D&D 5E The Audience - Do you feel like you're the target audience?

[MGibster]

Don't tell me that there is a thieves guild operating in this city. Instead, give me two or three short adventures plus a half dozen sidebar adventures using that thieves guild. Sure, that means I get less background material for the city.

Ideally I can get both. Let me start over. Hi, my name is MGibster. And when it comes to sourcebooks I like having interesting NPCs and organizations as well as some plot hooks for adventures. The Night City (1991) sourcebook for Cyberpunk 2020 is a good example of a setting for a game. It's got a short history of the city, divides the city into districts giving you areas of interest, NPCs in the area, and scores of adventure hooks. City of Lies (1998) is another great sourcebook for the 1st edition of Legend of the Five Rings and is filled to the brim with NPCs, locations, and all sorts of adventure hooks. It even has the outline of a campaign you can run.

 

[MGibster]

Oh, and I'm absolutely not the target market for WotC. For starters, high fantasy games are less appealing to me these days. And despite 5th edition being my favorite, I'm just not interested in most of the books they've published. I have a few of their campaign books I've purchased that are still in their shrinkwrap. I don't expect WotC to cater to me, so I'm not bitter or anything, and I'm glad so many of you are happy with what they've been producing.

 

[humble minion]

I'm certainly not the target audience for most of WotCs more recent products, but there's some I've enjoyed and nobody's ever going to like EVERYTHING a company puts out. But these days, the 3pp market is so huge and varied that i certainly can find products for which I AM the target audience for. WotC isn't the be-all and end-all these days. They seem to be doing fine for themselves, which means (because they're the 800lb gorilla of the industry and they own all the damn copyrights) that they'll keep growing the game and attracting new players who might one day want to play in my games.

I'm not their audience, but I'm hardly hard done by either. Shrug. The game is bigger than WotC these days. There's room for everyone.

 

[Incenjucar]

I am certainly not the current target audience, and since they're keeping 5E around a bit longer there's no reasonable chance I will ever be, as I will be downright ancient by the time they have finished the next edition's further simplified Xerox of old content while I will have another decade more game development experience and knowledge. Realistically, this is probably the last decade they'd be able to cash in on me.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Personally, I jumped off the D&D boat years ago. I play Pathfinder with my friends cause they do. I want to explore the weird and unusual.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I don't think there is a singular audience for WotC's D&D. I suspect the number of people who buy the books to use, rather than to collect/read, who ran both Descent into Avernus and Wild Beyond the WItchlight is pretty small. They're taking a shotgun approach and trying to sell at least some books to everyone.

So, to that extent, sure, I'm their audience. I'll probably buy the 2024 core books. I will buy interesting adventures that aren't the same flavors of things I've seen for 40 years. (I bought Wild Beyond the Witchlight and Journeys Beyond the Radiant Citadel for actual table play for that reason.) But the idea of a multiversal tour chasing Vecna bores me to tears -- been there, done that, got the t-shirt, multiple times over.

But WotC isn't just worrying about people who've been playing since Jimmy Carter was president -- nor should they. And frankly, at this point, I'm happy to split my time between WotC D&D, non-WotC D&D stuff and other games, many of which are lighter and more tightly focused on delivering a very specific experience, rather than the one-size-fits-most of D&D, which doesn't excite me as much as it once did.

So I'm not leaving WotC's D&D behind, but I am seeing other people as well.

 

[Incenjucar]

I do certainly retain interest in fantasy RPGs and new creative works by indie developers - anything Planescape or Elemental will likely get a glance minimum - and I plan to continue supporting them here and there while trying to find a game to settle into that doesn't frustrate me but which also has enough players.

 

[Charlaquin]

Forking this over from the https://www.enworld.org/threads/manual-of-the-planes-for-5e-on-dmsguild.700597/ thread where this sidebar is taking away from the excellent work those folks are doing.

Something that was said in that thread caught my eye:



See, this is how I feel about it. I was doing a bit of a nostalgia dive into my 3e books collection and I realized pretty quickly how much I do not want those kinds of books anymore. I've got, for example, pretty much the entire run of Scarred Lands. LOVED the setting. ADORED it. Reading it now? Zero interest in running it because I realize that despite having all this lore and background and whatnot, any campaign I build in Scarred Lands is going to be me pretty much home brewing 100% of the campaign. Sure, it will draw on various Scarred Lands ideas, but, since there are almost no actual, practical, usable elements in the books (other than monsters I suppose), I'm stuck writing 99% of everything myself.

I have neither the time, inclination or frankly, skill to do that. I really don't. I freely admit that. I don't want books of setting material. Setting material books are completely useless to me. Don't tell me that there is a thieves guild operating in this city. Instead, give me two or three short adventures plus a half dozen sidebar adventures using that thieves guild. Sure, that means I get less background material for the city. I get that. There is a limit on page count after all. But, that adventure location with NPC's, maps, and actual adventures is something I can use RIGHT NOW. It doesn't mean that I have to take the pages of setting material and then incorporate it into whatever adventure I happen to bake. And, even better, I can use that material as a skeleton framework to build and scaffold a larger adventure onto.

I mean, this is classic “show, don’t tell” applied to RPG books, isn’t it? It’s one thing to inform readers about things that are in the setting, and another to provide adventure hooks, or full-on adventures involving those things.

 

[Charlaquin]

I will say, while I prefer adventure modules over setting guides in theory, I haven’t loved most of the WotC-published adventure paths for 5e. I find a lot of them have really interesting ideas, but generally find their execution pretty disappointing. So, maybe I’m not the target audience despite agreeing with the general premise?

 

[Kurotowa]

On the one hand, I appreciate that I'm not drowning in low quality splatbooks. On the other hand, I rarely find myself behind the DM screen, so I've kind of shied off from reading all these adventure sections so as to not spoil myself should one of the more regular DMs in my group choose to run it. So that's sharply curtailed how attractive these hybrid release packages are to me.

I value good setting books like Eberron and Ravenloft because they're chock full of seeds I can build character ideas around. Having that material hidden in an adventure section is annoying to me. I know it's because WotC has done their surveys and found that non-DMs rarely buy setting books, and I know from experience that a lot of DMs prefer not to have their players quoting setting facts they haven't deliberately introduced. But dang it, I like having a nice menu of locations and characters as a jumping off point for making my own PC background.

So consider me partially served. I'm fully on board with the mechanics and player options side of things, but don't love these adventure heavy setting releases.