What is going on with the release schedule? Now metaplot?

[Aegeri]

This was in the latest Ampersand, but once I noticed it the whole thing really made me scratch my head.

The novella leads up to next year's worlds-spanning event, The Abyssal Plague. You'll see signs of the Abyssal Plague in Dungeons & Dragons, Forgotten Realms, and Dark Sun novels, game products, and even in the Dungeons & Dragons Encounters program, starting this fall and throughout 2011.

Please don't tell me they are about to make an incredibly dumb mistake by adding metaplot. My Eberron, future Dark Sun and similar games do not NEED or want any metaplot at all. This should be strongly emphasized with this stuff that it isn't considered overall setting "canon" or I will be very very very unhappy.

Additionally what I really want is a bone of some sort. With essentials throwing the fate of things I've really enjoyed like books like Open Grave, Draconomicon into uncertain waters and now the threat of metaplot crap it would be nice to see something I enjoy in the release schedule (I already have nothing to look forward to until potentially after March next year).

I am becoming really unhappy about the future of 4E at the moment. Hardcover books are either disappearing and being replaced with softcovers (Dark Sun Creature Catalog) and nowhere in sight are things like Draconomicon 3, a devils book like Demonomicon next month and similar. Several months of essentials that I have zero interest in beyond two products! I hope to god in the next couple of months I see something come up that reminds me why I've been enjoying 4E DnD the past two years. If it ends up being Dark Sun and then absolutely NOTHING for me after that, I might well consider doing something else. Really, throw me a damn bone wizards. I just need to see something like "Here is a book on Devils" or "Draconomicon 3: Catastrophic Dragons" or "The Wild Plane" (book on the Feywild) or just something.

There, I've had my whine and cheese.

 

[FireLance]

Please don't tell me they are about to make an incredibly dumb mistake by adding metaplot. My Eberron, future Dark Sun and similar games do not NEED or want any metaplot at all. This should be strongly emphasized with this stuff that it isn't considered overall setting "canon" or I will be very very very unhappy.

The way I see it, "official" adventures have a tendency to be absorbed into D&D continuity. One of the more recent examples I can think of are the references to both the 3e Dungeon adventure "The Lich Queen's Beloved" and the 4e Scales of War adventure path in the section discussing the githyanki in The Plane Above.

I'm fairly confident that any "metaplot" will be handled in the same way as the Scales of War adventure path: an event takes place which could happen on any world, or which happens on several worlds concurrently. D&D canon assumes the event took place and was resolved, hopefully without making significant changes to the world(s). In particular, that last clause will ensure that DMs who wish to ignore the event may do so quite easily.

 

[Aegeri]

Yeah I've seen those sidebars, but that's generally all they tend to be - just sidebars as Orcus for example is still distinctly alive (or not the God of Death) despite the events of HPE series of modules. I'm just a bit concerned of some overall metaplot being added into the game. I wouldn't mind that approach at all though, just as long as it isn't being considered "canon" or "updating" settings.

In reality it's probably not going to be a major issue for me in terms of enjoying 4E. It's just combined with the fact I see nothing in the future I want or am excited about after Dark Sun I'm feeling a bit left out by Wizards (I own practically every book and supplement they've released thus far).

 

[Echohawk]

Please don't tell me they are about to make an incredibly dumb mistake by adding metaplot. My Eberron, future Dark Sun and similar games do not NEED or want any metaplot at all. This should be strongly emphasized with this stuff that it isn't considered overall setting "canon" or I will be very very very unhappy.

I don't think there is enough to go on in the Ampersand article to know which approach WotC is taking for the Abyssal Plague. It might be:

• An event that has, as a meta-plot, something that affects all of the currently-supported D&D worlds (Point of Light, Forgotten Realms, Eberron and Dark Sun) at the same time.
• An event that could be used as a key plot element in a campaign set on any one of the D&D worlds, and which will be supported in novels and game product for each of the worlds, but which doesn't have any meta-plot elements.
• Something else entirely.

I'm cautiously optimistic. So far, WotC have been pretty good about limiting meta-plot assumptions. For example, as FireLance mentioned, The Plane Above mentions the events of the Scales of War but makes it clear that that is just one possible interpretation of the future of the githyanki, and that it should be used or discarded as the DM sees fit. I'm pretty sure WotC understands that not everyone will want to inflict the Abyssal Plague on their campaigns, and I hope they will structure the support to take that into account.

 

[Aegeri]

I know I'm probably overreacting, but when I combine it with the fact I don't see anything else to be excited about coming out it makes me much more negative. I'm just not sure what direction they are taking DnD after essentials and what's happening with future books.

I'm pretty sure WotC understands that not everyone will want to inflict the Abyssal Plague on their campaigns, and I hope they will structure the support to take that into account.

I certainly hope so to be honest.

It's more that this isn't what I wanted to hear as something coming out in future, when I've not heard about things I do actually want first.

 

[Jhaelen]

Please don't tell me they are about to make an incredibly dumb mistake by adding metaplot.

Agreed. Metaplots never end well - see oWoD or Darksun 2e Revised. I'm pretty confident WotC already learned that lesson, though.

If they do something metaplotty they'll be more clever about it (as in the before-mentioned sidebars).

 

[Shroomy]

The way I see it, "official" adventures have a tendency to be absorbed into D&D continuity. One of the more recent examples I can think of are the references to both the 3e Dungeon adventure "The Lich Queen's Beloved" and the 4e Scales of War adventure path in the section discussing the githyanki in The Plane Above.

I'm fairly confident that any "metaplot" will be handled in the same way as the Scales of War adventure path: an event takes place which could happen on any world, or which happens on several worlds concurrently. D&D canon assumes the event took place and was resolved, hopefully without making significant changes to the world(s). In particular, that last clause will ensure that DMs who wish to ignore the event may do so quite easily.

Another example of this type of "metaplot" in core 4e is that the ending of Paizo's Savage Tide AP was written into Demogorgon's background according to last Monday's Demonomicon excerpt.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I know I'm probably overreacting, but when I combine it with the fact I don't see anything else to be excited about coming out it makes me much more negative. I'm just not sure what direction they are taking DnD after essentials and what's happening with future books.

I certainly hope so to be honest.

It's more that this isn't what I wanted to hear as something coming out in future, when I've not heard about things I do actually want first.

Well, if you're like me and have a LONG term core homebrew setting then this kind of thing is more or less irrelevant. I expect that the majority of DMs games are only at best loosely connected with 4e canon. In that case some kind of meta-plot event that WotC devises becomes at most fodder for developing stories within our own campaigns. My current campaign for instance has a decent demonic theme going. Maybe some of the ideas from this demonic plague thing will resonate with that and give me some ideas, or I might even adopt a large part of it with suitable modifications to match the assumptions of my setting. So that's a bit of a somewhat contrasting viewpoint.

I can see where if you're running FR and all of a sudden WotC's version of FR takes a radical right hand turn you might not be terribly excited by that. Meta-plot can tend to radically change the nature of a setting and its almost bound to change it in ways that the current fans don't like (almost by definition). Maybe though what this will amount to is one possible path for the setting to take. They could release a whole slew of these kinds of things, each one taking the base setting and describing one direction it could take. Then the DM has a nice menu of options to pick and choose from.

As far as future releases of 4e material goes I think what we have to realize is that 4e has been on a balls-to-the-wall release cycle for the last 3 years. I have 23!!!! hardcover 4e books on my shelf right now. I don't think 1e and 2e combined released 23 hardcover books in its 20 some year history, and I don't have every book by any means, there must be north of 30 books out there now. I don't think that kind of pace is sustainable for the long term. There are a few more obvious books they can release like a Shadowfell book, a Feywild book, and a Psionic Power book, but the core system is pretty nearly tapped out. No doubt they could squeeze another dozen books out of it over the long term, but there's only so much material people can actually afford to buy and need for their games.

Then you toss Essentials into the mix. I think it is pretty obvious that Essentials has stolen a good bit of resources away from extensions to the main system. All the designer manpower working on that had to come from somewhere. My impression is that Hasbro's mandate is for WotC to expand the market for D&D above all else. Simply releasing more books with a narrower and narrower appeal isn't ever going to do that. The only people that are going to buy each new add-on to 4e are people that likely have most of the existing ones, a smaller and smaller audience for each one as time goes on. Certainly something like PHB3 HAD to have considerably smaller sales than PHB1, everyone needs a PHB1, a lot less people NEED a PHB3.

So that would be my guess. You're just going to see less really new books and more products designed to support 4e and try to bring it to a wider audience, along with other things that will go with that. The D&D Encounters is a great example. I'd expect to see more things along those lines. Maybe we'll see some things like a new tactical mass combat system or pure TT skirmish system update to try to appeal to the Warhammer crowd and the general wargaming audience for instance.

I think the majority of effort on extending and filling in the core system is going to be in Dragon mag where it serves to keep the DDI subscribers engaged. It may also be going forward we'll see a renewed emphasis on DDI too. In the long run it seems to me that having a DDI that has a VTT, a way to find and recruit players for games, and a lot of the sorts of features you see on the computer gaming networks is really the future. D&D as it is requires a lot of commitment of time and energy and the availability of people to play. The whole online dimension could make it much more accessible if it evolves far enough.

 

[Insight]

Why worry about some WotC-invented metaplot? Just don't use it in your game.

 

[Markn]

Yeah, I don't get why people are so worked up over Meta-plot...