D&D 5E Poll: How do you feel about 5e pace of releases?

[Nikosandros]

As a sort of a spin-off from the mothballing thread... what is your personal opinion about the pace of releases for D&D 5e?

I'm not asking about whether it is good or bad from the point of view of sales, but how do you feel about it as a customer and as a player.

 

[Nikosandros]

Personally, I found the recent pace right and the one in the current year somewhat fast.

 

[overgeeked]

While I don't want a return to the madness of release schedules as they existed in 3X and 4E, I'd like a somewhat faster pace. We are talking about the biggest RPG in the world, backed by a multinational corporation. They really could manage more than six books a year. They don't need to release things so slowly that everyone has a chance to play everything they publish.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Personally, I found the recent pace right and the one in the current year somewhat fast.

Me too. I find the current realise too fast - I haven't had the budget to buy any of them yet. But if we assume this is due to bit of a pile-up, then it's about right.

 

[schneeland]

It was a little slow initially, but by now it’s ok. Could be slightly faster (I.e. one more book per year), but that’s about it.
Now 5e didn’t develop the way I had hoped and I would have liked different books, but that’s another story. Had they released the books I wanted, I would have been happy with the pace. And I feel overall, it was/is beneficial for the edition.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Now 5e didn’t develop the way I had hoped and I would have liked different books, but that’s another story.

I was hoping for more modular options but the DMsGuild and the large 3pp are fulfilling that role for me.

Otherwise I'd say our table makes a meal out of adventures compared to other people on this site which seem to get through material quite quickly.

In the last 9ish years we have completed
Two Sundering Modules (MiBG and LofCS);
2 Adventure League storylines (SKT and ToD);
4 Vignette adventures;
Dabbled with 3-4 levels of DofMM and a chapter of WD-DH;
A dozen or so homebrew storylines; and
We are at the tail end of 2 APs (SKT and ToD)

 

[mamba]

I think this year’s pace is about right, previous years were somewhat slow

 

[pukunui]

I think it’s too fast and would rather they slow down than speed up. I’m really struggling to keep up, and I’ve bought / been given most of the books.

While I acknowledge that there’s significantly less content now than previous editions had at this point in their lifespans, I nevertheless feel like there’s too much already.

It’s hard to keep track of all the options, both in terms of player content and DM-facing rules and mini-systems and so on.

That being said, I am cautiously optimistic about next year’s soft reset of the core rules.

 

[Echohawk]

I posted a slightly different version of this graph in the thread from which this poll was spun off, but for comparison, here it is again. I counted only RPG products released by TSR/WotC, and not licensed accessories from 3rd parties. The release pace for the last decade is the slowest since the 1970s, at least in terms of the number of products.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Otherwise I'd say our table makes a meal out of adventures compared to other people on this site which seem to get through material quite quickly.

That's certainly not me! In the lifetime of 5e I have completed exactly three of the whole book adventures. I have used adventures from all four of the compendium books though. And Keys from the Golden Vault was the last book I did buy. But I don't feel any particular need to keep buying new stuff in order to keep playing 5e.

But if the old PHB is still selling well, WotC have no need to keep churning out lots of new stuff. Hasbro know this from things like Monopoly and Cluedo. In ye olden days the pool of people playing D&D was small and not growing, so D&D's publishers had to keep churning out new stuff to sell to the same small pool of customers.