D&D 5E Which Would You Rather Buy/Use?

[redrick]

I guess B. Maybe C. I just don't see myself (and the group I play with) ever committing to a single year-long adventure path. I also feel a little weird about buying one just so I can pull out one chapter for use in my own campaign.

On the other hand, I'd happily buy shorter, well-done adventures. One good short adventure can easily be augmented with my own material to support 3 or more months of gaming. That's why I generally stick to B/X or AD&D adventures off of D&D classics, or OSR adventures. The old stuff just seems to require a little more conversion work as you get over level 5, so I keep my eyes out for well-done 5e adventures for levels 5 and up. (On the other hand, I'm more likely to be running a game for lower level groups, as we like to start at level 1 and we seem to mix up campaigns fairly often.)

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Hey, I didn't say any of this was from WOTC. So it wouldn't likely be $15-$20.

I don't think whether it is WotC or not has as much influence on the pricing as you might think.

Goodman Games sells 16 page black & white adventures w/color covers for ~$10 each.
Paizo's 64 page full color adventures are priced at ~$25 each.

$15-$20 seems like "normal" for the current market and anything that falls somewhere between those two page counts.

 

[delericho]

Well, Out of the Abyss is a hardback with 256 pages and costs $50.

Price isn't linear with page count. The first page is by far the most expensive. Also, the size of the print run matters a great deal - WotC have been printing a lot of copies of a very few products, which helps a great deal. Switch that to one smaller product every couple of months, and you get a correspondingly shorter print run, and so a higher cost per unit.

The Starter Set was sold as adventure+rules+dice for $20.

How many copies of "Lost Mine" did they print? My guess would be of the order of 100,000. By contrast, I'd be surprised if many of the standalone adventures from the 3e era hit 10,000 sales.

It's also worth noting that "Lost Mine" doesn't have a cover, which makes a difference (albeit a fairly small one, given the need for the box).

Oh, and of course the Starter Set was deliberately priced to sell as widely as possible. They'll have deliberately set the profit margin on that one of the minimum value they can get away with. They won't do that for other adventures.

If we're talking a shorter adventure, say 32 pages. Softcover and not in a box set then yeah, I expect it to be under $25 and even under $20. I doubt we'll get it for under $10 though.

I'll be very surprised if we ever again see a print D&D-RPG 5e product from WotC that is not hardback, is not full-colour, is less than 250 pages, or is less than $30. I think we're more likely to see them give away short adventures for free (either in Dragon+ or in a new eDungeon).

The market just doesn't seem to make the 40-page softcover a viable proposition any more. Certainly not for WotC, but not really for anyone else either. (Paizo are a bit of a special case, because of their subscription model. But even they have cut down on the smaller products, and especially smaller adventures.) Fewer, bigger, more deluxe products seems to be the future.

But I might be wrong, of course.

 

[Uchawi]

It depends on the quality of the adventure. There is more risk in buying a campaign, if it ends up only being average. where a smaller adventure reduces that risk, but then you end up having to rely on other adventures to fill the gap; if you don't have a lot of time as a DM. I have not been impressed with any of the current campaign releases, because most of them are sandboxes were the DM has to do a lot of work to flesh them out and they are repeats on old themes.

So in the current environment, I would prefer to buy short ones.

 

[Henry]

I don't think it's possible to so this anymore and make money, but

F) a monthly periodical with about 4 standalone 20 page black and white adventures with a range of levels for about 12 dollars each. Add about 16 pages worth of ads to help cover costs.

To this day I still wish I had managed to retain those old dungeon magazines from the TSR days, but I just don't have the space for a collection like I used to before I was married.

 

[Mistwell]

Does it stay the same if the price is $25, rather than the $7-10 suggested?

Because "Scourge of the Howling Horde" was 32 pages and $15 in 2006, and the costs to produce items of that size have increased at an above-inflation rate since then.

Scourge of the Sword Coast, a D&D Next adventure, 85 pages, $17.99
Dead in Thay, 107 pages, $17.99
Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle, 281 pages, was $29.95, now $17.99
Legacy of the Crystal Shard
Murder in Baldur’s Gate
Search for the Diamond Staff
Vault of the Dracolich

All similar pricing

 

[Bawylie]

All similar pricing. But I'm interested it what you might buy for $10, not what you think the price ought to be. Skews the opinion if you go "well, it's really likely twice as expensive as he's suggesting."

 

[delericho]

Scourge of the Sword Coast, a D&D Next adventure, 85 pages, $17.99
Dead in Thay, 107 pages, $17.99

It is a good point that digital-only publishing adjusts the costs, and therefore the types of products that can be reasonably produced. And I do frequently overlook that - though in fairness it's also the case that WotC generally haven't gone down that route; most of their digital-only stuff is free material for the Adventurer's League, or D&D Game Days, or similar.

 

[S'mon]

100 percent B. I want short, cool episodic adventures and lots to choose from.

I dislike long 1-15 adventure paths. They feel too locked in. Reminds me of awful megadungeons like Undermoutain.

Eventually I realised that the secret of megadungeons is to have them as locations within
your campaign world, never the entirety of your campaign. Malizewski's concept of the "tentpole
megadungeon" is instructive - it holds the campaign up, it's somewhere the PCs can always go to to find adventure, it's not the entirety of the campaign.

 

[S'mon]

Thinking about my favourite products, the two that come to mind are the Lost City of Barakus and Yggdburgh hardbacks - both are essentially detailed sandbox campaigns in a book, with lots of adventures of variable level. I basically ran the first chapter of Rise of the Runelords that way, too. If Lost Mine of Phandelver were better presented it would also qualify as the sort of thing I like best. A hardback collating all the 4e Chaos Scar adventures & a home base would also qualify.

So it would look a lot like the current hardbacks in scope & detail, but it wouldn't have a linear adventure path tentpole, rather the tentpole might be a big dungeon like Barakus, or it might be a villainous organisation's machinations, but it wouldn't all be pre-scripted.