D&D General Top selling 5E official non-core 3 books? / Why aren't adventure books catching fire?

[FrozenNorth]

Back in the day, modules were maybe a total of 28 pages, maybe more, and I honestly haven't heard too many complaints about them being lacking in information or being boring, but I hear far more complaints about the newer modules that are 100+ pages. This tells me that modules back in the day had more history in them than the ones now, and that DMs today are expecting to have everything done for them without having to actually think even with their 100+ page modules. This could easily be solved though in two ways:

Back in the day, people didn’t complain about modules. Of course, in those days you needed to write a letter to Dungeon magazine, or post your complaint to a BBS, but still, the numbers speak for themselves.

It’s the kids these days, you see. They like stuff I don’t like so they are wrong.

Back in my day, we were tougher. We didn’t complain about modules we didn’t like. Any claims that people complained about “the Complete book of Elves” so much that the author apologized is hogwash. And people definitely didn’t complain about large quantities of shovelware during the TSR area, no sirree!

I bet that if you searched the posts of a long-running site like Enworld, for instance, you definitely wouldn’t find a long running thread about a poorly written module called “the Forest Oracle”.

And if you were to read the thread, you definitely wouldn’t find numerous other examples of extremely poorly written modules from yesteryear.

Sure, I remember the great modules from years ago, while the crappy modules have faded from memory (or simply weren’t purchased in the first place), but that doesn’t mean that 5e adventures aren’t bad.

 

[M_Natas]

So personally: I got burned once to often from WotC so I don't buy their adventures anymore. The rule books like Fizbanes or Bigsbys are fine, but adventures? They never live up to the hype, are way more work to run than homebrewing a campaign from scratch and are quality wide very bad and are falsch advertisement.
Dragon Heist doesn’t have a heist, Strixhaven is a bad adventure and a worse setting book, Spelljammer was the ultimate insult ...

Like I was interested in the shattered obelisk, I'm all up for Eldritch Lovecraftian cosmic Horror, but all the reviews agree that is really bad and they even made Lost Mines worse.

 

[DarkCrisis]

I'm sorry, but, am I missing a point here? In what way are WotC adventure books not catching fire?

Apparently Dragonlance didn’t do well. See the rest of the original post.

 

[MockingBird]

I mostly enjoy WotC adventures. I got all of them with the exception of Radiant. That one just didn't grab me. ToA is definitely my all time favorite.

 

[michaeljpastor]

They do sell well. Really well. Better than at any other point in D&D's history. Adventures from 2014 are still selling. They don't sell as well as core books because there is obviously a smaller market for them, but that's apples and organs.

The kidney and liver markets are still pretty vibrant.

 

[Minigiant]

I did not feel that way (must buy) about the early adventures either, but the percentage I bought was higher before Tasha’s and has dipped since.

Maybe the earlier ones were more the essential themes (dragons, underdark, vampire) and with those covered, we are now getting into the ‘weirder’ stuff that interests fewer people instead of getting a second dragon / vampire / … adventure

In that case it will be interesting to see what they do 3 or so years from now after having covered all the old worlds and revived all the interesting modules. Do they come up with new worlds and themes, or dip into the old ones a second time and have a second Ravenloft / DL / SJ / … book

I can't see new books on the old settings and themes with the same level of innovation, quality, and imagination selling well.

 

[RoughCoronet0]

sounds like you treat them as / would rather have a settings book

Would definitely rather have more setting books (both full overviews of a setting and books that take a deeper dive into certain continents/areas) or creature lore books.

 

[Meech17]

The adventure books are a lot of investment, to be honest. You're basically saying you're willing to invest a year or more in running them. The adventure compilations (Tales of the Yawning Portal, Candlekeep, Tales from the Radiant Citadel, Keys from the Golden Vault) are only sensible to purchase if you're planning to use more than one of the adventures within it.

I'd like to see a return of the 32 page or so adventure modules. Something you can run in a few nights and be done with it - for a handful of bucks (on the order of a night at the movies or such). I think that's why a lot of the older modules as so well-beloved - you could insert them into a few night's games without having to dedicate your entire campaign to it. But I'm betting WotC doesn't think the model of small modules is cost/time effective. And, there's the risk if your pumping out the 5-6 equivalent mini modules vs. one big book, people will start getting analysis paralysis from trying to figure out which one to get, and end up not buying one at all.

As for Campaign books, WotC's obviously gunshy after it was deemed to be a major factor of the death of TSR's sales by fracturing interest, so that's a big reason we're seeing one-and-done for the few campaign worlds we've got. And in this day and age, if you've got to make up all the associated adventures yourself, why would you buy into a setting book that you know is going to be dropped like a hot potato and not receive any future support/expansion (beyond DMs Guild, which it appears a large majority doesn't know exists or doesn't use)?

This was my thought, and I was kind of surprised it took three pages for someone else to say it.

Modules were called modules because they were modular. Sure. There is a set of 3-5 that can be played together as a full campaign, but you don't have to. You can grab number 1, or number 4, and with a little finagling and some name changing drop it into your existing campaign.

Now though, they don't release anything short of 200+ page, hard back, tomes which all run for $50+ (Unless you wait to it to eventually end up on Amazon for half of that.)

If you want Sunless Citadel, you should be able to just buy that as a $15 soft cover module instead of springing $50 for Yawning portal to get it plus a bunch of other adventures you may or may not use. (Apparently Yawning Portal is on Amazon for $25 right now, but I digress)

As far as the campaign setting books, I agree there. Apparently that has a big problem for TSR, but they were running over a dozen settings. I wonder if they buckled down on just like three settings and really supported them if we'd see more hyper around them.

 

[DEFCON 1]

This was my thought, and I was kind of surprised it took three pages for someone else to say it.

Modules were called modules because they were modular. Sure. There is a set of 3-5 that can be played together as a full campaign, but you don't have to. You can grab number 1, or number 4, and with a little finagling and some name changing drop it into your existing campaign.

Now though, they don't release anything short of 200+ page, hard back, tomes which all run for $50+ (Unless you wait to it to eventually end up on Amazon for half of that.)

If you want Sunless Citadel, you should be able to just buy that as a $15 soft cover module instead of springing $50 for Yawning portal to get it plus a bunch of other adventures you may or may not use. (Apparently Yawning Portal is on Amazon for $25 right now, but I digress)

As far as the campaign setting books, I agree there. Apparently that has a big problem for TSR, but they were running over a dozen settings. I wonder if they buckled down on just like three settings and really supported them if we'd see more hyper around them.

This is why WotC goes with DMs Guild... so that they can allow other people to make the quick and cheap modules that WotC doesn't want to spend their time on.

But of course when that gets pointed out to people, the usual response back is "Oh, but 3PP quality sucks! I'm not going to risk it!". Despite the fact that they will then turn around and say that the quality of the WotC adventure paths suck too. Which begs the question why they would want WotC to be the ones to make the short, cheap modules then?

At some point if a person wants short modules, they have to find and take what they can get.

 

[Stormonu]

On the Campaign settings, I think if they did full in-depth treatments, instead of frosting with a half-baked adventure, they'd be a lot more successful. That was the big problem with SpellJammer and Dragonlance - there was more focus on the adventure instead of the campaign setting itself. Planescape did a bit better, but it's still fairly just skimming the surface. The only oddity is Ravenloft - folks love the adventure, but the dedicated campaign book felt pretty off - probably due to the retcons and re-imaginings permeating it.

If they gave the settings the old boxed set level of detail (like the FR gray box), then a separate 3-module set of adventures I think they could get away with it - covering the campaign in enough detail to ignite the DM's imagination to create their own story, and enough actual adventure for those folks who need premade materials to run.