Urriak Uruk
Gaming is fun, and fun is for everyone
Oh. Why did you not say you worked at Wizards? That you are privy to their product schedule. That you are intimately familiar with their decision making process. And is not hindsight just the greatest.
They have past material. A great backlog of material. Given their history of rehashes of old material into newer editions it is feasible. You are also missing the point that balancing encounters is not minimal effort.
However my point is that we simply do not know what Wizards will release. And we have precedent in 5e earlier of re-released material.
Clearly we are going in circles here... Tyranny of Dragons was an obvious product to re-release, because the Rise is a direct sequel to Hoard. Just because it exists, a product that may have taken them maybe a month to finish (not including printing), is very little evidence of anything. You're asking for a very different type of re-release.
Also don't really know how the book can stay called the SCAG if it includes a bunch of non-SC material, but whatever.
Did you not see where I said I personally am fine with how it is? I’m sure I said it several times. I’m playing devil’s advocate and honestly people would rather buy physical books than PDFs. E-Books are on the downturn for the last handful of years and people aren’t consuming digital product aside from music and video likes they were. The E-Book revolution is over and that includes PDFs which are more and more becoming a market for scholars. While they generate a profit still facts remain facts.
Like I’ve now said multiple times I’m fine with a region book approach personally. I’m just putting out why the same people saying the same ol thing over and over again are wrong. First it was “you can’t put the Realms in one book”. Well they have. Then it was page counts being similar in SCAG vs the FRCS and lo and behold the fonts are really different so the word count is very, very different. Now it’s pointing out people are saying “if you wanna run an X style campaign by adventure Z and use the information in that” and the information being a few scant pages that really can’t be used that way. Now the worm is turning on that argument. It looks a lot like people trying to gatekeep at this point to me.
And like I’ve said before... five or so years ago we would all be up in arms over such comments.
I mean, you're phrasing it like I'm shifting my argument, when really these are just segments of my same point.
- You can put the entire Realms in one book, it's just going to look very similar to the FRCS with minimal content for each region and a few minor changes for 5E.
- The word counts are different, but not that much different, and the font isn't changing back to that size anyway because 5E layout is consistent.
- They adventure books can be used that way, in fact much better than the handful of pages for the same region in the FRCS.
Which all tie back to my larger point, which is you clearly want a 5E FRCS. And I don't really understand why, as the setting material from the 3E FRCS is entirely useable from 5E. Yes 100 years have passed, so maybe some of the leadership has changed hands, but again there's only going to be enough room to hold minor changes from the 3E book.
Consider Chult. In a 5E FRCS, it would have to most of the material the 3E book has for that region, and add some lines explaining the Port Nyanzaru revolted and kicked out Amn. Ok, that's slightly different. Mostly the same, but slightly different yes. Is it better than the 3E version? I guess slightly, though paying an extra $50 for this marginal difference seems excessive (and we know you care about this since you find the adventures so expensive).
Compare that to Tomb of Annihilation. You get an entire first chapter devoted to Port Nyanzaru, complete with a map, key NPCs, random encounters, maps for villas, etc. In addition, you have a description that varies from one paragraph to a short adventure for literally every point marked on the Chultan Peninsula map. If you want to run an adventure in Chult, even one independent of the Death Curse plot, ToA is OBVIOUSLY the superior product to have.
I also don't understand the "5 years ago" thing... what's different 5 years ago from today? That we didn't have the 5 FR adventure books that we do now?