What is good for D&D as a game vs. what is good for the company that makes it

[Pentius]

Some people want new stuff and more options, and they want it yesterday. Some people want intelligently selected quality, even if they need to wait a year or more to get it. You don't get much better raw material than, "the best of X, playtested by the market." Publish that, and then also the whole "subscription stuff goes away' argument vanishes. Who cares if the dregs go away, eventually, if we have the best stuff in beautiful books?

Someone, invariably. It might be an interesting model, but for every dreg, there will be at least one person who loved it, and they will show up online to tell us.

 

[Desdichado]

Some people want new stuff and more options, and they want it yesterday. Some people want intelligently selected quality, even if they need to wait a year or more to get it. You don't get much better raw material than, "the best of X, playtested by the market." Publish that, and then also the whole "subscription stuff goes away' argument vanishes. Who cares if the dregs go away, eventually, if we have the best stuff in beautiful books?

Who decides what's the dregs and what's not? What you want from the game is likely very different than what I want. Your dregs could be my gold and vice versa.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

Well, note in that model that there is implicitly a sizable gap between dregs and the best stuff. It's the stuff in the middle that is the problem space, not the dregs. The dregs are things like broken feats that have been superseded by something better. Sure, there may be that tiny minority that thought the old feat was better, but statistically, they lost that argument.

However, mainly what decides is usage over time. Time is critical for this model to work very well, in several ways. Eventually, electronic things run the risk of going away, if only no longer being officially supported. (I'm aware of various ways around this, but they are all more involved than having a "book"--either printed and/or in some static electronic format.)

Consider the history of Victorian England newspaper debates. There was serious and sustained "conversations" over the course of the whole era, by people from many perspectives. We know, because a lot of them were put into books in one form or another. There was a lot of drek that never saw print again. And there was stuff in the middle, some that got saved and some that didn't. There were probably a few gems that were overlooked and/or misunderstood because of the tenor of the era. Some drek got saved the same way. But practically, we weren't going to get all of it saved for us to pick from later. The Victorian appetite for words was immense (sound familiar?). So I'm glad the perfect was not the enemy of the good, here, and that several someones made editorial decisions to preserve some of it.

But don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating that the "non-printed" stuff be phased out merely because it didn't make the print editorial cut. If the online part is selling subscriptions for 20+ years, then by definition the collective information is sufficiently non-dregs to stay there. I am saying there is a market for selective quality in printed form, and this market relates directly to the main discussion in this topic.

 

[Hussar]

Y'know, funnily enough, the idea of "usage over time" is obviously very much being put into play at WOTC. They've commented on how the online tools are a HUGE market research plus for them. They know what classes are being played, what monsters are being used, what feats are being taken, for a very large number of gamers.

Right now, the sub numbers are over 60 000. That's a massive database to mine right there. So, if we see some things get dropped or added later on down the line, you can bet it has a lot to do with what's going on inside the DDI. I doubt it was accidental that the PHB 2 classes got a fair bit of loving in the latest book out of WOTC.

That is one thing that the online DDI does that gaming has never really had before - the ability to really pin down how the game is being played for a very large selection of people.

 

[The Shaman]

You can play for many years on just the 3 core books of virtually any edition. If all I had was the core 3 for 3.5e, I could run games on that for the rest of my life, everything else is optional. . .and realizing that is WotC's nightmare because it kills sales.

Whizbros' marketing reeks of flop sweat.

I've seen a number of gaming groups that still play or played for many years niche product books that only had one or two books released for them, with no more support ever . . .

Five in the case of Flashing Blades, the game I'm running right now: a core book, a supplement, an 'adventure path,' and two books of shorter adventures.

I bought the .pdfs, and printed out they fit into a standard size report cover. That's my whole 'canon.'

. . . or that play what was once a well supported game but hasn't had books released in many years.

Like "classic" Traveller: the CD-ROMs are perhaps the best bargain in gaming.

The need for "support" in the form of new supplements and web information is illusory, it is just that: supplementary.

Quite a few gamers feel they don't have the time to develop a lot of material on their own, so they lean pretty heavily on that support.

In fact, I've noticed a pattern over many games, not just D&D, that as more and more products come out the complexity of the game rises, the difficulty of GM'ing rises, and the barrier to entry for a new player rises. If/when a new edition comes along, then there is the tough choice to effectively lose the hundreds (or even thousands) spent on buying books, or move to the new edition along with "everybody else", although you don't need to buy it to keep playing as long as your players are satisfied with the system as-is and want to keep on playing as if nothing changed.

It's this train of thought which lead me to create the thread, the realization that D&D as a game does not need a constant stream of new supplementary books every month, and new editions every few years, to be playable and enjoyable. It only needs those things for business reasons as the product of a publicly traded company that has to be accountable to stockholders for record profits every quarter, not for the quality of the game being playable and fun.

Agreed.

I first realized it circa 2005, when I realized that I was buying all the various D&D 3.x products, but I'd never get close to using them all, I'd buy a new $40 book to read through it for stuff to use in a game, but I'd probably never use more than one or two feats or spells from it. . .and I couldn't afford to keep doing it. As I've watched D&D and the gaming industry as a whole progress in the 6 years since then, I've continued to hold this philosophy the more things I've seen happen in the gaming world.

I had the same reaction to buying game books and realizing how very little of what was between the covers would ever actually make it into any campaign I'd be willing to run.

 

[ExploderWizard]

That is one thing that the online DDI does that gaming has never really had before - the ability to really pin down how the game is being played for a very large selection of people.

Gaming still doesn't have that. We don't know that all the stuff being generated in the online tools is seeing actual play. A subscriber could log in and make up 8 characters in the builder. All we know is what data was used to build those characters not what those characters were used for.

It could be a player working on ideas trying to decide what to play. In that case only 1/8th of the data generated is seeing actual play.

 

[wedgeski]

It could be a player working on ideas trying to decide what to play. In that case only 1/8th of the data generated is seeing actual play.

The data is still extremely valuable. What ideas were they interested in? What level did they build it to? What house rules did they activate? Magic items or inherent bonuses? Campaign setting? How often was it printed? How long before they deleted it, if at all? Cross check with: what books had just come out? What marketing was in action? What articles were on DDI?

 

[Imaro]

The data is still extremely valuable. What ideas were they interested in? What level did they build it to? What house rules did they activate? Magic items or inherent bonuses? Campaign setting? How often was it printed? How long before they deleted it, if at all? Cross check with: what books had just come out? What marketing was in action? What articles were on DDI?

But if the character isn't being used in actual play... how does this give one relevant data to improve the actual game? In fact it seems like it could do the opposite.

 

[wedgeski]

But if the character isn't being used in actual play... how does this give one relevant data to improve the actual game? In fact it seems like it could do the opposite.

How could it not? For many people D&D is a lifestyle hobby. Everything we do as players and DM's speaks to our preferences to the game. If 10,000 people build a vampire PC in the Character Builder but only 1% of them ever see the light of day (so to speak), combined with other stats that could say a lot about player vs DM preference for that class, or about how what's on at the movies affects D&D players.

I've probably only ever got to play, I don't know... 1 in 20 of the characters I've made up over the last few decades? But I've put a lot of love into the others. Same with the campaign worlds I've built: probably only around 10% of that actual material I've ever written has found its way directly onto the table, but the love I've poured into the rest of the campaign world still speaks volumes about the kind of game I like to run and what parts of a campaign world interests me more than others.

 

[Imaro]

How could it not? For many people D&D is a lifestyle hobby. Everything we do as players and DM's speaks to our preferences to the game. If 10,000 people build a vampire PC in the Character Builder but only 1% of them ever see the light of day (so to speak), combined with other stats that could say a lot about player vs DM preference for that class, or about how what's on at the movies affects D&D players.

I've probably only ever got to play, I don't know... 1 in 20 of the characters I've made up over the last few decades? But I've put a lot of love into the others. Same with the campaign worlds I've built: probably only around 10% of that actual material I've ever written has found its way directly onto the table, but the love I've poured into the rest of the campaign world still speaks volumes about the kind of game I like to run and what parts of a campaign world interests me more than others.

I feel like you're dancing around the question. How can you determine anything when you don't know the motives, reasons or whatever for why a particular character was built in the CB? Taking your above example... you have no idea what percent of vampire characters are seeing actual play. All you know is 10,000 have been built with the CB...what exactly does that tell you?