D&D 5E Why such little content (books) for Dnd 5e?

[Iosue]

I'll have to find it. It was before the release of 5E, IIRC, either near the end of the playtest or during the wait for release. I was heavy in the WotC boards at the time (I've since abandoned them), and there was a thread or two devoted to figuring out which five it would be.

It's possible that this was started by someone outside WotC, but it was taken as gospel there.

I remember what you're talking about Shiroiken. It was something that was said during GenCon 2013, but I can't find the original quote, only the residual ripples in the community. Probably the closest I've found is this conversation on Mearls' twitter:

https://twitter.com/mikemearls/status/372503463478829056

Here's a thread from here at Enworld.
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?340458-Old-settings-coming-back

There was also speculation based on a 2012 GenCon comment by Mearls that they were focusing on FR so they could provide one awesome campaign setting rather than six mediocre ones. Lots of folks assumed that the number six wasn't pulled out of a hat, so speculation began on what the other five (aside from FR) might be.

Of course, in the core books Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Mystara, Dark Sun, and Eberron were all mentioned, though not given much in the way of crunch. We know that Warforged and Kender were planned for the DMG at one point. The 4e setting got calls out to the Dawn War and Eladrin. In 2013, they probably hoped to be able to include a lot of that kind of stuff, but come crunch time some of it had to be cut.

Which is not to say that WotC lied, or broke promises, or anything like that. But Mearls did mention something about modular support for the top five campaign settings - which he pointedly did not specify. So Shiroiken is not spinning things out of whole cloth.

 

[teitan]

A lot of the speculation in this thread seems to be based on the misperception that 4e was a failure when for d&d it was a success, not for Hasbro who wanted to make it a core brand. People also seem to, for some reason, be calling 3.x a failure when it definitely wasn't a failure, being the best selling edition since 1e was launched in the seventies and reached its peak in 83. 3e was HUGE and is still huge when you think about it. Unlike 1e and 2e the 3.5 core books are expensive, sometimes selling for higher than cover price and not in the eBay overinflated sense you sometimes see for modern comics or people trying to sell their ad&d stuff as "collector's items". The rereleased versions dipped the price a bit but its still a thing. Essentials, hell, goes for a lot of money in regards to the red box, dm's kit, and monster vault! So these games were a success and it makes me shake my head the way people seem to be implying that they were failures.

3.5 started dipping towards the last two years but why? The quality wasn't there aside form a handful of books but some of those were big like the phbII and DMgII, rules compendium, and the last few monster manuals. I managed a game shop at the time, I talked to other retailers. 3.5 was still a thing when they announced 4e. Products like the expedition series and the adventures just sucked up shelf space though and towards the end of 3.5 those were the products. The weirder stuff like Incarnum and such died out quick but looking at the rereleases the Spell Compendium was big, it was an essential text for 3.5 and a late edition release. Pathfinder Chronicles launched and it was a thing as well. I couldn't keep Rise of the Runelords in stock and it was beginning to outpace 3.5 sales aside from the aforementioned handful of books.

I had to keep my finger on the general pulse of RPG sales, especially after the nWOD failed to kick up the same sales the original did. 3.5 was all there was going on, and Mutants & Masterminds. WFRP died slowly, 40k just launched and was doing really well but nothing like 3.5 had been. So to imply, as I've seen in this thread, that 3.5 died from poor sales is misleading. 3.5 died because Hasbro wanted d&d to become a core brand and it was too late in the life cycle to try to do it with what they had already. It wasn't going to be a $50 mill line especially with Hasbro not including the novels and licensed products as part of the bottom line unlike Transformers, GI Joe and eventually MLP. Doing a revision was out of the question because it would just appeal to the then current base, as demonstrated with Pathfinder's player base and lesser sales, as slight as those lesser sales are. It hasn't really brought in a significant amount of new people. They've made a valiant effort with the beginner's box I will tell you that though!

Fourth is a different critter. If you look at it, it is designed to appeal to four different audiences. D&D players, collectors, board gamers and video gamers. It actually does emulate d&d play really well. The collectible element died in the minis though, sales were starting to bottom out on d&d minis before fourth launched anyway. But the minis did appeal to board gamers! The modularity of the tiles and tactical play made a great bridge between war gamers and role players and the system itself was, in fact, very much like a video game. How it failed wasn't bad design or even the fractured market because SOMEONE was playing and a LOT of someone's at that because it still outsold Pathfinder! So those players lost to Pathfinder were certainly made up for in new players and lapsed players. How fourth failed was delivering the number Hasbro wanted! That and the constant errata and updates that came out, modifications to rules like skill challenges and monster math requires extensive errata, essentially (pun intended) making those first few core rulebooks null & void as far as reference books and the changes were so extensive that silently updating the next printing was a way to generate more confusion. Essentials didn't flop or even thud. Well, phb books did but those boxed sets and the rules cyclopedia? The boxed sets still, damn, I was offered $90 for my dm kit and saw the red box at HPB for $60! But fourth failed more because of Hasbro than being 4e or essentials. It failed because revenue generated from novels and licensing didn't count. The video games didn't count towards the bottom line. Drizzt novels and Elminster novels didn't count. But those books did sell well. DDI did very well. Hell, it was such a huge and integral part that people are demanding digital tools for fifth and it doesn't even need it! In fact, when the line was cancelled, it was almost to a turning point as a line. Product seemed to be just hitting it's stride in terms of quality. Compare Gardmore Abbey or Tomb of Horrors to the H1-P3 series or the Giants adventure. OP was growing. Then things dried up and fifth was announced. That vocal minority crying about fourth made it seem like fourth was a failure. I have a friend insist to me, constantly, that fourth was a dismal failure and required collectible cards like MTG to even play the game. He even know I own the books and still tells me that.

Note that unlike in fourth, the guy in charge at Hasbro is praising d&d sales? He wouldn't be doing that with just three core books, a starter set and a couple adventures, something is different and it boils down to the licensing. The branding structure reworked so that the video games, novels, minis and other license material now counts. That is good for the brand AND the RPG. When the Sword Coast game launches and some other factors like the film deal are worked out, I have a feeling the RPG will change directions a little bit. We will get more books because under the new structure, the brand will have more money alloted to it.

 

[El Mahdi]

I'll have to find it. It was before the release of 5E, IIRC, either near the end of the playtest or during the wait for release. I was heavy in the WotC boards at the time (I've since abandoned them), and there was a thread or two devoted to figuring out which five it would be.

It's possible that this was started by someone outside WotC, but it was taken as gospel there.

I remember what you're talking about Shiroiken. It was something that was said during GenCon 2013, but I can't find the original quote, only the residual ripples in the community. Probably the closest I've found is this conversation on Mearls' twitter:

https://twitter.com/mikemearls/status/372503463478829056

Here's a thread from here at Enworld.
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?340458-Old-settings-coming-back

There was also speculation based on a 2012 GenCon comment by Mearls that they were focusing on FR so they could provide one awesome campaign setting rather than six mediocre ones. Lots of folks assumed that the number six wasn't pulled out of a hat, so speculation began on what the other five (aside from FR) might be.

Of course, in the core books Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Mystara, Dark Sun, and Eberron were all mentioned, though not given much in the way of crunch. We know that Warforged and Kender were planned for the DMG at one point. The 4e setting got calls out to the Dawn War and Eladrin. In 2013, they probably hoped to be able to include a lot of that kind of stuff, but come crunch time some of it had to be cut.

Which is not to say that WotC lied, or broke promises, or anything like that. But Mearls did mention something about modular support for the top five campaign settings - which he pointedly did not specify. So Shiroiken is not spinning things out of whole cloth.

I stand corrected.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Everything you have described there is not a justification for the release schedule we have now.

There is no evidence what so ever that Wizards lost money during 3rd and 4th edition because of the books and yet I see this argument pop up. I also keep hearing this argument about creating books that people won't buy. I think this statement is a bit vague and I think it's being taken that way. I bet you Complete Mage and Complete Arcane sold well during the 3rd edition era, as did the Forgotten Realms books, and many others. Sure you would have that odd book that didn't sell but if you want to use that argument then you need to provide figures for each and every book that was created and go from there.

I also never heard that 4th edition did badly because of the amount of books that were available. A lot of what I heard was the amount of errata that came out and made a lot of the books seem a bit obsolete.

It really has nothing to do with how well the books for 3E and 4E sold... it's all about how fast the books get released. And because 3E and 4E were released one way... it's why 5E is taking a different track.

If we just say for the sake of argument that all three of these editions will end up selling about the same amount of books overall (when you include the core books, splat books, adventure books, and setting books)... 3E and 4E had very aggressive schedules. Most of the books they sold occurred in Years 1, 2 & 3. Thus, when you got to Years 4, 5, & 6 of the respective lines... a lot less money was coming in because the edition was front-loaded, and thus the feeling became that beginning work on a NEW edition was a good idea (as they could see that a new core book influx of cash would be probably two to three years down the line with the new edition's release.)

But what has been one of the big complaints in recent years? People feeling that new editions are being released too quickly and thus they are being forced to "buy all their books over again". So how does WotC assist those people? By expanding the lifespan of the edition. How do they do that? By not making Years 4, 5 & 6 so barren of sales that they panic and feel like they need to start working on 6E. And how do you not make Years 4, 5, & 6 so barren of sales? By releasing good-selling product in those years that in years past would have been released in Years 1, 2, & 3.

Can you imagine the influx of cash WotC would get in Year 4 of 5E's lifespan if that was the year the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting finally was released? It'd be a huge Year 4 for them. Now granted, yes... by that point there would be a contingent of players that might have "left" 5E because they didn't get that setting book immediately and they felt like if their needs weren't being served that they would go somewhere else where they were "wanted"... but a larger number of players would just keep playing 5E as they always had (because a lot of the players don't NEED a "campaign setting guide" to play the game, and another large group don't even use established campaign settings in the first place). Then these folks would then buy the Campaign Setting in Year 4 because it looked to be an awesome new book (detailing a lot of the history that occurred in the five or six FR adventure path books up until then, much of which were directly a result of player action from all the Adventurer's League material.)

Here's the issue for a lot of people right now: There is MORE than enough material in the Player's Handbook (and the subsequent Elemental Evil and Unearthed Arcana documents) to play in 5E games for years. But if players are upset that there isn't enough material to BUY right now... it's pretty obvious you aren't getting this material to actually *play* with, you're getting it because you just want to buy it. But if that's the case... you aren't the person WotC is interested in serving, because you have no stake in the long-term viability of the game. You're not in it for the long haul because you aren't even concerned about playing the game right now. Your focus is all about just buying stuff, not actually using the stuff you already have. And thus you are a great person for a company that just wants to pump out a crapton of material right away in order to squeeze the stone dry immediately... but for a company looking at the sales in the latter half of this decade... they need to hold *some* product back so there's something worth releasing down the line.

 

[Iosue]

Can you imagine the influx of cash WotC would get in Year 4 of 5E's lifespan if that was the year the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting finally was released? It'd be a huge Year 4 for them. Now granted, yes... by that point there would be a contingent of players that might have "left" 5E because they didn't get that setting book immediately and they felt like if their needs weren't being served that they would go somewhere else where they were "wanted"... but a larger number of players would just keep playing 5E as they always had (because a lot of the players don't NEED a "campaign setting guide" to play the game, and another large group don't even use established campaign settings in the first place). Then these folks would then buy the Campaign Setting in Year 4 because it looked to be an awesome new book (detailing a lot of the history that occurred in the five or six FR adventure path books up until then, much of which were directly a result of player action from all the Adventurer's League material.)

Actually, that does sound like a nice plan. Focus on Forgotten Realms for 2 or 3 years. Then release a big campaign set incorporating all that new material, for the folks that love the Realms and just want to play there. Then move on to the next setting, say, Greyhawk. Focus on that for 2, 3 years and then release the Greyhawk campaign set and move on to Dragonlance. Repeat for Eberron, Mystara, and Dark Sun. By then you're 12 or so years into your edition. You can release a new edition (in the 2e, B/X, BECMI style): essentially the same rules with updated and revised rules. Then you start the process over again. The die-hard setting fans get focus on their preferred setting, without being diluted by working on a bunch of other stuff, and without splitting the market. The casual fans who just need some published material can get a wide taste of the different settings (perhaps finding one that they really like). Each of the properties gets developed as a multi-platform IP.

I'm not saying that's what they are going to do (although it does fit with Chris Perkins' "working on storylines for the next seven years"). But it would be a nice plan.

Here's the issue for a lot of people right now: There is MORE than enough material in the Player's Handbook (and the subsequent Elemental Evil and Unearthed Arcana documents) to play in 5E games for years. But if players are upset that there isn't enough material to BUY right now... it's pretty obvious you aren't getting this material to actually *play* with, you're getting it because you just want to buy it. But if that's the case... you aren't the person WotC is interested in serving, because you have no stake in the long-term viability of the game. You're not in it for the long haul because you aren't even concerned about playing the game right now. Your focus is all about just buying stuff, not actually using the stuff you already have. And thus you are a great person for a company that just wants to pump out a crapton of material right away in order to squeeze the stone dry immediately... but for a company looking at the sales in the latter half of this decade... they need to hold *some* product back so there's something worth releasing down the line.

Agreed, but to be honest, I don't think their target market is all that interested in the long-term viability of the game, either. It seems to me that they are aggressively targeting the prospective and casual players, who far outnumber the hardcore hobbiests, and adjusting their release schedule to them. They're the ones that need published adventures, preferably ones that can keep their group occupied for some time. And while the release schedule may be lighter even than hardcore fans who want a lighter release schedule might prefer, they have to be careful not to oversaturate the market for those casual fans. If they've got a campaign adventure that's going to take them six to eight months to complete, they're just not going to be interested if a new adventure comes out three months in.

In the meantime, the completely unheralded reveals of Sword Coast Legends, the VTT license, and Dragon+ put paid the claim that just because they haven't announced stuff, they don't have very clear plans that they are working on. There will be more books, more non-adventure books. Monster Manuals for sure. Probably eventually a printed and playtested Unearthed Arcana...or two! Maybe a player resource with more backgrounds and exotic equipment (Asian weapons and the like). Things of that nature. They're taking it easy, so they're still getting the ball rolling. We're not even a year into the release yet. But as the great James Earl Jones once said, "Material will come, Ray. Material will most definitely come."

 

[Jester David]

Now granted, yes... by that point there would be a contingent of players that might have "left" 5E because they didn't get that setting book immediately and they felt like if their needs weren't being served that they would go somewhere else where they were "wanted"

Here's the issue for a lot of people right now: There is MORE than enough material in the Player's Handbook (and the subsequent Elemental Evil and Unearthed Arcana documents) to play in 5E games for years. But if players are upset that there isn't enough material to BUY right now... it's pretty obvious you aren't getting this material to actually *play* with, you're getting it because you just want to buy it. But if that's the case... you aren't the person WotC is interested in serving, because you have no stake in the long-term viability of the game. You're not in it for the long haul because you aren't even concerned about playing the game right now. Your focus is all about just buying stuff, not actually using the stuff you already have. And thus you are a great person for a company that just wants to pump out a crapton of material right away in order to squeeze the stone dry immediately... but for a company looking at the sales in the latter half of this decade... they need to hold *some* product back so there's something worth releasing down the line.

Harsh but true.

It also might benefit other gaming companies. Smaller companies can support themselves with less sales. Gamers with lots of disposable income who want to buy books every month can purchase products for other game systems. Or 3rd Party campaign products/ adventures. Even if they never play those games, it's not like they were likely to be using the D&D books each month so they're still getting an equivalent amount of content for their table.

 

[airwalkrr]

Need I remind the naysayers to WotC's current plan for tabletop 5e (limited release schedule focused on adventures and keeping the core books relevant) is almost exactly what Gygax did in the 70s and 80s with TSR and it was WILDLY profitable. Granted that had a lot to do with D&D's novelty at the time, but there were still lots of competing products. D&D has been the marquis RPG for decades, the splatbook fest of 2e is what made TSR go broke (and why they sold to WotC). The splatbook fest of 3e (which, while popular early on because 3e was so darn polished and awesome had rapidly diminishing returns and led us to the travesty* of 4e). The 4e "attack them with splat from every angle and write a tabletop game we can parlay into an MMO" led to the almost complete rewrite of the system within 2 years with D&D Essentials and had people both hooked on an online subscription just to get a character generator while forcing them to carry around a bookshelf to games. So now they playtested a game publicly for a whole year, asked players what they wanted, figured out what the problems were, and fixed them. If you ask me they did a smashing job. I can keep creating stories with just the 3 core rulebooks as my guide for a decade easily.

*YMMV but I didn't enjoy it