WotC GenCon Announcement: A New Campaign Setting?

[Cergorach]

I think if you look at release schedules, WotC is bringing out far fewer books than TSR was back in the day. One book a month, how dare they!

Januari
Grasp of the Emerald Claw
Complete Adventurer

Februari
Lost Empires of Faerûn
Races of the Wild

March
d20 Past
Sandstorm

April
Dungeons & Dragons For Dummies
Races of Eberron
Lords of Madness: The Book of Aberrations

That's atleast two products per month, at the end of last year (an probably this year) there were 3-4 products per month and a lot of those are $30, a lot more expensive then the average price of a TSR product. I'm not even adding the d20 based miniature game releases every other month...

I wouldn't be suprised if WotC released another campaign setting. D&D is now more popular then ever and people seem to be willing to pay more for an individual product. I think that WotC is trying to fill holes their other settings can't fill, there were a lot of people that didn't want to spent any money on FR, put were more then willing to pick up Eberron. If WotC can identify an audience that doesn't spend it's money on FR or EB products, but wants to spent money on setting X then it needs to identify setting X and see if there enough people interested in such a setting to make a profit. WotC has something that TSR didn't have, a very good marketing research department, TSR had an Empress that dictated what the customers should buy, things like Buck Rogers in the 25th Century...

 

[BonesMcCoy]

IIRC, wasn't Eberron sponsored by the book department of WotC? So the primary purpose of the Eberron setting is to sell novels, not RPG books. If the Eberron novels have not sold well then perhaps a new setting is just what's called for. Purely speculation of course.

 

[Kesh]

I'm not sure I'd say goth. The basic idea is all the players want to destroy the world and redo it in their own image. You use all kinds of icky, Cthulhu-ish critters to bump each other off and collect souls along the way.

Dammit. And here I promised myself I wouldn't get into another CCG.

 

[Kanegrundar]

I doubt that it will be another full campaign setting. It could be another Ghostwalk-like one-off setting. I wouldn't mind seeing a fully-supported setting for Modern/Future/Past line, since that is my game of choice ATM. However, seeing as how WotC is fine with letting the 3rd party publishers handle the particulars of supporting the Modern line beyond the basics, I doubt that will happen either. I hope it'll be something I'm interested in whichever way it goes.

Kane

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

IIRC, wasn't Eberron sponsored by the book department of WotC? So the primary purpose of the Eberron setting is to sell novels, not RPG books. If the Eberron novels have not sold well then perhaps a new setting is just what's called for. Purely speculation of course.

Well, seeing how there are only two Eberron novels out at this point, and they are both less than 2-3 months old, there is no way they are making any decisions about the success of the novel line at this point. Sell in and sell through on novels is MUCH different than the sell in and sell through of RPG books. They won't have reliable sales figures on the novels for several months. So I seriously doubt they are making decisions at this point. If for some bizarre reason they are, then they have a real idiot running the trade books divison, and I doubt thats the case seeing as it's probably much more profitable than the RPG line.

 

[Vocenoctum]

IIRC, wasn't Eberron sponsored by the book department of WotC? So the primary purpose of the Eberron setting is to sell novels, not RPG books. If the Eberron novels have not sold well then perhaps a new setting is just what's called for. Purely speculation of course.

Not sure if it was sponsored by Novel Division (I don't think so), but the novels just started, so I don't think they could have failed yet.

 

[Sketchpad]

I for one would love to see a d20 Modern/Future/Past setting ... something like Top Secret would rock!

 

[whydirt]

Januari
Grasp of the Emerald Claw
Complete Adventurer

Februari
Lost Empires of Faerûn
Races of the Wild

March
d20 Past
Sandstorm

April
Dungeons & Dragons For Dummies
Races of Eberron
Lords of Madness: The Book of Aberrations

That's atleast two products per month, at the end of last year (an probably this year) there were 3-4 products per month and a lot of those are $30, a lot more expensive then the average price of a TSR product. I'm not even adding the d20 based miniature game releases every other month...

I wouldn't call d20 Past and DnD for Dummies standard DnD supplements. Also keep in mind that $15-20 back in the mid-nineties would be almost $20-25 now, so I don't think the prices are that much higher, especially for hardcover books instead of softcovers. I think trying to compare WotC's current release schedule to TSR's in the past is silly at best.

 

[Captain Tagon]

You know, you should really look outside of WotC for these things. Blue Devil Games and RPGObjects have both requests covered.

Except neither of my requests were really specific enough to point to something already out. And I'm of the mindset that more options is always a good thing. Pick the good bits from all sorts of sources and work out my own coherent whole kind of thing.

 

[Mouseferatu]

It's amazing how many people cite so many different aspects of TSR's business model as "great mistakes." To hear people talk, you'd think that every single book they put out was the greatest mistake since Columbus named the Native Americans "Indians."

You want to know what TSR's mistakes were? It's quite simple.

1) Books/settings that competed with each other for the same dollar.

2) Using the profits of one line to support other lines that were failing.

That's it. Everything else can be traced back to those two issues.

It wasn't that they had "too many splatbooks." It was that they were putting out gobs of material all aimed at the exact same portion of the market. Consumers had to choose between Greyhawk, FR, Ravenloft, Mystara, Spelljammer, Planescape, Al-Qadim, and who knows how many others.

It was that they were propping up failing lines, because the people at TSR liked them, with profits from more successful lines, and therefore not using those profits to support the company, or the lines that were selling.

WotC has Eberron and FR. And they aren't putting out dozens of books for either of them.

WotC has splatbooks, and they seem to be doing well. I don't have access to WotC's internal figures--and even if I did, I wouldn't have the right to reveal them--but I'd be very surprised to learn that they're propping up failing lines with profits from more successful ones. That's standard business sense.

WotC is not TSR. WotC is not making the same mistakes TSR did, no matter how much some people seem to wish they were.