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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6652715" data-attributes="member: 37579">No, you're not asking for a hardcover a month, just four or five with enough written content to fill another two or three. So just two hardcovers every three months. Pathfinder is NOT D&D and Paizo is NOT Wizards of the Coast. First, Pathfinder expects far, far fewer sales than WotC. The Pathfinder Core rulebook is the biggest hit of the company and it's sold half as many copies as the 3.0 PHB in twice as long. Heck, the 3e PHB sold more copies in its first month. And Pathfinder keeps growing. The first print run of the Core Rulebook was the largest print-run Paizo had every done, which is likely a number of copies WotC wouldn't even bother with. The scale is completely off. WotC belongs to a publicly traded company. They're expected to turn a profit for Hasbro shareholders (and it's actually illegal for them not to act in the shareholder's interests). Paizo is privately owned by a woman who never has to work another day in her life after a Hasbro payout and started a game company so she wouldn't be bored. She's worked for free, laying herself off to save the job of another employee. Paizo can make almost no money and be happy. They can turn the profits from books into other books and barely have money to invest in new ideas and the company will go along swimmingly. But WotC can't do that and D&D can't do that. They're a business out to make as much money as possible, and making D&D accessories was not profitable enough and not worth the expense. Plus, WotC has shrunk the D&D department to being closer to many small publishers. It's closer to a Green Ronin or Margaret Weis Productions or Monte Cook Press. And those companies aren't releasing a half-dozen sizable hardcover books each year. There is a finite number of books people will buy. Per month, per year, per edition. People buy certain books and then slow down purchases. (Except for the collectors or uber-fans which are a small percentage of the fanbase). And there is a finite number of books before quality drops and material becomes stretched thin. The faster you release that content and hit that wall, the faster the edition burns out. Slowing down releases doesn't fix the problem, it just delays it. Hence the delaying obesity metaphor: the base game was all the calories we needed and anything else is just snacking. By tonnes do you mean 250,000? Because that's what it'd take. And, as has been said dozens of times before, it takes almost zero effort to take the storyline and strip out chunks of it to make a small adventure or two or thirteen. And producing a competing line of small modules would cost sales of the storyline volumes reducing overall profit. D&D doesn't have the fanbase for WotC to compete with itself over adventures. But if you really need adventures, why not look at Necromancer Games' small adventures? Or En5ider? Or the dozen other 5e compatible adventures on DriveThruRPG? Your adventures don't need some WotC employee rubber stamping them.At my table? No. In the world at large, totally. If the game goes under and no one can buy it, it will die. I'm not against the periodic accessory or a campaign setting. But mandating X per year whether they're ready or not, whether people need that content or not is problematic.Because it's bad for the game. It kills the edition and saturates the market necessitating a new edition that can fragment the audience and is super costly to produce. The higher ups at WotC are clearly not impressed with D&D's sales or the brand's performance, as seen by the constant shrinking and outsourcing of the brand. We're right off the heels of an under-performing edition. If 5e dies quickly - which it WILL if the market is flooded - then WotC will likely just shelf the RPG, like they've done with dozens of other brands and products. D&D the RPG goes bye-bye. And I don't want that. That's bad.-edit--I kinda object to the limiter on the question, "answer that without rallying against glut". That's like saying "argue against a 4000 calorie diet without mentioning obesity." You can, but preventing obesity is the whole damn point! I actually wrote a whole blog on the issue of lite release schedules a while back, expanding on a lengthy forum post. Then forgot to publish. Here it is now: <a href="http://www.5mwd.com/archives/2819" target="_blank">http://www.5mwd.com/archives/2819</a></blockquote>

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