These screencaps were posted by GM Leigh (of Mage Productions) on Twitter after being showed on WotC's Twitch stream, presented by Kate Welch and Nathan Stewart. Note the old Saltmarsh trilogy references!
It felt like they were only doing APs, but they always did something else every year.
Yeah, SCAG does only have 11 new subclasses vs the 28 in XGtE. That does have twice as many. But still hardly the smorgasbord of options people are used to from 3e. I think had they released XGtE in 2015 instead of SCAG there would have still be as much complaining.Hmmm, I think a lot of it was just how thin SCAG was in terms of content other than Realms fluff, so it was essentially two full years before a decent non-AP release happened.
Yeah, SCAG does only have 11 new subclasses vs the 28 in XGtE. That does have twice as many. But still hardly the smorgasbord of options people are used to from 3e.
I think had they released XGtE in 2015 instead of SCAG there would have still be as much complaining.
/snip
Well, it is what it is, but WotC's release schedule was definitely not to many people's liking, not just the reflexive whine brigade.
Quality of dmsguild products is questionable, hence my first comment about it being rather bad. However, I would rather wade through the bad to find the good than receive nothing at all, hence my second comment about wanting the old settings available for the dmsguild. I wasn't flipflopping on my stance.
And I had to look up the number of subclasses in the SCAG, as 11 seemed a bit high. But it's actually correct. 12 if you count the extended totems for the barbarian. It also seemed D&D and Hasbro had no faith in 5e, since they outsourced the adventures to other studios (Tyranny of Dragons was Kobold Press, PotA was Sasquatch Game Studios, OotA was Green Ronin). It took them until Curse of Strahd to finally do an adventure in house, and that was March 2016.
As for the most iconic adventures being Greyhawk and players dumping remakes of them onto the DMG before WotC could: Most people would prefer an "official" version over a fan made one. There have been numerous fan made versions of monsters that weren't in the MM, and a number of them have shown up in a WotC publication. Another person could remake the Slave Lords adventures, put it up on the DMG, then 2 months later WotC could publish a remake of the Slave Lords, and people would be apt to use the WotC version.
FR could use an update as the current state of the world is a decade out of date, during which time there were several wars and a major Realmshaking event. The current status quo of large regions of the world is unknown.
Meanwhile, virtually every other setting is identical to how it was last published.
I like settings, but opening up every setting in a short period is probably a bad idea. Any chance of those "gems" getting noticed would be lost under the waves of content.
We got TWO new settings last year, bringing the total number of supported settings to four. Which is more official support than we got in 4e and 1e, and matches what we got during 3e. And it's pretty likely we'll see more on the Guild sooner rather than later.
The catch is the overwhelming majority of players run homebrew worlds. The Realms is the most popular non-homebrew world, but only just. The market for classic settings is small.
I was responding to a comment that WotC should add more settings to the DMsGuild made by someone who just minutes earlier had slammed the quality of the Guild.
Which begged the question: if the DMsGuild is so inferiour to the official content, why add more settings to the Guild?
But the difference between "official" and "third party" and "Guild content" for campaign settings is extra fuzzy. Because you don't have balance issues with lore. Flavour and world backgrounds doesn't require playtesting. The difference between WotC releasing a campaign setting for the Guild or using Midgard by Kobold Press or Tal'Dorie by Green Ronin is much more cosmetic.
It's less that they weren't releasing content (they were: three books a year) but that the fans wanted everything all at once. The 4e or 3e release schedule of a big campaign setting AND a couple splatbooks AND more monsters, all within the first twelve months of the edition. They wanted two or three years of content all at once.
An entire product line's worth of content right away.
Which makes some sense. As people want the game to feel "complete". You don't want half a game. But once you have all that content, there's not really any reason for the publisher to continue to exist.
We saw that with John Wick Presents and 7th Sea: when people got everything they ever needed all at once there was no need for a second wave of products.
So, Bart Carroll said on the Dragon+ show that the next issue of Dragon+ is coming early next week to coincide with...other things...might see an announcement soon.
Haven't had a listen yet, but in the Dragon Talk podcast today Chris Perkins discusses the history of TSR UK: maybe we'll get some of the other UK modules, too.