WotC has a milking machine now (Draconomicon I)

[Fallen Seraph]

Pfft, nothing can beat WERESHEEP!

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Natural prey of everything

Be careful of the creature in the cage kids, those hairless monkey things may look harmless but they're the most vicious pack predators to almost rule the stars, responsible for more mass extinctions than the Wke2%#@$ Transcendant Blight and killed off their own related sapient competitor species before even developing sedentary culture.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

"Baah"

Moo...

Cows are cooler. Or rather, they are not. That's why my creature in Black & White was a cow.

 

[Jhulae]

For example if the 3.5 PHB didn't have Monks or Barbarians in it, but they were introduced as "new" base classes in Complete Warrior, people would have screamed bloody murder.

Uh, yeah, whatever. 3.5 wasn't a 'new' version of the game, but an update of 3E. If 3.0 didn't have Barbarians or Monks in them *nobody would have known the difference* if they weren't in the 3.5 core books. According to your "argument", people *should* have been up in arms when 3.5 was released, because the 3.5 books didn't include Psionics in the PHB (seeing as that was released as a 3.0 book before the update). After all, prestige classes from a ton of books were put in the DMG, why didn't Psions get added to the PHB? They weren't 'new' when 3.5 came out.

Just because some classes seem to be 'sacred cows', doesn't mean the game is incomplete without those classes, especially if the rules those classes use really need to be worked on (such as the shapechanging rules that seem to have updates every few months because they're so wonky).

 

[Derren]

Along with the content. The 3.5 Draconomicon was 288 pages, and the 4e Draconomicon I: Chromatic Dragons will have 288 pages. While I don't understand the higher sticker price than other splat books (and even larger than the Phb at 320 pages, it does look like they are giving way more content. Twice as much, so it would only follow suit that twice as much content would be found in twice as many books.

And now think about what content that would be. If the Draconomicon I has generic dragon content like the Draconomicon had then this generic content (physiology, etc) will either be reprinten in the Draconomicon II, Draconomicon II will include much more crunch than Draconomicon I or the Draconomicon II will be much slimmer than Draconomicon I. Unless there are heavy changes for chromatic/metallic dragons (unlikely imo as most art stays the same) they are simply too similar so that you need two books for fluff about those different dragon types.

Now unless WotC goes with the gradually smaller books approach Either the first or the following books will contain a lot of crunch, most likely dragon flavored powers, new abilities for dragons themselves etc. Now do you remember what happened to 3E when lots of crunch book were pumped? Bye bye balance.

Of course you can always say "Don't buy it" but that doesn't help D&D/WotC at all and you will likely miss out the interesting parts of the book too.
Also do you really think WotC will only use this strategy for the Draconomicon? Unlikely. I hoped they learned something from 3E that endless streams of crunch books hurt the brand in the end, but apparently making money is more important to them. Not that I blame them, they are a business after all, but there are probably better ways to earn money in the long term.

At least we will likely get customizable dragons with lots of options & abilities back. Good for me, bad for people who were happy about easy out of the book dragons. Those people must most likely stick with the MM.

 

[hong]

And now think about what content that would be. If the Draconomicon I has generic dragon content like the Draconomicon had then this generic content (physiology, etc) will either be reprinten in the Draconomicon II, Draconomicon II will include much more crunch than Draconomicon I or the Draconomicon II will be much slimmer than Draconomicon I.

Sigh. Stick to cows, Derren.

 

[Roman]

And now think about what content that would be. If the Draconomicon I has generic dragon content like the Draconomicon had then this generic content (physiology, etc) will either be reprinten in the Draconomicon II, Draconomicon II will include much more crunch than Draconomicon I or the Draconomicon II will be much slimmer than Draconomicon I. Unless there are heavy changes for chromatic/metallic dragons (unlikely imo as most art stays the same) they are simply too similar so that you need two books for fluff about those different dragon types.

They can always put more sample dragons or dragons with fighter levels into the book as filler...

At least we will likely get customizable dragons with lots of options & abilities back. Good for me, bad for people who were happy about easy out of the book dragons. Those people must most likely stick with the MM.

I would not be so certain. The new trend seems to be to give us lots of statblocks, sample creatures and creatures with levels and to cut back on the real crunch. Hopefully, this trend will be reversed in 4E, but that is still an open question.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

While in 3E WotC milked the cash cow still by hand (hard and tirelessly working hands) they seem to have upgraded to a high powered automatic milking machine now. At least thats the only explanation I have fore splitting up the Draconomicon into 2 or more books.

WotC is one of the few RPG company that actually does market research, so I assume they have some good reasons for this.

Besides, I could see how this can be made to work. The first book concentrates on the expansion of the game mechanics, and the second could be a collection of fully statted out "NPC dragons", complete with character history, layout of their lairs, resources, allies, and so on - ready to be put into a campaign.

 

[Roman]

I don't know about you, but I sure didn't need 56 pages on dragon physiology, psychology, and culture that was sparse on adventure fodder.

The 56 pages on dragon physiology, psychology and culture had limited usefulness for gaming, but are at least an interesting read. The 70 pages of statblocks had limited usefulness of gaming and are boring to read...

Lords of Madness, on the other hand, was filled to the brim with the sort of rich plot hooks I want to see in future monster spotlight books.

I cannot really comment on that, as I have only a passing familiarity with the Lords of Madness.

 

[Derren]

They can always put more sample dragons or dragons with fighter levels into the book as filler...

Samples for what? A goal of 4E is to make dragons runable out of the book. Thats why they won't have any customizable abilities anymore. Open the MM, take a appropriate aged (level) dragon and you are ready for combat.
So what should they make samples off? Classed dragons? According to the designers its easy to add class levels to monsters so such sample should not be really useful.