D&D 5E What Wizards can do to make D&D Next successful.

[Evenglare]

How about they keep with an edition for at least a decade? I'm tired of buying rule sets that are slightly different and thus incompatible with old material. I am aware that my old books wont get taken away, but I am also aware that I will no longer get official support, and that REALLY irritates me.

 

[Tony Vargas]

They need to return to the Open Source model, get the 3pps back on board instead of competing with them directly.

 

[Morik]

How about they keep with an edition for at least a decade? I'm tired of buying rule sets that are slightly different and thus incompatible with new material. I am aware that my old books wont get taken away, but I am also aware that I will no longer get official support, and that REALLY irritates me.

Really, really true... you know what... I just started to like 4.0 and now... well... it's almost over now with that edition or what?

I liked the 4.0 concept with the seperation of the rounds in Standard, Move and Minor.... I like the swapping thing... you know, you can change your Standard-Action in two Minor ones and so on.

And the powers? They are okay IMO... only powers for the spellcasters... I dunno... I never get used to that.

And now, in Next, as far as I see as a beta playtester, they really go back... Standard Action and Moving.

Spellcasting in Levels are back...

All is back somehow.... the Manouvers... well... is that really something new?

Looks like old things to me with a new name on it.

I like the moving rule though... that you can run, attack and run for your rest movement (if any is left).

Well... as it was said before here... open to third parties would be good. I am not really into the old adventures as I almost always do my own campaign writing (only FR Adventures sometimes get a hold on me).

 

[phloog]

It seems like satisfying one crowd would almost make it the default that another group is happy.

If they focus on adventures instead of splat books/rules, then all the money from publishing just comes from new adventure modules, which I would think require a bit less labor than creating rules (assuming that they actually play test them)

It seems like the rules-focused model leads to shorter edition lifespans. Eventually the rules become so bloated and the shelves are filled with 400 variant books, so the obvious solution becomes 'blow it up and start again'.

One problem is you're making a company decide to move away from (horribly) overpriced books to adventures that might have smaller per unit margins.

 

[pemerton]

They need to return to the Open Source model, get the 3pps back on board instead of competing with them directly.

Are you serious about this, or is this your secret plan to sabotage Next?

 

[delericho]

More adventures from WotC would be welcome. More good adventures from WotC would be even more welcome.

But for D&D to survive, never mind for it to be a success, it needs to make money, and lots of it.

To that end, WotC should:

- Sell PHBs (or, if they go for a single Core Rulebook, sell CRs)

- Sell DDI subscriptions.

And, where there's a conflict between the two, DDI subscriptions win. Somewhere, there are 'magic numbers' for DDI subscriptions - sell X thousands and D&D gets to survive; sell Y thousands and D&D gets extra investment; sell Z thousands and we get a new cartoon series.

(Potentially, there's also #3 - sell Fortune Cards. However, I'm ignoring those in the hope that they'll go away.)

Everything else is worth doing if and only if it results in greater sales of PHBs or greater numbers of DDI subscriptions. Even measures that increase the number of players only matter insofar as they lead to greater numbers of customers.

(The reality is that the majority of D&D players, if they buy anything at all, buy exactly one item: the PHB. A smaller, but still significant group, buy a second item, being a splatbook for their chosen class. Beyond that, you're selling to the tiny percentage of hardcore collectors who pick up just about everything. That's why most products get a single, modest print run... and are then easily available, new, years after publication. Even worse - with 4e a portion of splatbook-buyers bought a DDI subscription instead, canibalising sales of what should have been the best-selling supplements. So now, even those previously-reliable splatbooks have become marginally-worthwhile products.)

 

[delericho]

They need to return to the Open Source model, get the 3pps back on board instead of competing with them directly.

Are you serious about this, or is this your secret plan to sabotage Next?

Actually, that may not be a bad idea. Especially if they find a way to enable those third-party companies to tie their products (perhaps only adventures and splatbooks) into the DDI Compendium. That way, those third-party products serve as value-add for the DDI, increasing subscriber numbers, and helping WotC.

What WotC crucially must avoid doing is making it possible for third-party companies to produce products that don't require either a PHB purchase or DDI subscription to use. And, in particular, they need to not make the rules of the game freely available online. (Although what they could sensibly do is provide a crippled "quick-start" version of the rules freely, pointing to the DDI, and make the full rules available via DDI for anyone with an active subscription.)

 

[Starfox]

Without some kind of a open-gaming SRD, 5th is not interesting to me. It's that simple. It's really hard to swim against the current, and WotC s no longer the market leader.

 

[radja]

The OGL really made third edition into a big success, the lack of a decent OGL was a MAJOR step back. Ofcourse, I define succesful as 'lots of people play it, and like playing it'. success is different things for different people.

 

[delericho]

The OGL really made third edition into a big success, the lack of a decent OGL was a MAJOR step back. Ofcourse, I define succesful as 'lots of people play it, and like playing it'. success is different things for different people.

Even in terms of sales, the third-party products were a major factor in 3e's success - for the first few years the overwhelming majority were supplements for D&D (okay, "third edition fantasy roleplaying" or the like). It wasn't until later that we saw lots of complete OGL games being released.

Unfortunately, one of the unintended consequences of the OGL (and the SRD in particular) may well be that it has made it impossible for WotC to succeed with any new edition of D&D - any new edition must inevitably compete with a very good past edition that is available, legally, for free.

If the new edition is closed, the market will split as people divide between official D&D and the OGL-derived material; if the new edition is open then it will just be absorbed by the free version.

The likely consequence of this is that WotC can manage 4e-level sales, which would be eagerly jumped upon by any other RPG company, but may well never be able to do significantly better.

The consequence of the OGL may well be that "D&D" will live forever in the SRD, but that D&D itself dies.