sniff sniff...Do I smell 2nd edition mistakes?

[John Morrow]

If it's 5 million players with a 4:1 ratio of players to GMs, and only GMs bought the setting books, that would be only 10% of the GMs.

I think they'd be lucky to hit 25,000, which could still be economically viable. A lot of role-players are cheapskates and there is also competition out there from not WotC settings.

When you consider that TSR at its peak production was putting out an AD&D product almost every month for Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Buck Rogers, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Birthright and Planescape and usually a Mystara product or two for Basic D&D, plus "Core" material like the Complete books, that's clearly over the top.

Let's not forget that the TSR you are talking about when bankrupt and was bought out by WotC.

I'm not convinced that a Wizards-like schedule couldn't support 3-5 campaign settings as full lines. With three (for purposes of wishful thinking, we'll say the Realms, Eberron and Spelljammer, though that probably wouldn't be the best business decision) at one book per line per quarter, that's still 1/10th(!) the amount of setting-specific content TSR provided.

I think a better model would probably be to maybe keep FR a core setting that just keeps going and then follow the Games Workshop minitature game model for settings. Keep rotating old settings out and new settings in.

Have three active settings at a time (with, perhaps, Greyhawk lurking in the background supported by Dungeon and Dragon or release it as an Open Source setting). Come up with a new "Eberron" every two years and keep it going for four years, at which point it will be retired and a new setting will take its place. Offset the introductions by two years. In all honest, you can explore a setting in more than enough detail in four years, avoiding tactics like new editions, setting-changing metaplots, and books about corners of the setting that no sane person could care less about.

WotC needs to sell books. They can only sell so many rules and variant rules before the audience gets sick of it. Settings, on the other hand, can always be made fresh and, better still, get read by people who don't actively play but still like reading role-playing settings. They can also support fiction lines with the new settings.

Observe that Games Workship has solved the problem of constantly selling new stuff with miniatures by giving many of their games and miniature lines a limited lifespan. Then that line gets retired and they push a new game or, in the case of Warhammer, focus on a different part of the setting. When a line is retired, they might collect all of the rules of the expansions into a hardcover volume like they did with Necromunda or license it off like they did with Warhammer FRP for a while.

I think WotC could do the same thing with settings, perhaps doing things exactly like they did with Eberron with the contest and such. Up to four years and then a setting is retired. Then they move on to something fresh and more in line with current tastes. If the setting is really popular, keep it in print, compile the important parts into a single setting compilation or do as someone else here suggested and license it out to a third-party company that can survive on 5,000 to 10,000 copy print runs. We are also close to approaching a time where print-on-demand technology or will allow a company like WotC to keep setting books "in print" without incurring the cost of maintaining a low selling volume in a warehouse.

 

[broghammerj]

So the Complete Series' aren't options? Huh? I think you may need to look at those old 2E kits for powercreep btw. A great deal of them were broken beyond all sense of balance.

I guess my point was that there weren't any kits written into the 2e players handbook and DMG. To me that makes them more of an option if you will. I agree that many of them were very broken. The complete series has more of a reason to be incorporated into the game since it's providing feats and prestige classes, something that is also found in PHB and DMG. Yes, I know that everything is optional and up to the DM, blah, blah, blah. It's just pretty hard to say no to a player when you run a general DND game and they want to use an official WOTC product. That's why I wish the were playtested, balanced, etc. I was hoping that there would be more sophistication to a product put out in a newer edition.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

I guess my point was that there weren't any kits written into the 2e players handbook and DMG. To me that makes them more of an option if you will. I agree that many of them were very broken. The complete series has more of a reason to be incorporated into the game since it's providing feats and prestige classes, something that is also found in PHB and DMG. Yes, I know that everything is optional and up to the DM, blah, blah, blah. It's just pretty hard to say no to a player when you run a general DND game and they want to use an official WOTC product. That's why I wish the were playtested, balanced, etc. I was hoping that there would be more sophistication to a product put out in a newer edition.

I find it quite easy to say no to a player. They ask me to play a ludicrous D&D spellcaster and I tell them why, in my setting, they can't.

Oh, you meant non-core material? Heck, I let all of that in. Even the hulking hurler isn't really as dangerous as a core druid, and he's the worst of the bunch.



Seriously, though, the range of powers in Complete Adventurer, Arcane and Warrior isn't close to the range in the PHB itself, and all three fall well on the lower end of the scale. The dervish and frenzied berserker each in their own way allow warrior classes to come close to matching up with non-druid spellcasters, the hulking hurler makes a great one-trick pony. Other than that? Is there anything in any of those three books even close to the core druid? Any spell close to Shapechange?

(I won't vouch for Complete Divine, since I don't have a copy and it focuses on two of the strongest classes)

Is it "power creep" when barbarians, bards, fighters, monks, paladins, rogues, rangers and sorcerers get a chance to compete with clerics, druids and wizards? In my opinion, Core D&D is terribly unbalanced; the Complete books make it a bit less so.

 

[Ranger REG]

If there is, indeed, anything close to the 4+ million D&D players in the US alone that WotC's market research apparently indicates, I don't think 100,000 buyers for a niche setting is at all an out of the ballpark figure, especially if we're just talking about a single setting book rather than a full line. If it's 5 million players with a 4:1 ratio of players to GMs, and only GMs bought the setting books, that would be only 10% of the GMs.

When you consider that TSR at its peak production was putting out an AD&D product almost every month for Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Buck Rogers, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Birthright and Planescape and usually a Mystara product or two for Basic D&D, plus "Core" material like the Complete books, that's clearly over the top. Especially when many of those products were boxed sets with two or three booklets, maps, cardboard standees, and often other peripheral material.

Oh, TSR was putting out. They just didn't have the expected sales coming in. To assume that every AD&D DMs in the world are going to buy one product from each setting line is -- to be brutal -- stoopid. I mean, I never got into Dark Sun or Alternity. I didn't even get into Jakandor. I only limit myself to just three settings I like: FR, DL, and Birthright. And mind you, when DL went from AD&D to SAGA, I stopped buying.

I was young and stoopid in the 90s. The 3-shelf bookcase full of TSR products always reminded me of my youth. I think the young gamers today would have at least learned from my mistake.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Oh, TSR was putting out. They just didn't have the expected sales coming in. To assume that every AD&D DMs in the world are going to buy one product from each setting line is -- to be brutal -- stoopid. I mean, I never got into Dark Sun or Alternity. I didn't even get into Jakandor. I only limit myself to just three settings I like: FR, DL, and Birthright. And mind you, when DL went from AD&D to SAGA, I stopped buying.

I was young and stoopid in the 90s. The 3-shelf bookcase full of TSR products always reminded me of my youth. I think the young gamers today would have at least learned from my mistake.

I also have a 3-shelf bookcase of TSR products. Although I don't actually regret 'em - 2e may have been awful, but it had some really interesting bits. Now that D&D has decent rules attached to it, I get a lot of use out of those old boxed sets.

My point, however, was that WotC and the industry in general (and I daresay the community, too), looked at the ludicrous overflow of multiple settings and related material TSR put out and concluded that multiple settings and related material were the wrong way to go.

It's like saying you should only ever have a single small car because if you buy ten SUVs you'll be in debt forever. Just because the latter is silly and excessive doesn't mean the former is necessarily correct.

My contention is that 3-5 settings with a much scaled-back schedule would not be flooding the market.

We know that 7-10 settings with roughly one release a month did flood the market, and did so at a time when the RPG community was shrinking before bad rules and new competition (electronic games and CCGs, mostly).

We know (at least, I think we can all agree) that 2 settings with roughly one release per quarter does not flood the market.

Where is the cutoff point? If you add, say, Dark Sun to the list of supported settings, giving you one setting-related release per month, does WotC's D&D division collapse under its own weight? What about sticking Spelljammer on top of that? Will more than one setting-related release per month, once per quarter, break the WotC bank?

It's possible that three settings is too many. But I don't think we've seen evidence of that. Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk coexisted and thrived in the '80s despite being much less modular than today's Eberron and Forgotten Realms.

TSR's mid-90s collapse came after it had introduced many more settings, and the settings were hardly the only problem. The company's attitude, new competition, the ethics of its management, the poor and increasingly muddy 2e rules, disastrous introductory products like Dragon Strike... the list goes on and on. Just because TSR failed doesn't mean everything it did was wrong, nor that some of the things it did 'wrong' weren't just too much of a good thing.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

When they start releasing ten products a month about 6 different settings, then I'll start agreeing with you. The good news is that whatever I DON'T want to buy, I don't have to to get some esoteric piece of info from it for a product I DO own.

Well, they do have cross-references in the newer books, like Lost Empires of Faerûn mentions 35 monsters from almost 20 sources. BUT, they offer monster substitutes. So if you come by, say the Caller in Darkness (from the Expanded Psionics Handbook) who's said to inhabit a phantom city, and you don't have XPH, you just use a dread wraith. Often enough, it's only a mention, anyway (like described above), so if you don't have the genuine article you can use the substitute without changing any of the relevant things.

I think that's the best of both worlds: The loyal fans get opportunities to use their plethora of books, but the others aren't punished by being unable to use that part of the book they just bought.

However, I have ceased to buy most WotC releases for both poor quality (in terms of balance and editing) and too many of them.

I haven't really seen problems with much of the material. OK, some of the options are over-the-top, but IMO there's not a single book (at least of those I bought) that has only imbalanced stuff.

I don't see the power creep some talk about, either.

Plus the 4th edition is coming very soon and all my 3.5 books will turn obsolete so...

Define "very soon"?
For me, that would mean "before the end of the year". Which isn't true, it would have been announced by now then. I do think 4e will wait for several years yet, and that isn't very soon in any human scale.

 

[MonsterMash]

What I think WotC could safely get away with is produce one-offs for their various old settings. Make a single book around 300 pages that is full of balanced, modular crunch with a healthy frosting of fluff tossed over the top. There's no committment to full production on a setting and people with fond memories of Dark Sun, Planescape, the Known World, or Spelljammer suddenly have semi-complete toolboxes with which to run the setting in 3.5e.

I would probably bite on those books knowing I had no committment to spend money on an ever-growing product line for the setting.

I'd probably go for some of those too. Especially Al-Qadim.

 

[Belen]

Define "very soon"?
For me, that would mean "before the end of the year". Which isn't true, it would have been announced by now then. I do think 4e will wait for several years yet, and that isn't very soon in any human scale.

If it's anything like 3e, then we will know 2 years in advance because they will start large scale playtesting.

However, I do not think that WOTC will ever playtest a product as rigorously as 3e again. In fact, I think that 4e will only be playtested in house. That will probably lead to only a 6-12 month notice of the next edition.

Of course, they have so few designers at WOTC that I am afraid that the next edition will be the equivalent of the 1e/2e change rather than the 2e/3e change.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

If it's anything like 3e, then we will know 2 years in advance because they will start large scale playtesting.

However, I do not think that WOTC will ever playtest a product as rigorously as 3e again. In fact, I think that 4e will only be playtested in house. That will probably lead to only a 6-12 month notice of the next edition.

I do hope that they will playtest the next edition properly. I mean, this is not just a supplement. It's a whole new edition. They simply have to. After all, they have a great community to get back to for that.

Of course, they have so few designers at WOTC that I am afraid that the next edition will be the equivalent of the 1e/2e change rather than the 2e/3e change.

I think that 3e has fixed a lot of glaring errors. The stuff I deem necessary for 4e aren't nearly as much as I did with 2e. It will be finetuning, but in a larger scale than 3.5 for now they have an actual new edition and can really change things.


But to get back on topic, I don't think they will even announce 4e in the next couple of years. And after the announcement, we have some time of breething space (how long in advance did they announce 3.5?) yet. So the "very soon" is probably quite far from the truth

 

[Psion]

The complete series and the races series are some of the poorest products they are releasing and IMHO the Complete X Handbook were far superior products. Don't get me wrong, they are pretty cool and allow for more options but the mistakes are horrendous. Stat blocks are quite often wrong, power creep exists with each new product, they don't share the same vision as the designers (mostly because they have left the company and therein lies part of the problem), unbalanced spells, spells at the wrong level and so on. I guess I was just hoping for better. Will this stop me from buying the books? Not likely, I am sucker for buying books and I do enjoy reading them immensely. Am I very critical in what exists in those books and am I concerned with how it will affect my game? You bet. As is a DM's perogative I can easily say what is and what isn't allowed. But I do expect better from Wotc for the money I put down on their books.

Has anyone else noticed this trend? Do you feel the same?

I am not seeing much "power creep". I think there were some notable offenders (BoED, anyone?), but nothing resembling a trend.

I can see how having the design team change is affecting their consistency. But that's still better than the 2e era, when most of the supplements were freelanced out. The usability of any two 3e products with one another is much better than in 2e, where the design philosophy seemed to continually change and there was very shaky quality control. The current situation is somewhat better now.