Why D&D is slowly cutting its own throat.

[Dannyalcatraz]

A few remarks:

1) Personal biases: I love HERO, I love D20, and I hate GURPS (too many internal inconsistencies).

2) Where are the modules? As has been pointed out, they're out there, just not published in great numbers by WOTC. Look to Dungeon and the 3rd party publishers. (BTW, Judge's Guild is still out there somewhere...) Let's not forget all those mini-modules that were released- I don't know what kind of profit margin those had- they were mostly bad but some were excellent. In addition, the trend of DM's doing their own homebrew has strengthened, so any module on the market is competing not only with published, internationally distributed products, but also with thousands upon thousands of people writing their own stuff, some of which winds up online. And that doesn't even address the issue of the extant, unconverted 1Ed & 2Ed adventures, not to mention conversions of excellent adventures from other games! In terms purely economic- there are too many substitute goods for there to be much profit in printing new D20 modules.

3) In addition, as you point out, the quality of some of the new modules is, well, subpar. This will drive the demand curve down- in other words, people will be less desirous of modules in general because there is a general perception of a lack of quality. If people think their homebrew is better than a module from the store, they won't buy it. If they won't buy it, modules don't sell, and wind up in the discount bins. Eventually, modules stop selling to their breakeven point, and modules die as a commercially viable product.

 

[Sigurd]

IP & the bigger picture

Intellectual property that is not relevant or popular is not very valuable. D&D made inroads because it was a good game and it was new. Modules seemed like the youth's equivalent of comic books and they enhanced the value of D&D to the extent they were popular.

Your arguements are interesting but you don't have any financial data to back them up. I suspect D&D will always be 'worth' more than Gurps. What other game has a movie, at least one television show, several comics and several computer games to its credit?

I am curious to see what Hasbro thinks of Wizards of the Coast (a book and collectibles production company)? Are profits as good as the typical Time Life series?

I think you have to expand your arguement from modules to include computer games and merchandizing to make them relevant. Its hard to assess value especially of fiction. Don't forget D&D doesn't have a monopoly on Dragons, Elves, Dwarves, gold as treasure or magic. Creative minds aren't forced to deal with WOTC unless it inspires them enough to pay for it. What inspires them, from a business perspective, will be confined to what is popular & what excites potential readers\consumers.


When D&D was hot it was HUGE. Game stores _plural_ opened to sell role playing games. Now even if WOTC is a fair size company, as a percentage of game entertainment choice I think D&D is shrinking. The surviving game store in my city primarily sells miniatures for warhammer and comic books. Video games don't need Dungeons & Dragons and they are a much bigger industry. If the OGL sacrifices a percentage of the pen and paper role playing market but increases interest from the video market WOTC wins. Modules and written dungeons just don't compare as money makers -- base rules and control makes money everything else is small potatoes. Much of it not really profitable at all.

I can easily see a future where even WOTC neglects pen and paper gaming because the market is saturated and/or too small. The Open Content license is a life support for the material that even WOTC benefits from by keeping enthusiasm for their trademark. In some ways D&D properties are like old television shows - spent and unprofitable unless there is a nostalgia boom.

Sorry if that sounds pessimistic - this is only my opinion of the 'big picture'. I don't have any more facts than your post.

I'd love to hear any numbers or other opinions.


S

 

[Storm Raven]

I think you have this backwards. The farmed the crunch of the game via the SRD and the OGL. The SRD does not contain fluff - or at least it contains as little fluff as WotC can manage.

Except you have it exactly backwards. They farmed out the fluff. By making the OGL, they allow other companies to produce the fluff. That's why you see many, many third party adventures, setting books, and other fluff material being produced. WotC sells the crunch: the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and so on. WotC's development lines have been almost entirely in the "crunch" area: more feats, more prestige classes, more options for characters and monsters and so on.

I think the OGL is a great idea, but it will look like the height of folly if some other company out there ends up creating intellectual property (not covered under the OGL) which has move value than WotC's intellectual property and people ultimately leave the game because they find someone elses setting to be more compelling that WotC's properties.

To use the OGL, a product essentially has to use the Player's Handbook. Which is what WotC wants to sell.

One way to defend against this would be to continue to get near universal penetration of the market the way modules like S1, I6, X2 and so forth have near universal penetration of the market.

The OGL exists primarily so that WotC doesn't have to bother making adventures. Other companies do that for them. In point of fact, there have been multiple small publishers who do almost nothing other than put out adventures.

 

[Celebrim]

Seems obvious to me but my perspective might be skewed by having RPG'd since 1974 (primarily as a DM and with my own homebrew) and my long term interest in my own burgeoning RPG Publishing company...

The Whispering Woodwind 2nd-level (easily scalable 1st-4th)
Cooperative Dungeon 01 - Terror and Blasphemy 14th-level
CD 02 - Halls of Anarchy 7th-level
CD 03 - Crypt of Damnation 5th-level

As always,
Mark Clover
(The Godfather of Gaming )
www.CreativeMountainGames.com

So Mark, if you'll indulge me one more time, I'd like to have your opinion as a publisher.

Could it be that the reason that there are not many good modules on the market is that writing a compelling module is harder than writing up a rules supplement? Is the good fluff harder to do than the crunch?

To me, it seems like it is, because I can smith out rules as I need them and feel I'm doing a pretty good job. I respect a good crunch writer, but generally speaking I don't feel that the quality of the crunch on the market vastly exceeds what I could do myself. I think if I had the time, I could write up a crunch product - even several products - that might appeal to enough people to sell as a PDF. But I don't think that I could start churning out modules that appealled to a wide audience, and certainly not as easily. It could be that this is just because I'm a stronger rulesmith than story teller, but I was wondering whether in your opinion whether this perception that fluff is harder than crunch is more general amongst real game authors?

 

[buzz]

I think the OGL is a great idea, but it will look like the height of folly if some other company out there ends up creating intellectual property (not covered under the OGL) which has move value than WotC's intellectual property and people ultimately leave the game because they find someone elses setting to be more compelling that WotC's properties.

As long as said setting requires the players to own a PHB, I don't think WotC much cares, nor should they. The whole point of the OGL is to encourage companies to make products that drive sales of the core books.

Everybody who plays D&D needs a PHB. Only some portion of D&D players will choose this hypothetical setting, and of them only the DMs really even need it. WotC still wins.

One way to defend against this would be to continue to get near universal penetration of the market the way modules like S1, I6, X2 and so forth have near universal penetration of the market.

"Universal"? Nobody I knew growing up owned I6 or X2. I bought S1 at some piont, but never got a chance to run it.

The quality of the modules and settings had absolutely no effect on my taking up D&D. All the wonderful settings you cited in your first post certainly didn't stop me from totally avoiding 2e. All that mattered was: Did I enjoy the game itself? and Are there people I can find to play with? In 1e's case, the answers were yes. In 2e's case, the answers were no. In 3e's case, the answer tot he first question was a resounding yes, and I made my own answer to the second question by finding some players.

I think you're taking the wrong track if what you're after is new classic adventures. In the current market, adventures don't make money and do little if anything to bolster the popularity of a game system. Your theory doesn't jibe with existing data.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Could it be that the reason that there are not many good modules on the market is that writing a compelling module is harder than writing up a rules supplement? Is the good fluff harder to do than the crunch?

It may be partly this, but the main reason that there are not many good modules out there (not that I'm sure that that is an accurate assessment) is that writing modules at this point is not a terribly good way to make money.

It may work for smaller publishers like Mark, and it worked in the very early days of 3E, but most publishers seem to have decided that - like WoTC - modules just weren't profitable enough. In a previous thread, Chris Pramas of Green Ronin pointed out that Dungeon is a formidable barrier to successful module writing - its so good, and at such a good price that its tough to compete with.

WoTC has seen the point you're making - they announced several months back that due to the lack of adventures in the marketplace they were going to get back into the module business. I don't think we've seen any product announced to back that up yet, but WoTC's business cycle is slower than the average RPG company due to their size.

 

[ThirdWizard]

Good fluff is much harder to produce than good crunch. It's relatively easier to write a balanced feat for 3.5 D&D than it is to write something interesting to read. Ask most novelists!

Now, most business strategy these days is short term. You arn't going to see many people these days who even consider where the business will be in 25 years. I don't know myself what is good for D&D long term, but no matter what it is, I doubt anyone at Wizards has seriously considered it. Whether it's modules or something else entirely, they will produce what sells this quarter because that's sadly how things go nowadays.

Personally, I never bought nor played adventures, and I don't particularly see the appeal. If WotC started producing really good modules, how many would sell? If they don't sell (as we know they arn't extremely good sellers at least now), how many would play them? If not many people play them, then what good are they doing? They arn't building anything if the vast majority of gamers don't play them. CRPGs are the new sellers, I think. Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic are the two big ones. And there's more coming.

 

[buzz]

...there are not many good modules on the market...

I'd honestly like to contest that this assertion is even true.

Sure, there's a lot of crap adventures out there, but that's Sturgeon's Law, and it applies equally to TSR's output. Most of the adventures that have been cited so far are all from this narrow window in the early '80s.

Personally, I think that the entire Penumbra line from Atlas is fantastic. I'm running City of the Spider Queen right now and having a blast. The Freeport series from GR is practially a 3e "classic" now. Lots of people rave about Necromancer's adventures, and Firey Dragon's, and Malhavoc's, and Goodman Games', and Creative Mountain's... and Dungeon pumps out 3-4 excellent adventures every month.

The truth is out there.

 

[buzz]

I don't know myself what is good for D&D long term, but no matter what it is, I doubt anyone at Wizards has seriously considered it.

Oh, I think the long-term health of D&D is very often considered by the folk at WotC. The OGL alone has insured that even Wizard's deminse can't sink D&D. It's basically public property.

 

[Celebrim]

Everybody who plays D&D needs a PHB.

Arguably, that's a statement that just isn't true and hasn't been for some time. The minute that someone releases a variant player's handbook, whether it be for LotR, Wheel of Time, or Diamond Throne, you are no longer married to WotC products.

So the question is, why do inarguably valuable IP's like LotR or WoT not successfully compete, and the answer that satisfies me is that quality published adventures are required to keep a large base of players hooked into a setting.

"Universal"? Nobody I knew growing up owned I6 or X2. I bought S1 at some piont, but never got a chance to run it.

As I said, near universal. I couldn't possibly guess at numbers, but I'm fairly certain that there are examples of fantastically successful early modules where the appelation 'near universal' applies - afterall, many of these had 6+ printings.

All the wonderful settings you cited in your first post certainly didn't stop me from totally avoiding 2e. All that mattered was: Did I enjoy the game itself? and Are there people I can find to play with? In 1e's case, the answers were yes. In 2e's case, the answers were no.

I can't help but feel that to at least some extent, both those things were driven by the availability of quality modules. Getting started in 1st edition was easy. Getting started in 2nd edition without a 1st edition DM to guide you was not so easy.

I think you're taking the wrong track if what you're after is new classic adventures. In the current market, adventures don't make money and do little if anything to bolster the popularity of a game system. Your theory doesn't jibe with existing data.

Data? Data? We don't have data. We have a bunch of settings which failed, but we can't prove one way or the other why they failed until we have several counter examples of settings which succeeded. We could bring lots of different successes and failures of past game systems into this, but that just makes things more complicated. We probably will never end up with a single simple explanation. If you are looking for me to prove anything of this complexity, then I'm sorry but nothing this complex and abstract in nature is provable. All I can try to be is compelling, and as far as compelling arguments for me go I believe that the strength of D&D has been modules and 'network utility'.