Worried that the mistakes of the past are being repeated...

[Shemeska]

Seeing all the new books coming out, I'm getting worried. Yes, some of them are good additions (D20 Modern, D20 Future, those books add new elements that are useful), but a lot are needless accessories that 9 our of 10 gamers will rarely if ever use (Races of Stone, Stormwrack, etc.), so I'm starting to get a bad feeling.

There's the assumption however that what one group finds 'useless' will get the same reaction from everyone else, and that what one group finds useful will also be useful among the other groups buying books.

I found Stormwrack pretty good, but I'll laugh at the suggestion that I buy D20 modern or D20 future etc. Those last two are 'useless' to me, but lots of people probably like them. I personally might find DDG to have been six metric tons of steaming bulldrek put between two glossy covers, but some people might for inexplicable reasons have liked the ideas in the book to buy it.

I'm not in my 'must buy everything WotC' phase that I was when I first started gaming at the start of 3e, but WotC has been putting out products that are, generally speaking, a fair mix of nifty ideas and stuff I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. So long as there are other people in the market with different tastes than me and my group, WotC will do pretty well.

 

[amazingshafeman]

I like releases that have nothing but new and innovative and pertinent information, but a lot of the ones we're getting either rehash old stuff or tell us what we (should) already know or at least have enough creativity to come up with ourselves.

The trouble here is that while many, if not all, of us have the creativity to come up with some of the latest WotC and non-WotC products ourselves, we don't necessarily have the TIME. For instance, at present, I'm running a campaign centered in a fertile river valley in the middle of a desert. At the end of the river is one of the world's most exotic port cities. I could spend my free time researching ships on the off chance the next time the PCs visit the extensive magic library there they decide to go hunt Kraken, or I could wait, and if the PCs want to do that, I buy Stormwrack or Corsairs. By not doing the research myself, I save time, and more importantly for me, I don't get distracted with cool ideas for a new campaign, which bugs my players to death.

 

[tetsujin28]

What makes you think that 90% of all D&D gamers find these books useless?

Exactly. "If we're not buying them, then nobody else is, either!"

And yet the WotC product is flying off the shelves in my FLGS.

 

[Steel_Wind]

While I don't think its time to hit the panic button (and I think Stormwrack will be used), I think Anubis has a point.

There clearly are diminishing returns.

That said - I also expect that Stormwrack outsold in a week D20 Future's sales for a year, but setting that aside...

There clearly are more books of a niche variety being created. Magic of Incarnum, for example - or Heroes of Horror.

There is a reason you are seeing these in 2005 and didn't see them in 2001.

The more that gets published, the less virgin ground there is to exploit in obvious topic areas, and the more innovative WotC has to be to find new ground.

That's not a bad thing though. We are starting to see truly new material emerge from WotC now covering topics we have not ever seen before in any previous editions. Sure - that will mean some duds - but it also challenges designers to think outside the box and innovate. The few gems that will emerge may well be worth the inevitible lumps of coal.

Will it all end in tears? Probably. When? We'll see.

 

[Mark CMG]

Seeing all the new books coming out, I'm getting worried. Yes, some of them are good additions (D20 Modern, D20 Future, those books add new elements that are useful), but a lot are needless accessories that 9 our of 10 gamers will rarely if ever use (Races of Stone, Stormwrack, etc.), so I'm starting to get a bad feeling.

TSR and 2nd Edition went under because the market was flooded with too many useless accessory books. 3rd Edition avoided this for a very long time, but now we're again having three or four new books monthly, which is permeating the market needlessly just as before. One new book every month or two (that isn't a new thing altogether like D20 Modern) is a good rate; three or four per month is way too much.

Anyone else got a bad feeling about this nonsense?

Naw. The primary problem with the pig-piling of books that came out during and toward the end of the 2E era was the lack of consistancy from supplement to supplement and, of course, the undeniable tendancy for power creep from book to book. I don't see that here, for the most part. Most of what comes from WotC could be written by any DM given enough creativity and time (and I suspect all of the writers get behind the screen quite often). Couple that with a strong sense of not-wanting-to-break-the-game among the designers, writers, and the management, and WotC has a good formula for putting out an assortment of supplements that, while they might not all appeal to all gamers, provide a seemingly endless stream of viable, balanced options. The best of the third party companies either follow suit or produce material outside of the genres or rulesets of WotC. The fierce competition in the current marketplace doesn't leave a lot of room for screw ups.

 

[Anubis]

Of course 90% is made up, but I'd at least call it an educated guess. I'm not pointing to any one product either. If you look at all the supplement books versus the number of DMs out there, I think it is safe then to look at those numbers and say a very strong majority (about 90%) would never use most of the books out there. On top of that, some various books cover the same topics, dividing the base between the books in many cases.

Once you pile on so many books, given that most gamers have limited income (I seriously doubt more than a small fraction of gamers are doctors or lawyers) or AT LEAST limited cranial capacity to take in so much information that they would buy every book out there. As such, the book books there are, the lower the percentage chance of any one person buying any one book.

I'm guessing that's what some people here meant by diminishing returns, and that was my main point really. I'm not worried worried per se, I'm just . . . "concerned" . . . 2nd Edition itself was (at least in my opinion) a steaming pile of crap from the start; I stuck with D&D0 until the day 3rd Edition was released. I just don't wanna see it happen to 3.5 because this system actually works, something that simply could not be said for D&D0 or 2nd Edition.

 

[Alzrius]

Seeing all the new books coming out, I'm getting worried. Yes, some of them are good additions (D20 Modern, D20 Future, those books add new elements that are useful), but a lot are needless accessories that 9 our of 10 gamers will rarely if ever use (Races of Stone, Stormwrack, etc.), so I'm starting to get a bad feeling.

TSR and 2nd Edition went under because the market was flooded with too many useless accessory books. 3rd Edition avoided this for a very long time, but now we're again having three or four new books monthly, which is permeating the market needlessly just as before. One new book every month or two (that isn't a new thing altogether like D20 Modern) is a good rate; three or four per month is way too much.

Anyone else got a bad feeling about this nonsense?

In all honestly, no.

For one thing, what killed TSR was sub-dividing their market by releasing multiple campaign worlds, thereby competing against themselves. The amount of product out there was because of this; ergo, it wasn't the volume of product so much as it was that the products were of competing campaign worlds.

Likewise, you seem to ignore that the Open Game License has already allowed so many companies to publish compatible material that the market is already far more crowded than it ever was under TSR, and WotC seems to be doing fine.

Finally, if WotC's didn't publish further books that were "needless accessories," what would you have them put out? Not releasing any books isn't an option, and releasing books that are absolutely necessary to run the game would upset the fans much more quickly than "needless" books. This is to say nothing of the fact that having virtually all of their accessory books be almost completely modular (e.g. you don't need Races of Stone to use Stormwrack).

I think WotC's current policy is a good one, and that they're not doing anything that's hurting the market.

 

[Anubis]

What I'd like to see more of are books where the material is all brand new. Stuff like Races of Stone and such are simple expansions of existing rules and supplemental stuff. D20 Modern was all-new as was D20 Future. Deities & Demigods is another example. Libris Mortis and Draconomicon, while expansions, had enough interesting new stuff to fall into this group because of the broad multi-use things within.

Racial books, though, and things like Savage Species and Stormwrack, just don't provide enough frequently usable new territory.

Like I said, it's just a concern for the time being. Still, some things like the Planar Handbook even have me quite nervous as to the direction.

 

[Hussar]

Well, I dunno about Stormwrack, but Sandstorm saw, and still sees pretty heavy use in my games. My fire priest in one game is borrowing ideas from there and the water rules have become pretty much standard in all my games. Dehydration is a real issue now in my games.

In all honesty, I doubt any single DM, beyond a very small number, used more than 10% of the published material in any edition. I highly doubt that it's much different now. People use what they can for their games. That means that, at any given time, there's a huge number of things that CAN'T be used in a game. I'm not about to start using Eberron Airships in my World's largest Dungeon game for example. Heck, even back in the 2e days, I barely scratched the surface on most of my Complete books.

In other words, there's no real difference today. DM's don't use most of what they buy. They never did. In all honesty, outside of the 3 core books, how much of any supplement have you ever used. The most I've ever done was MEG's Urban Blight book which saw about a 50% usage in my last campaign. For any other non core book, I'd put it closer to 10%. The only exception to this might be modules. For any crunch or fluff book, it's pretty rare to see more than a small amount of the book used in any single campaign or even a series of campaigns.

Me, I love the fact that there are so many choices. Competition keeps the rules tight. Someone who publishes crap get's buried by the market and someone who is consistent rises to the top. There's nothing like a little competition (or rather a lot) to keep quality up.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

WotC makes use of substantial market research, and they have a team of staff devoted entirely to business purposes. If such books weren't selling in sufficient quantities, the lines wouldn't be continued.

I see little evidence of this - one big web poll on pisonics and some vague questions on those tear-out forms in hardcover books.