and sales reporting and accounting, limited focus time for PR and marketing, these are all resources they have to manage. And I don't want the spending those resources on that product.

They seem to have plenty of resources to get Goodman Games to reprint old adventures and in the DMs Guild era do they even pay contractors in advance now a days?

Besides I have seen that book shelf - if they clear out old edition stock there is plenty of room for more stuff.