Maybe this has been posted before....but I see that there is another new book coming out. This one again based on Magic the Gathering. Why do these two games/ words/ ideas keep mixing together? D&D is a world full of fantasy lore already, and many areas that could be updated, or added. Why take from some other source, instead of just making new ideas?
Bottom line, from the little WotC has revealed about sales - these books sell extremely well! Likely because they appeal to two separate (although overlapping) audiences. Wider audience = more sales. Simple as that.
I agree that there is a massive amount of existing great worlds & lore unexplored in 5e as well as possible new worlds, and it sounds like more of it is coming next year, but the ultimate decider is WotC's bottom line. ;) If the Magic the Gathering D&D books make a lot of money, WotC will keep making them.
Because Wizards of the Coast owns both properties and very, very, exceptionally super badly wants people to give them more money, whether or not they've earned it. So they try and convince D&D players to play their terribly mismanaged card game, and they try and convince M:tG players to play their also-ran side gig. Imagine it works better for the M:tG to D&D conversion since you can't actually play Magic without being able to drop a few thousand bucks a week on brand new cards after Wizards gets done banning all the cards you bought last week from all tournaments or official events, so popping fifty bucks every other month or so for a new D&D book is nothing. Getting D&D players to play Magic: the Crackening? Significantly harder, which is why Wizards puts more effort into that conversion path than the M:tG to D&D one.
Getting D&D players to play Magic: the Crackening?
I don't have anything to add, other than how much that sentence made me laugh out loud.
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D&D is a world full of fantasy lore already, and many areas that could be updated, or added.
Personal opinion. I find the 'vanilla' D&D worlds just dull. I have a number of mates who are in to Magic: The Gathering so this kind of stuff will definitely appeal to them. Nothing wrong with getting more source books.
I know I am an older player (RPGing since 1983), and I feel WotC could not give a crap about players like me, so it should come as no surprise that I am completely uninterested in any of the MtG-branded D&D books.
That being said, I am a little upset that WotC has not produced updated 5E versions of Greyhawk or Spelljammer, and they have not even finished the rest of the Forgotten Realms! The Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide came out in 2015...six years ago!
I guess the new company name should be Wizards of the Sword Coast, because that is all they are going to give us.
I imagine Wizards is slower to produce new lore books for older settings in 5e because they know that older gamers still have their 1e/2e/3(.5)e settings books and are going to use those over the new 5e stuff regardless of what Wizards prints. They print things like Eberron and Wildemount for new-to-5e players who don't have a ton of older edition setting books sitting around still being full of perfectly valid setting lore and information. Someone who actually has a Spelljammer book can play Spelljammer without maybe a day or two's fiddling to get spelljamming mechanics updated to 5e, and then they can go hate space hippos without any desperate need for a new book. It's the new players with no books who need the new setting books, and Wizards would prefer to get those players hooked on M:tG settings instead. So we can go spend thousands and thousands of dollars a month on their incredibly poorly managed, hyper-predatory trading crack game as well as the D&D setting books.
It's the new players with no books who need the new setting books, and Wizards would prefer to get those players hooked on M:tG settings instead. So we can go spend thousands and thousands of dollars a month on their incredibly poorly managed, hyper-predatory trading crack game as well as the D&D setting books.
This is gross hyperbole. Do you know how much it costs to play a draft tournament at my LGS's Friday Night Magic event any given week? Fifteen bucks. That's sixty a month, which isn't much more than buying a new hardcover D&D book each month and possibly less if you also get the DDB and/or Roll 20 or other digital copy of said book to use online.
MtG and D&D are WotC's two biggest products. Financially speaking, they're the only two that matter. As mentioned, there's a lot of overlap between the markets/fanbases. And there isn't a for-profit business anywhere that wouldn't see the obvious upsides of combining the two. People who are already customers of both product lines are very likely to buy the crossovers, as my hardcopy of Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica exemplifies, and it also serves to attract interest from both sides. And if you think MtG players don't care about the lore then go to a LGS on a Friday evening and ask a table full of Magic players what they think of how WotC creative directors handled Nissa and Chandra, or their opinions of Jace Beleren in general. The opportunity to insert themselves and characters of their own creation into the worlds of Ravnica, Theros, and now Strixxhaven does attract Magic players to the D&D market and there are plenty of hardcore D&D nerds (quite a few of us being party to this forum) who will almost always want to snap up every new book that comes out just as much as an avid MtG player wants to buy cards from the latest Magic set (which are released with considerably less frequency than D&D books tend to be, especially if you don't heavily invest in the premium sets from which most players just buy select singles on the secondary market which WotC has no direct part in).
Wizards actively banning cards from all events, venues, and any other Official Thing after two years at the absolute most in print.
My brother sold a collection he'd spent several years and thousands of dollars curating simply because Wizards decided to terminate his format in tournaments and switch to solely their Limited/Most-Recent-Set-Rotation structure. because getting to use your cards you spent tons and tons of money on for longer than a few months at a stretch is anathema to Wizards' rampant profiteering on their trading crack game.
My 5e material is good for as long as I want to use it. Magic cards I bought twenty minutes ago are already liable to be rotated out, deprecated, and effectively transformed into nothing more than oddly nostalgic campfire fuel.
No, Wizards does not get a gorram pass on M:tG, and the fact that nobody ever calls them out on their bullshit frustrates me to no end.
WotC has creatives working on D&D and creatives working on MtG. Since they're both made under the same roof, or at least management structure, if you have a developed world lore that seems to "speak well" to D&D and offers a new environment for D&D, why not that that world and give it some D&D mechanics? Both Theros and Ravinica have a number of good ideas that could be fun in a lot of games. It's kinda like if your big business are these giant tent pole summer block busters, but you also own a comic book publisher ... maybe some of those ideas will translate well.
I don't know why folks find this crossover puzzling. It's not like the books contain mandatory changes to the game or anything.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Wizards actively banning cards from all events, venues, and any other Official Thing after two years at the absolute most in print.
My brother sold a collection he'd spent several years and thousands of dollars curating simply because Wizards decided to terminate his format in tournaments and switch to solely their Limited/Most-Recent-Set-Rotation structure. because getting to use your cards you spent tons and tons of money on for longer than a few months at a stretch is anathema to Wizards' rampant profiteering on their trading crack game.
My 5e material is good for as long as I want to use it. Magic cards I bought twenty minutes ago are already liable to be rotated out, deprecated, and effectively transformed into nothing more than oddly nostalgic campfire fuel.
No, Wizards does not get a gorram pass on M:tG, and the fact that nobody ever calls them out on their bullshit frustrates me to no end.
Lots of things "expire" (food, medicine, technology, etc), and I don't see much true complaint about that, and I also don't see where WotC is breaking down doors and forcing people to burn their out-of-date cards. I have sets that are 7 years old at this point that I still take out from time to time. Sure, i can't use them in an official tournament or event, but I can use them with friends.
Yes the hobby is expensive (which is why my sets are 7 years old, I stopped buying when I realized how much I was spending per month on it), but there is another reason other than forcing people to buy new cards; They produce hundreds, if not thousands of different cards per year. Each "set" has its' own hyper-powerful cards; having to release new cards on a regular basis and keep track of every ability for balance would be a massive endeavor that would only increase with time. you might go to 1 set a year (if that) due to the time it would take to back-check every other card in existence to make sure no one has a distinct advantage using older cards, and setting expirations allow for new players to actually have a shot at winning with a few months collecting. Setting expiration dates on the cards is the only way to have a viable tournament and the only way to have a viable business in this market.
D&D does the same thing, just at a slower pace, because the games run slower. There also isn't the tournament-based play they need to prepare for. but each edition of D&D effectively expires the previous one just the same as cards expiring.
I know I am an older player (RPGing since 1983), and I feel WotC could not give a crap about players like me, so it should come as no surprise that I am completely uninterested in any of the MtG-branded D&D books.
That being said, I am a little upset that WotC has not produced updated 5E versions of Greyhawk or Spelljammer, and they have not even finished the rest of the Forgotten Realms! The Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide came out in 2015...six years ago!
I guess the new company name should be Wizards of the Sword Coast, because that is all they are going to give us.
OK, rant over.
I'm an old geezer too and I agree with your rant, even if I'm happy for the MtG kiddies that get stuff to be excited about.
But I have come to understand that WotC is actually employing all the computing power of US three letter agencies to scan forums and social media for old folks moaning about classic settings for 5e. And when it reach certain word counts WotC autogenerate another MtG setting.
The only solution I can see is that us old folks come to a global understanding not to write a single word about Spelljammer or Planescape. It will probably take some time for the MtG autogeneration process to slow down, but after a while we are shure to get a few golden oldies published.
So one of the hardest things to do with settings is get players hooked on the lore. We already play 5th, that part is done. We already have homebrew rules for mechanics, classes, etc when we want to customize the game. 5th edition though, players want to be able to access these easily deep and interwoven places. You have fans who are absolutely COMMITTED to the lore of places like Ravenloft, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, Greyhawk, Eberron, etc because its been around forever. With 5th edition being the most popular edition, and Magic being as popular as it's ever been, its a natural transition.
Ravnica, Theros, the upcoming Strixhaven, and all of the Plane Shift stuff released in 2016 had the already lofty task done of having this massive amount of lore behind it. Even with Wildemount, Mercer was able to use all of the lore he had put aside for it to create a "New" setting, but they leveraged all that existing knowledge to create something for D&D proper. I think that's why you're seeing a lot of the Magic stuff come into play. The stories are deep and anyone who REALLY wants to dig in can reference a lot of very easy to locate information on the history of Magic, and the lore behind it. (wiki link to Magic Multiverse article). The creatives can tinker that and go from there, because its far easier for the DM to take a setting and manipulate it rather than create an entirely custom world with every piece of information having to be thought of.
I can solidly tell you that rotating formats keep the game affordable; It's modern and legacy that price people out.
The MtG solution is, honestly, probably better than the more common solution to this in other games (power creep -- sure, you can use your old deck, but it will be trash).
WotC didn't decide on a primary setting for no reason either. The Realms, Greyhawk and Dragonlance have very different lore, but not really a very different feel to them. They're all somewhere on the epic/high fantasy spectrum, and not even that far from each other at that. Exandria is in the same boat too, but given Critical Role's massive popularity especially with newer players it a) sells itself and b) provides a low entry bar into a buying into a published setting. The latter is significant too: if I was a newish DM who started in the 5E era, would I want to make the Oerth or Krynn or Faerûn the setting for my campaigns? I rather doubt it, getting to know those worlds starting from zero would be a daunting task and if an older player with previous edition experience came along I'd probably feel like every mistake I made out of ignorance would undermine my credibility.
I get wanting to tap into the nostalgia market, and there's certainly a lot to say for giving players who grew up on those classic settings what they crave, but I can totally see why WotC waited with a 5E Dragonlance book until new novels could provide some extra impetus and why Greyhawk is an unlikely pick for the third classic setting. Ravenloft can be useful even if for nothing other than as a horror game inspiration; Ravnica, Theros, Strixhaven - they all have a theme that sets them apart from "another take on high/epic fantasy" too; Eberron is pulp noir with magitech tones. Greyhawk would only have that nostalgia factor and whatever crunch WotC would put into it to drive sales, Dragonlance will only have the new novels on top of that.
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Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
WotC didn't decide on a primary setting for no reason either. The Realms, Greyhawk and Dragonlance have very different lore, but not really a very different feel to them. They're all somewhere on the epic/high fantasy spectrum, and not even that far from each other at that. Exandria is in the same boat too, but given Critical Role's massive popularity especially with newer players it a) sells itself and b) provides a low entry bar into a buying into a published setting. The latter is significant too: if I was a newish DM who started in the 5E era, would I want to make the Oerth or Krynn or Faerûn the setting for my campaigns? I rather doubt it, getting to know those worlds starting from zero would be a daunting task and if an older player with previous edition experience came along I'd probably feel like every mistake I made out of ignorance would undermine my credibility.
I get wanting to tap into the nostalgia market, and there's certainly a lot to say for giving players who grew up on those classic settings what they crave, but I can totally see why WotC waited with a 5E Dragonlance book until new novels could provide some extra impetus and why Greyhawk is an unlikely pick for the third classic setting. Ravenloft can be useful even if for nothing other than as a horror game inspiration; Ravnica, Theros, Strixhaven - they all have a theme that sets them apart from "another take on high/epic fantasy" too; Eberron is pulp noir with magitech tones. Greyhawk would only have that nostalgia factor and whatever crunch WotC would put into it to drive sales, Dragonlance will only have the new novels on top of that.
That is why I am hoping for Dark Sun since it is a Post Apocalyptic setting so fairly unique.
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Hi All-
Maybe this has been posted before....but I see that there is another new book coming out. This one again based on Magic the Gathering. Why do these two games/ words/ ideas keep mixing together? D&D is a world full of fantasy lore already, and many areas that could be updated, or added. Why take from some other source, instead of just making new ideas?
Because cross-promotions are in theory beneficial to both sides, and the two games have the same publisher?
Bottom line, from the little WotC has revealed about sales - these books sell extremely well! Likely because they appeal to two separate (although overlapping) audiences. Wider audience = more sales. Simple as that.
I agree that there is a massive amount of existing great worlds & lore unexplored in 5e as well as possible new worlds, and it sounds like more of it is coming next year, but the ultimate decider is WotC's bottom line. ;) If the Magic the Gathering D&D books make a lot of money, WotC will keep making them.
Because Wizards of the Coast owns both properties and very, very, exceptionally super badly wants people to give them more money, whether or not they've earned it. So they try and convince D&D players to play their terribly mismanaged card game, and they try and convince M:tG players to play their also-ran side gig. Imagine it works better for the M:tG to D&D conversion since you can't actually play Magic without being able to drop a few thousand bucks a week on brand new cards after Wizards gets done banning all the cards you bought last week from all tournaments or official events, so popping fifty bucks every other month or so for a new D&D book is nothing. Getting D&D players to play Magic: the Crackening? Significantly harder, which is why Wizards puts more effort into that conversion path than the M:tG to D&D one.
Please do not contact or message me.
cross sell
Guide to the Five Factions (PWYW)
Deck of Decks
I don't have anything to add, other than how much that sentence made me laugh out loud.
#Open D&D
Have the Physical Books? Confused as to why you're not allowed to redeem them for free on D&D Beyond? Questions answered here at the Hardcover Books, D&D Beyond and You FAQ
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i'd say its not exceptional at all and no more 'very very' than any other company on the planet.
Guide to the Five Factions (PWYW)
Deck of Decks
Personal opinion. I find the 'vanilla' D&D worlds just dull. I have a number of mates who are in to Magic: The Gathering so this kind of stuff will definitely appeal to them. Nothing wrong with getting more source books.
I know I am an older player (RPGing since 1983), and I feel WotC could not give a crap about players like me, so it should come as no surprise that I am completely uninterested in any of the MtG-branded D&D books.
That being said, I am a little upset that WotC has not produced updated 5E versions of Greyhawk or Spelljammer, and they have not even finished the rest of the Forgotten Realms! The Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide came out in 2015...six years ago!
I guess the new company name should be Wizards of the Sword Coast, because that is all they are going to give us.
OK, rant over.
I imagine Wizards is slower to produce new lore books for older settings in 5e because they know that older gamers still have their 1e/2e/3(.5)e settings books and are going to use those over the new 5e stuff regardless of what Wizards prints. They print things like Eberron and Wildemount for new-to-5e players who don't have a ton of older edition setting books sitting around still being full of perfectly valid setting lore and information. Someone who actually has a Spelljammer book can play Spelljammer without maybe a day or two's fiddling to get spelljamming mechanics updated to 5e, and then they can go hate space hippos without any desperate need for a new book. It's the new players with no books who need the new setting books, and Wizards would prefer to get those players hooked on M:tG settings instead. So we can go spend thousands and thousands of dollars a month on their incredibly poorly managed, hyper-predatory trading crack game as well as the D&D setting books.
Please do not contact or message me.
This is gross hyperbole. Do you know how much it costs to play a draft tournament at my LGS's Friday Night Magic event any given week? Fifteen bucks. That's sixty a month, which isn't much more than buying a new hardcover D&D book each month and possibly less if you also get the DDB and/or Roll 20 or other digital copy of said book to use online.
MtG and D&D are WotC's two biggest products. Financially speaking, they're the only two that matter. As mentioned, there's a lot of overlap between the markets/fanbases. And there isn't a for-profit business anywhere that wouldn't see the obvious upsides of combining the two. People who are already customers of both product lines are very likely to buy the crossovers, as my hardcopy of Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica exemplifies, and it also serves to attract interest from both sides. And if you think MtG players don't care about the lore then go to a LGS on a Friday evening and ask a table full of Magic players what they think of how WotC creative directors handled Nissa and Chandra, or their opinions of Jace Beleren in general. The opportunity to insert themselves and characters of their own creation into the worlds of Ravnica, Theros, and now Strixxhaven does attract Magic players to the D&D market and there are plenty of hardcore D&D nerds (quite a few of us being party to this forum) who will almost always want to snap up every new book that comes out just as much as an avid MtG player wants to buy cards from the latest Magic set (which are released with considerably less frequency than D&D books tend to be, especially if you don't heavily invest in the premium sets from which most players just buy select singles on the secondary market which WotC has no direct part in).
Ye know what isn't gross hyperbole?
Wizards actively banning cards from all events, venues, and any other Official Thing after two years at the absolute most in print.
My brother sold a collection he'd spent several years and thousands of dollars curating simply because Wizards decided to terminate his format in tournaments and switch to solely their Limited/Most-Recent-Set-Rotation structure. because getting to use your cards you spent tons and tons of money on for longer than a few months at a stretch is anathema to Wizards' rampant profiteering on their trading crack game.
My 5e material is good for as long as I want to use it. Magic cards I bought twenty minutes ago are already liable to be rotated out, deprecated, and effectively transformed into nothing more than oddly nostalgic campfire fuel.
No, Wizards does not get a gorram pass on M:tG, and the fact that nobody ever calls them out on their bullshit frustrates me to no end.
Please do not contact or message me.
WotC has creatives working on D&D and creatives working on MtG. Since they're both made under the same roof, or at least management structure, if you have a developed world lore that seems to "speak well" to D&D and offers a new environment for D&D, why not that that world and give it some D&D mechanics? Both Theros and Ravinica have a number of good ideas that could be fun in a lot of games. It's kinda like if your big business are these giant tent pole summer block busters, but you also own a comic book publisher ... maybe some of those ideas will translate well.
I don't know why folks find this crossover puzzling. It's not like the books contain mandatory changes to the game or anything.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Lots of things "expire" (food, medicine, technology, etc), and I don't see much true complaint about that, and I also don't see where WotC is breaking down doors and forcing people to burn their out-of-date cards. I have sets that are 7 years old at this point that I still take out from time to time. Sure, i can't use them in an official tournament or event, but I can use them with friends.
Yes the hobby is expensive (which is why my sets are 7 years old, I stopped buying when I realized how much I was spending per month on it), but there is another reason other than forcing people to buy new cards; They produce hundreds, if not thousands of different cards per year. Each "set" has its' own hyper-powerful cards; having to release new cards on a regular basis and keep track of every ability for balance would be a massive endeavor that would only increase with time. you might go to 1 set a year (if that) due to the time it would take to back-check every other card in existence to make sure no one has a distinct advantage using older cards, and setting expirations allow for new players to actually have a shot at winning with a few months collecting. Setting expiration dates on the cards is the only way to have a viable tournament and the only way to have a viable business in this market.
D&D does the same thing, just at a slower pace, because the games run slower. There also isn't the tournament-based play they need to prepare for. but each edition of D&D effectively expires the previous one just the same as cards expiring.
Recyclable lore and players
I'm an old geezer too and I agree with your rant, even if I'm happy for the MtG kiddies that get stuff to be excited about.
But I have come to understand that WotC is actually employing all the computing power of US three letter agencies to scan forums and social media for old folks moaning about classic settings for 5e. And when it reach certain word counts WotC autogenerate another MtG setting.
The only solution I can see is that us old folks come to a global understanding not to write a single word about Spelljammer or Planescape. It will probably take some time for the MtG autogeneration process to slow down, but after a while we are shure to get a few golden oldies published.
Darn, I delayed it again! ;-)
Time to put this thread back on topic.
So one of the hardest things to do with settings is get players hooked on the lore. We already play 5th, that part is done. We already have homebrew rules for mechanics, classes, etc when we want to customize the game. 5th edition though, players want to be able to access these easily deep and interwoven places. You have fans who are absolutely COMMITTED to the lore of places like Ravenloft, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, Greyhawk, Eberron, etc because its been around forever. With 5th edition being the most popular edition, and Magic being as popular as it's ever been, its a natural transition.
Ravnica, Theros, the upcoming Strixhaven, and all of the Plane Shift stuff released in 2016 had the already lofty task done of having this massive amount of lore behind it. Even with Wildemount, Mercer was able to use all of the lore he had put aside for it to create a "New" setting, but they leveraged all that existing knowledge to create something for D&D proper. I think that's why you're seeing a lot of the Magic stuff come into play. The stories are deep and anyone who REALLY wants to dig in can reference a lot of very easy to locate information on the history of Magic, and the lore behind it. (wiki link to Magic Multiverse article). The creatives can tinker that and go from there, because its far easier for the DM to take a setting and manipulate it rather than create an entirely custom world with every piece of information having to be thought of.
The MtG solution is, honestly, probably better than the more common solution to this in other games (power creep -- sure, you can use your old deck, but it will be trash).
WotC didn't decide on a primary setting for no reason either. The Realms, Greyhawk and Dragonlance have very different lore, but not really a very different feel to them. They're all somewhere on the epic/high fantasy spectrum, and not even that far from each other at that. Exandria is in the same boat too, but given Critical Role's massive popularity especially with newer players it a) sells itself and b) provides a low entry bar into a buying into a published setting. The latter is significant too: if I was a newish DM who started in the 5E era, would I want to make the Oerth or Krynn or Faerûn the setting for my campaigns? I rather doubt it, getting to know those worlds starting from zero would be a daunting task and if an older player with previous edition experience came along I'd probably feel like every mistake I made out of ignorance would undermine my credibility.
I get wanting to tap into the nostalgia market, and there's certainly a lot to say for giving players who grew up on those classic settings what they crave, but I can totally see why WotC waited with a 5E Dragonlance book until new novels could provide some extra impetus and why Greyhawk is an unlikely pick for the third classic setting. Ravenloft can be useful even if for nothing other than as a horror game inspiration; Ravnica, Theros, Strixhaven - they all have a theme that sets them apart from "another take on high/epic fantasy" too; Eberron is pulp noir with magitech tones. Greyhawk would only have that nostalgia factor and whatever crunch WotC would put into it to drive sales, Dragonlance will only have the new novels on top of that.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
That is why I am hoping for Dark Sun since it is a Post Apocalyptic setting so fairly unique.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master