D&D 5E The Size of Books

[DaveMage]

Combining the Player and GM book (ala the Pathfinder Core Rulebook) makes a lot of sense from the publisher point of view (using Paizo/Pathfinder as an example):

1. Everybody buys the Core Rulebook, so everyone who plays will also have the guidelines on how to be a GM.
2. There are no big adventure (or monster) secrets in the core book, so being familiar with the material will have no significant impact regarding adventures.
3. More GMs = more sales, as GMs historically purchase more products than those who are just players.

If you split the books into a player book and a GM book, a lot fewer players will have access to the GM material, and thus, you've created a barrier to entry for GMs.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

Eh, I've never really liked the digest size.

I can understand that. A lot of my regular fiction paperbacks (when I'm not getting them electronically) seemed to be headed to that size.

One good point is that the digest size *seems* to be less scary to newcomers. I know that my daughters eyes got big when she saw the Tome that is Pathfinder. Then she sae 4E on my self and asked to learn that one instead.

Of course, after grazing on my game book shelves, she picked Savage Worlds Explorers because of the size, pictures and ease of reading.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think WotC's profit margins would be fine if they made the hobby more financially available. Lot of other companies do well releasing more affordable books. Plus right now I costs $100 to get the first three core 4e books, that is to just get into a game. I would never want to drop that without playing the game, which you need this to play, this causes a problem. For non-gamers this cost in truly outrageous to pay for something that they may never use.

Two things...

1) The number of players who have no concept of what D&D or RPGs are (and have no friends in the gaming group to clue them in on what they actually should or need to buy) is exceedingly small. 99% of all "new" players are going to be joining a game that includes at least one experienced player... and that player will tell him he doesn't need to drop $100 on all 3 books. But rather, only $30 on the Player's Handbook (if the player even so chose). But its also quite possible that the experienced one will tell the player to not even buy any books yet, until he discovers whether he likes the game. Because ther will be plenty of other PHBs around the table the "new" player can look at when he needs to.

2) Your suggestion is actually even WORSE for the "new" player... because rather than just dropping $30 on a PHB... they have to drop $50 on a combined book. So its the combined book that is giving the player much more useless information which they would never use, and would be a waste of money to them.

 

[Grimmjow]

The important part is that these books be complete. I don't want to see a 2 after any book, Monster Manuals excepted. Though I would prefer themed monster books.

agreed. Monster manuals are the only exception but there should also be monster themed books (with information for players to get involved also) and then maybe campaign setting monster manuals

 

[Razjah]

2) Your suggestion is actually even WORSE for the "new" player... because rather than just dropping $30 on a PHB... they have to drop $50 on a combined book. So its the combined book that is giving the player much more useless information which they would never use, and would be a waste of money to them.

I've said how I want affordable, small books. Sized and priced like the Essentials line, but with all the information for the base game. How does that end up with a $50 book? This would be the only book a new player would need to get. It would have all the GM information and still be cheaper than the 4e or 3.5 PHB.

I do completely agree with your assessment (not quoted because I'm lazy) about how electronic release should be a main source for releasing books.

 

[DEFCON 1]

You can't cram the entirety of information from the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual into a single book and make it 'affordable and small'.

Sure... you might want it that way, but it is no way realistic. Both from a page count point of view, as well as a "WotC needs to earn some profit back on these things that there's spending years to produce" point of view.

Let's not use what we'd 'like to have' as the starting point on the book production discussion... but what is fiscally and logistically required to accomplish it.

 

[delericho]

You can't cram the entirety of information from the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual into a single book and make it 'affordable and small'.

The corollary to the "single book"/"affordable and small" request is that the core of the game has to be slimmed down very significantly.

Taking 4e as a model, simply by cutting the level-range to just the Heroic tier cuts out sufficient powers, magic items, and monsters that it should be possible to compress to a single book. And there are savings that can be made by reducing font size and eliminating whitespace.

Or, alternately, look at the BECMI "Rules Cyclopedia".

A single-book version of D&D is certainly possible. Whether such an approach would be desirable (either for WotC or for the players) is rather more debatable.

(It's also worth noting, of course, that this refers only to the core of the game. The door should absolutely be left open for supplements adding any and all options that people care to have - and that's true whether the core is one, three, five, or fifty books.)

 

[Razjah]

I think they can. We have a lot of rules bloat now with complicated combat rules, feat lists that are really long, and spell lists. If other games can get it down to that size, why can't D&D? Burning Wheel is a hardcover 600 page book that is the same size, only thicker. I think that model would work well for the D&D books.

It would work much better if they got rid of the overly large borders and extra white space on every page. The 4e books are a homage to wasted page space, and the essentials line continued this homage. If the border were tightened, a slightly smaller font size was used, and pages space was more efficiently used then they could market the books this way.

I don't think the majority of sales come from the core books, but from the adventures, so shaping the books like this wouldn't be that big a hindrance. If the books need to be separate, then they should be sold together, at a discount. $20 for each book, $30 for the two. I don't care if they are soft or hardcover, whatever makes them more affordable.

Also, the Monster Manual will almost definitely need to be separate. But a core sample of monsters (like the 30 most popular monster from D&D) would work. Then they can add in easy to use rules for creating monsters and the bestiary becomes a community thing where people can build and share monsters.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I don't think the majority of sales come from the core books, but from the adventures...

Well... there's the flaw in your entire argument right there.

 

[delericho]

I don't think the majority of sales come from the core books, but from the adventures

This is incorrect.

With 3e, the overwhelming majority of profits were from core rulebooks. Indeed, the entire d20 strategy was based on the notion that third-party supplements would drive sales of PHBs, sparing WotC the need to produce those (low-margin) items themselves.

With Pathfinder, the item that drives the company does indeed seem to be adventures, specifically their Adventure Path product. However, this is somewhat misleading, because it's not adventures that are generating the revenue - it's subscriptions. Because Paizo know they have N-thousand guaranteed sales every month (and lower, but still M-thousand guaranteed sales of each supplement), they can produce product to their heart's content.

As far as I can tell, with 4e the thing that drove revenue was DDI, which again is a subscription-based service. But adventures were certainly not a major revenue-generator... otherwise, WotC would have made more of them!

If I were in charge at WotC, and assuming my goal was "make money", I believe my strategy would be built around a single* core rulebook, paired with as strong a DDI offering as I could reasonably deliver. I would almost certainly never publish more than a tiny number of adventures in-print, never more than a single setting in-print, and almost all in-print supplements would be little more than printed (and errata-ed) copies of material that had already been seen on DDI.

* I would go with a single core rulebook, gambling that what we lost in sales of three books we could make up in selling the single book more widely. Which may not be the right gamble, of course! I would also be sorely tempted to make my Starter Set a deluxe boxed set that included that same core rulebook as the key component.

Edit: Of course, if I were in charge at WotC and implemented this, I expect we'd probably lose a lot of money in doing so.