What next for FR?
- Thread starter The Grumpy Celt
- Start date
Not that I'd know, but I assume that writing a quality adventure is much harder than writing quality setting material. The preferance for the abstract rather than the directly applicable is interesting. Perhaps gamers prefer thinking about possibilities, and that it disturbs them when those possibilities are distilled down into a singularity because there's less to daydream about.
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d20Dwarf
Explorer
rounser said:
It's really interesting to me, too, what people want. Of course, it's impossible to generalize because there are a lot of people that want adventures more than lore, and vice versa...unfortunately there's no formula to satisfy everyone.
Personally, I like writing lore better than adventures. I mean, I enjoy adventure creation, since it gives me as a designer some narrative possibilities that other game design doesn't (and shouldn't), but it's easier and more fun to craft lore and exposition. Making proper stat blocks isn't really so easy as some people are claiming, especially at higher levels (thank goodness I didn't have the higher-level areas in MotM
), it's time consuming and very meticulous work...not super fun. So, as a consumer and DM, I tend to prefer the opposite of what I like to write...I want my stat blocks and treasure and the rest of the tedium done for me! That informs what I as a professional want to put into the things I create; of course, the outline I'm given by my WotC masters also informs it quite a bit. 
If I thought people would pay for lore and exposition, then I'd just go start selling short fiction on RPG Now instead of messing with spreadsheets all night to make sure my monsters and NPCs aren't short a skill point or attack bonus.
Darrin Drader
Explorer
d20Dwarf said:thank goodness I didn't have the higher-level areas in MotM
If I thought people would pay for lore and exposition, then I'd just go start selling short fiction on RPG Now instead of messing with spreadsheets all night to make sure my monsters and NPCs aren't short a skill point or attack bonus.
Just pointing out that there are a lot of RPG products in existence that are primarily lore and exposition, and there are a lot of people who really go for that sort of thing. I'm one of them. That's not quite the same as a fictional narrative though.
Sammael
Adventurer
If we were getting 5-6 FR books per year, I'd be all over it. However, with only 3-4 FR books annually, I want at least one of them to be a regional book - which is something we're not getting this year. Power of Faerûn is a great book (just got it), and I'm sure Dragons of Faerûn will be fine, but seeing as how The Twilight Tomb is an adventure, I feel that Mysteries of the Moonsea should have been a true regional book, not just a campaign arc with some lore sprinkled on top.d20Dwarf said:
d20Dwarf
Explorer
Whisperfoot said:
Just pointing out that there are a lot of RPG products in existence that are primarily lore and exposition, and there are a lot of people who really go for that sort of thing. I'm one of them. That's not quite the same as a fictional narrative though.
I'd call those RP products and leave the G out of it, since there's no G in exposition.
Actually, I'd just call them fictional atlases and not even classify them as RPG products. Hell, they might get more sales into book chains that way. I think you speak for the vast majority in terms of that preference, thus the popularity of worldbuilding races and nations that never were (especially mapmaking) among homebrew DMs. In fact, I don't think I'd be far off saying that the main "game behind the game" is worldbuilding - D&D's equivalent to Warhammer's miniature painting and customising.
For those using a published setting, maybe "worldbuilding" can be replaced with "collecting and reading", where I suspect a lot of the books bought may never see application in a game. The idea that the reader might get around to using it one day makes it more interesting to said gamer than a novel, maybe.
Right, same here. Given that adventures are outsold by rules and setting material, there must be a lot of ad libbers and collectors out there (and people running with some of the rules, but not dotting the i's and crossing the t's on most of the details because of the preparation time that would require).
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Darrin Drader
Explorer
rounser said:
I'm not sure that's true anymore. As the game ages, more and more people become satisfied with (and sometimes overwhelmed by) the amount of rules options they have to choose from.
d20Dwarf
Explorer
rounser said:
See, this is interesting to me, and it might inform a lot of this debate we keep having. People that assert that it takes less than 5 minutes to create a monster are out of their gourd, *unless* they don't really care about accuracy. Then it makes perfect sense...I mean, sure, you can approximate a low-CR creature in a few minutes, especially if you skip over the stuff that you won't likely use.
But there are other people that comb every product and come online to ask why the purple snorgleford only has 28 skill ranks when it should have 30. They get mad because if they're paying for rules, they want them done right. And they should. So that's what we try our best to do.
Unfortunately, the guys that want the rules accurately done for them and the guys that don't mind winging their own rules are at complete odds as to what they find useful and interesting in an RPG product. So you have misconceptions like "it only take an 8-year old 3 minutes to create a CR 16 templated demon!" butting up against "don't give me plots and villains, I can do those myself, it's the WORK I want done for me."
