D&D 5E The Printers Can't Handle WotC's One D&D Print Runs!

One of the reasons why the three new core rulebooks next year will not be released together is because D&D is such a juggernaut that the printers can't actually handle the size of the print runs!

Jeremy Crawford told Polygon "Our print runs are pretty darn big and printers are telling us you can’t give us these three books at the same time.” And Chris Perkins added that "The print runs we’re talking about are massive. That’s been not only true of the core books, but also Tasha’s Cauldron. It’s what we call a high-end problem."

 

[Micah Sweet]

Professional game designers with years and sometimes decades worth of published projects to their name can some 20 something rando whose never gm’d before.

Yeah I’d say I have more faith in the design team.

Funny how we have years of people pooping on dms guild and fan made products having terrible mechanics but now we’re supposed to believe that Joe Q Gamer is a professional game designer.

I've never complained about that. I love 3pp and have never been shy about it.

 

[Hussar]

I've never complained about that. I love 3pp and have never been shy about it.

Are you saying the criticism doesn’t exist?

 

[BookTenTiger]

You know who else printed lots of books?

Gutenberg!

 

[Micah Sweet]

Are you saying the criticism doesn’t exist?

I'm saying if you respond to my post with a criticism that doesn't apply to me, I'm going to call it out.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

what does this mean? The lifetime sales of the best selling PF book were less than the worst selling 4e book?

No, I didn't mean that, but I can see how it reads that way. I meant an apples-to-apples comparison of a 4e book dropping at the same time as a PF book in a head-to-head. I don't think that ever actually happened, and if it did, it wasn't during the few months that PF was on top. PF outsold 4e for a very little while, when PF was dropping new books next to 4e's old ones. It's likely that a poor-selling 4e book undersold a good-selling PF one, though!

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I appreciate the generosity behind this, but playtesting against what, exactly? After all, if the old and new editions are meant to be compatible, then that compatibility should flow backwards from the monsters, too. The new edition's monsters should be balanced/playable/whatever against PCs built using the old edition. Doesn't the D&D team want to playtest that?

Even if they aren't focused on that angle, doesn't the D&D design team want to know if new edition PCs are balanced with new edition monsters? That seems like the more useful metric. If the MM was furthest along and they had been updating MM monsters since MMoM, then they should be releasing the new monsters so that their playtest feedback can compare apples to apples.

AFAIK they plan to do that - to offer some monsters for playtesting - they just started with PHB stuff, probably because it's expected to be the most controversial, and therefore will need the most rounds of playtesting.

Precisely because the game is backwards compatible means that the monsters won't need much playtesting - they will be balanced with extant 5e ones. We're more likely to see cosmetic and quality-of-life changes to monsters rather than any major overhaul (most of which I expect to see in high-CR monsters).

 

[Audiomancer]

Should have posted this earlier, but…

WOTC: “You want the print runs?! You can’t HANDLE the print runs!”

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I took his comment in context of his whole post. Seems more like a volley in an edition war than a thoughtful response to Dysons post.

I'm afraid you've lost me. What context in what whole post? Who's volleying what edition war? I'm not following what you're saying here. It 'sounds' like you think I'm doing something edition-warring, which makes no sense.

You (I can't even remember if it was you) posted that Dyson said that Tasha's out-printed all of 4e. I simply suggested that it's more likely that it outprinted all of 4e ordered by that distributor or that print-shop, rather than ALL-all of 4e. Dyson could easily have either 1) mistaken what he heard; or 2) wrote it (mistakenly) in a way that has been misinterpreted.

If there's a lot more to what Dyson said, I certainly haven't read it.

But I can't imagine how you'd get the impression that I'd have any opinion whatsoever in either side of any edition war. Tasha's outselling 4e at a given printer or a given distributor is certainly an impressive feat in itself - it's just more likely than the idea that it outsold the entire edition across the board. Who knows? Maybe it did. It just seems unlikely to me.

Got a link to Dyson's longer post on the subject?

 

[darjr]

I'm afraid you've lost me. What context in what whole post? Who's volleying what edition war? I'm not following what you're saying here. It 'sounds' like you think I'm doing something edition-warring, which makes no sense.

You (I can't even remember if it was you) posted that Dyson said that Tasha's out-printed all of 4e. I simply suggested that it's more likely that it outprinted all of 4e ordered by that distributor or that print-shop, rather than ALL-all of 4e. Dyson could easily have either 1) mistaken what he heard; or 2) wrote it (mistakenly) in a way that has been misinterpreted.

If there's a lot more to what Dyson said, I certainly haven't read it.

But I can't imagine how you'd get the impression that I'd have any opinion whatsoever in either side of any edition war. Tasha's outselling 4e at a given printer or a given distributor is certainly an impressive feat in itself - it's just more likely than the idea that it outsold the entire edition across the board. Who knows? Maybe it did. It just seems unlikely to me.

Got a link to Dyson's longer post on the subject?

I dint think you were. I meant the rest of the post you were speculating about. Not Dysons.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I dint think you were. I meant the rest of the post you were speculating about. Not Dysons.

Oh! I think I follow you now. I had to go back and read each thing multiple times. Which is harder to do than I expected.