D&D General Ray Winninger on 5e’s success, product cadence, the OGL, and more.

[Micah Sweet]

No starter set, no multimedia push, no live event centering D&D the game, failure to get one of the several TV shows out this year, failure to get the documentary out this year

But they did do some museums, LEGO, Converse, dice sets, an album

No MM in the anniversary year either.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I feel that pain from years of doing community content. You hear a cry for adventures, but the unspoken words are "adventures that I haven't already run, that personally intrigue me, and I feel like buying when I get around to it."

Selling Adventures are like selling ice cream, really! Lots of GMs want them but they are all looking for different flavors. The only way to make it work is for you to have a variety to offer. Unlike ice cream, you can't just swap out a ingredient or two and make new ice cream just as fast as you can the first one.

This is why I feel the DMsGuild if the best endeavor WotC is attached to (and the only one that I ever get any product from nowadays), because it allows other designers to work with WotC IP, designers that aren't under the same business priorities.

 

[dave2008]

I think that horror in 5e works great at Tier 1 but as a PC progresses in level, that gets harder. I’d hate to run a horror campaign in Tier 3 or 4.

Sure, but other horror games don't have PCs with D&D tier 3 & 4 levels of power. So, an easy conceit is to limit D&D horror games to level 10 and lower.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sales weren't decreasing. From 2014 until I left (and possibly beyond), D&D revenues grew every year and by double digits in most years. Sales on the PHB alone were at least steady, and probably growing slightly YoY, as well. (I equivocate because the number of units sold was certainly growing, but we don't know exactly how many of the digital units were selling to net new customers as opposed to purchasers who already bought physical copies.) Five years in, the 5E business was stable in a way that hadn't occurred with any previous edition.

The original goals for the new core books were: 1) improving accessibility, 2) upleveling the art, 3) fixing a small handful of long-time issues and bringing some subtle elements of the design more in-line with the current state of the art, 4) moving a few things from expansion products into the core, and 5) laying a better foundation for future expansion. Numbers #1-4 are pretty self-explanatory. Number #5 was about reorienting the game rules to fully embrace the idea that D&D is a multiverse composed of an infinite number of unique worlds. That meant further distancing lore from the rules in some cases and being very careful about canonizing definitive statements about, say, orcs because (we believed) there is no such thing as a "D&D orc;" there are "Forgotten Realms orcs," "Eberron orcs," even the orcs from countless homebrew campaigns, all of which may differ in fundamental ways.

We never endeavored to craft a "new edition." My original concept was to name Monsters of the Multiverse the fourth core book, revise the PHB in 2023, the DMG in 2024, the MM in 2025, and MotM in 2026. In 2027, we'd revise the PHB yet again. In other words, going forward, we would release a revised core book each year, and each core book would be refreshed every four years. The idea was to further boost D&D's balance sheet, but also establish a mechanism that allowed the game to continuously improve and evolve instead of forestalling innovation until we we could pull of a quantum "edition shift."

Of course, things didn't unfold that way. The C-Suite insisted we revise all the core books together and very much wanted to position this effort as a "new edition," not to boost sales but to help solve an orthogonal business problem that later became moot. We were also ordered to announce the new core books much earlier than we preferred. I was deeply concerned that announcing a "new edition" would crash vital backlist sales. Thus began the strange linguistic dance of trying to position these books as both "a new edition" and "not a new edition" at the same time. (For my money, they are absolutely not a "new edition.")

This makes so much sense! I knew there had to be a reason it was being marketed so strangely!

 

[dave2008]

This makes so much sense! I knew there had to be a reason it was being marketed so strangely!

I was going to ping you on Ray's post, but I thought you would find it.

 

[TiQuinn]

Sure, but other horror games don't have PCs with D&D tier 3 & 4 levels of power. So, an easy conceit is to limit D&D horror games to level 10 and lower.

Of course but that’s my point. You pretty much have to stop the game at level 10 even though that’s an artificial stopping point. The game can’t really support the horror aspect beyond it.

 

[dave2008]

Of course but that’s my point. You pretty much have to stop the game at level 10 even though that’s an artificial stopping point. The game can’t really support the horror aspect beyond it.

It can support horror beyond level 10, but if you want to keep the feel from the first 10 levels I recommend some changes.

Personally, I think playing D&D to level 10 is a fully featured RPG. It took my group over 3 years of gaming to get to level 10. That is plenty bang for my buck.

 

[mamba]

Amusingly, while it seems they listened to their current base as far as rules changes, they seem to have made up their own minds about lore.

I don’t think they asked about lore changes, so yes, they had their mind made up. Moving setting specific lore out of the core books does make sense though

 

[Micah Sweet]

I was going to ping you on Ray's post, but I thought you would find it.

These are the kind of actual answers I've been looking for for years but are so thin on the ground.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don’t think they asked about lore changes, so yes, they had their mind made up. Moving setting specific lore out of the core books does make sense though

It seems we're hardly getting Ray's idea of a bunch of different versions on the same creature by setting though, at least in a mechanical sense.