And again from my examples: we see from many Kickstarters and third party publishers that WIERD or distinctive settings and adventures can sell like crazy. There's absolutely a market and hunger for D&D adventures and settings that aren't the same thing over and over again.
Looking at million dollar kickstarters, which is a reasonable lower bound to say something 'sells like crazy', there aren't a lot, so we can fairly well just classify them. List from
Strongholds & Streaming -- rules supplement for strongholds.
Humblewood -- campaign setting.
Kingdoms, Warfare & More Minis -- rules supplement for kingdom management.
The Deck of Many Animated Spells, Tarot & More -- D&D Tarot deck?
The Seeker’s Guide to Twisted Taverns -- looks to be drop-in locations.
Grim Hollow: The Monster Grimoire -- monster manual
Auroboros: Coils of the Serpent -- campaign setting
Heliana’s Guide to Monster Hunting -- not entirely sure what this one is? A bunch of boss fights? Probably counts as a monster manual.
Dungeons of Drakkenheim -- adventure
Fool’s Gold -- adventure
The Griffon’s Saddlebag Book Two -- rules supplements for magic items and character options.
Flee, Mortals!: The MCDM Monster Book -- monster manual
Steinhardt’s Guide to the Eldritch Hunt -- campaign setting
Sebastian Crowe’s Guide to Drakkenheim -- campaign setting
Obojima: Tales from the Tall Grass -- campaign setting
Moria (The One Ring) -- adventure (primarily for a different game system but there's a D&D version)
Ryoko’s Guide to the Yokai Realms -- monsters and player options
The Crooked Moon -- Not sure. It's either a campaign setting or a DM supplement.
Monsters of Drakkenheim -- monster manual
The Field Guide to Floral Dragons -- monster manual
Erevan’s Guide to Death & Beyond -- monster manual with some player options.
So... 2 adventures, 5-6 campaign settings, 6-7 monster manuals, and some that aren't particularly easy to classify. The majority are suitable as drop-in additions to existing campaigns. Also, we don't know exactly how much D&D sells, their earnings reports don't go into that much detail and the estimates I've seen are all over the map, but given that several of those have been made available on D&D Beyond, those numbers aren't negligible
.
Just a minor note - the Moria book for TOR/LotRRP isn't really an adventure book. It's better described as a setting or source book.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I'm not saying modern D&D lacks creativity. I am saying creativity takes a back seat to more than a few things that matter more to those who own the IP.
Oh, I'll say that. And while I think, overall, the 2024 rules are an improvement over the 2014 rules, both are amazingly empty of flavor, verve, inspiring creativity. In 2014, I think this was guided mostly by a desire to be as accessible as possible; which I'm good with, especially since D&D 2014 is wonderfully flexible and malleable in terms of applying it to evocative, "flavorful" homebrew settings and rules.
(Here I'll give a shout out to what I think might be the best supplement to the 2014 rules: VRGTR. The Domains of Dread ooze atmosphere and distinction in a way nothing else WOTC has put out does.)
For the 2024 rules, WOTC went even farther along the generic path, removing ALL world-specific lore and text, and even making the monster descriptions blander.
When you look at the many successful third-party campaign settings - Symbaroum, Grimhallow, Crooked Moon, and many, many more - there are and how wonderfully evocative and singular they seem, the lack of creativity and flavor in D&D becomes very apparent.
I can see your point, but D&D isn't a setting, it is a system. I think it is best to hold judgement on settings until we actually see the setting books that are due out this year. A year is a long time to wait for a full setting for the new 2024 rules, but that is a whole other subject.
If they don't put as much effort into the new setting books as they did for Ravenloft, then I will be in complete agreement with you. Even though I don't use published settings, they should be well made for the people that do.
Technically D&D is a setting, a modified D20 system is what it is built on. but i get what your point is.
I mean, what “sells like crazy” for a 3PP isn’t necessarily the same kind of numbers a major business like WotC looks for. To a certain degree they seem to be looking to use setting-specific background feats for some of that. Also, considering the fairly low adoption I’ve heard of for most of the optional rules like sanity/honor, facing, spell points, etc. from the ‘14 DMG, I can imagine that the market just isn’t there for a gameplay overhaul on the scope of something like Dark Sun.
Fair points! Especially about adoption rate: whether it's alternate settings or D&D competitors (Daggerheart, Draw Steel!), I assume that the number of people actually playing games using those pubs is significantly lower than those who buy them.
OTOH: How much does WOTC - and moreso Hasbro - care about adoption as long as people buy it? I have to assume Hasbro absolutely does not care if I ever crack open EVE OF RUIN once I've paid them for it.
OTOH, Part Deux: If leaked sales numbers are to be believed - if what vloggers like Dungeon Craft & others have shared in their YT channels is accurate - the biggest KS campaign settings are very much the kind of numbers that WOTC would like to have. For argument's sake, we'll stick with two supplements explicitly aimed at using D&D's core rules rather than replace them. Legends of Avantris' Crooked Moon setting raised more than $4 million, while DnDShorts' Ryoko's Guide to the Yokai Realms raised more than $3 million. These numbers ARE competitive with a LOT of the canon adventures put out by WOTC. This is competitive with Spelljammer, Icewind Dale, Tomb of Annihilation, Out of the Abyss, Storm King's Thunder, and Princes of the Apocalypse.
Regarding why adoption of a system/mechanic matters, if someone buys a book where X feature is a selling point and the mechanic doesn’t impress, they probably won’t be particularly interested in buying another book that leans strongly on X. And even if the company changes up the mechanics, if X, Y, and Z all fail to impress, then the hypothetical customer might well be put off any “check out our new mechanics” books from the company based on the track record. That said, I do take the point that some 3PPs trying to do their own thing have done well, but the counterpoint is what’s the ratio of success stories to flops there? This is a fairly subjective market when it comes to quality of these things, so I can see why they play it conservatively. And from the look of things I’d guess their plan is more to let 3PPs stick their feet in untested waters and then look at Beyond partnerships for successful ones. Captures a smaller slice of the market, but at fairly low time investment to risk on an idea that bombs.
Quote from The_Ace_of_Rogues>>These numbers ARE competitive with a LOT of the canon adventures put out by WOTC. This is competitive with Spelljammer, Icewind Dale, Tomb of Annihilation, Out of the Abyss, Storm King's Thunder, and Princes of the Apocalypse.
But they really are? Where's the official sales numbers for this WOTC modules?
But they really are? Where's the official sales numbers for this WOTC modules?
Not released, of course, but we can tell from WotC's own behavior (note: I don't consider any of the YTers I've seen talking about the topic reliable or trustworthy sources, but that doesn't mean they're wrong).
In the OGL scandal, they basically divided publishers into "not worth caring about" (roughly five figures), "worth negotiating with" (roughly seven figures), and "congratulations, you get shafted" (in between).
D&D Beyond has been making deals with third party publishers. Those deals appear to all be for products with seven figure kickstarters.
This tells us pretty clearly what level of sales D&D considers important. We don't know exactly where their own products fall, but for non-core books it's likely in the ballpark.
Now, on the topic of lore: let's say I'm running a custom or quasi-custom campaign. What do I actually want from a monster?
Stat block (hard to run without one)
Picture and/or Evocative Description
Suggestions for how this monster could be used in a campaign.
Lore, if any, should be generic enough that I can fit it in my campaign. Note that this isn't limited to homebrew campaigns -- lore that amounts to "this monster appears in <location not appearing in my campaign>" is unhelpful.
I do take the point that some 3PPs trying to do their own thing have done well, but the counterpoint is what’s the ratio of success stories to flops there? This is a fairly subjective market when it comes to quality of these things, so I can see why they play it conservatively. And from the look of things I’d guess their plan is more to let 3PPs stick their feet in untested waters and then look at Beyond partnerships for successful ones. Captures a smaller slice of the market, but at fairly low time investment to risk on an idea that bombs.
I AM glad that WOTC (or Hasbro or whomever) in the last few years too the move to license some of these big 3PP supplements for DND Beyond. Everybody wins with that approach.
And while I'd love to see WOTC hire some proven writers/creators and let them get their freak on WRT settings and adventures (no, I don't literally mean WOTC should publish sexually explicit content), at the very least I hope they continue to partner with third party creators to get some of these distinctive settings and supplements on DNDB.
I think the big misread Wizards of the Coast and a lot of gaming companies are making right now in the tabletop gaming space is the assumption that rapidly advancing technology that makes it much easier and faster to create a digital replication of tabletop games online means that the market (consumers) will make a grand shift to playing tabletop games online.
The problem is that this has already happened and sub-section of the tabletop community that has already made the permanent shift represents all there is in the market. What remains, what these companies think they will be able to do, is carve out a bigger part of the tabletop community that prefers to play face to face and bring them into the digital fold. I don't think this is going to happen and what is happening right now in the market is evidence of that.
The reality is that Covid forced a lot more people online than would ordinarily prefer to do so, especially in role-playing games and miniature games. These two hobbies have an intrinsic physical component to them and playing offline is the point of these two hobbies. There is no more growth available in the market for digital online play. Case in point, the most popular miniature game in the market today is Warhammer 40k, in second place is Nolzur's Marvelous Miniatures... aka.. miniatures for D&D.
The only reason and way you might be able to get more people to play online is if playing online is a lot cheaper, but Wizards of the Coasts intends for the exact opposite to be true. Not only do you already pretty much pay full price for digital books, but now there are subscriptions to various services and tools that you also need to pay for and the content you purchase will be tied to these tools. I predict that playing D&D online using the standard digital tools will be at least 2x if not 3x more expensive than playing offline. More importantly playing any other RPG, other than official D&D is soooo much cheaper already.
Wizards of the Coasts wants to sell a digital product, but the reality is that D&D is a game about books. That's what it means to sell a product called D&D, printing and selling books. WOTC wants to change that, but there isn't much hope for it. There is a digital-online market to a point that exists and effectively WOTC has already captured that market, but there is not much else out there. It certainly isn't a billion dollars worth.
I predict the most successful gaming companies out there over the next 3-4 years are going to be those that sell a great physical product that you can bust out on your kitchen table. Simplicity and accessibility as well as low price will be the keys to success.
Either the success or failure of 2024 will have nothing to do with the rules, gameplay or anything else. It's a fine game, I don't see why anyone who was a fan of 2014 would have a problem with 2024. All they have really done is cleaned-up the game and give us a better edit of the same game with some rules tweeks. I don't think the game itself is the problem. The problem is that Wizards of the Coast thinks they are a company that has a digital franchise and ... they don't.
And from the look of things I’d guess their plan is more to let 3PPs stick their feet in untested waters and then look at Beyond partnerships for successful ones. Captures a smaller slice of the market, but at fairly low time investment to risk on an idea that bombs.
Worth bearing in mind that this is exactly why the OGL was first created. TSR went bust and got bought by WotC largely because they were producing too many books that weren’t selling and were gathering dust in warehouses. They spread themselves too thin. The first OGL was intended to shift that risk to third party publishers, let them do the crazy niche releases with a small but dedicated market, but shift that risk in a way that forced everyone to keep coming back to D&D to buy the vanilla setting agnostic rule books
I mean, what “sells like crazy” for a 3PP isn’t necessarily the same kind of numbers a major business like WotC looks for. To a certain degree they seem to be looking to use setting-specific background feats for some of that. Also, considering the fairly low adoption I’ve heard of for most of the optional rules like sanity/honor, facing, spell points, etc. from the ‘14 DMG, I can imagine that the market just isn’t there for a gameplay overhaul on the scope of something like Dark Sun.
Fair points! Especially about adoption rate: whether it's alternate settings or D&D competitors (Daggerheart, Draw Steel!), I assume that the number of people actually playing games using those pubs is significantly lower than those who buy them.
OTOH: How much does WOTC - and moreso Hasbro - care about adoption as long as people buy it? I have to assume Hasbro absolutely does not care if I ever crack open EVE OF RUIN once I've paid them for it.
OTOH, Part Deux: If leaked sales numbers are to be believed - if what vloggers like Dungeon Craft & others have shared in their YT channels is accurate - the biggest KS campaign settings are very much the kind of numbers that WOTC would like to have. For argument's sake, we'll stick with two supplements explicitly aimed at using D&D's core rules rather than replace them. Legends of Avantris' Crooked Moon setting raised more than $4 million, while DnDShorts' Ryoko's Guide to the Yokai Realms raised more than $3 million. These numbers ARE competitive with a LOT of the canon adventures put out by WOTC. This is competitive with Spelljammer, Icewind Dale, Tomb of Annihilation, Out of the Abyss, Storm King's Thunder, and Princes of the Apocalypse.
Are they comparable? 3-4 million translates to probably less than 100,000 copies. (Kickstarters are complicated.)
We don't actually have numbers, but I'm pretty sure WotC would consider a book that only moved 100,000 to be a failure. (They claim a player base of many millions, including ~18 million DDB accounts. If we assume all D&D players have an account (they don't), and only 25% of the accounts are active, that's still 4.5 million players. 100K out of 4.5M is not that hot, even given that lots of people play without ever buying a book.)
WotC's economics are just different from everybody else in the business. A big hit for anybody else (most RPG publishers likely will never sell 100K books total in their existence) may not be worth their time at all.
I mean, what “sells like crazy” for a 3PP isn’t necessarily the same kind of numbers a major business like WotC looks for. To a certain degree they seem to be looking to use setting-specific background feats for some of that. Also, considering the fairly low adoption I’ve heard of for most of the optional rules like sanity/honor, facing, spell points, etc. from the ‘14 DMG, I can imagine that the market just isn’t there for a gameplay overhaul on the scope of something like Dark Sun.
Fair points! Especially about adoption rate: whether it's alternate settings or D&D competitors (Daggerheart, Draw Steel!), I assume that the number of people actually playing games using those pubs is significantly lower than those who buy them.
OTOH: How much does WOTC - and moreso Hasbro - care about adoption as long as people buy it? I have to assume Hasbro absolutely does not care if I ever crack open EVE OF RUIN once I've paid them for it.
OTOH, Part Deux: If leaked sales numbers are to be believed - if what vloggers like Dungeon Craft & others have shared in their YT channels is accurate - the biggest KS campaign settings are very much the kind of numbers that WOTC would like to have. For argument's sake, we'll stick with two supplements explicitly aimed at using D&D's core rules rather than replace them. Legends of Avantris' Crooked Moon setting raised more than $4 million, while DnDShorts' Ryoko's Guide to the Yokai Realms raised more than $3 million. These numbers ARE competitive with a LOT of the canon adventures put out by WOTC. This is competitive with Spelljammer, Icewind Dale, Tomb of Annihilation, Out of the Abyss, Storm King's Thunder, and Princes of the Apocalypse.
Are they comparable? 3-4 million translates to probably less than 100,000 copies. (Kickstarters are complicated.)
We don't actually have numbers, but I'm pretty sure WotC would consider a book that only moved 100,000 to be a failure. (They claim a player base of many millions, including ~18 million DDB accounts. If we assume all D&D players have an account (they don't), and only 25% of the accounts are active, that's still 4.5 million players. 100K out of 4.5M is not that hot, even given that lots of people play without ever buying a book.)
WotC's economics are just different from everybody else in the business. A big hit for anybody else (most RPG publishers likely will never sell 100K books total in their existence) may not be worth their time at all.
Technically D&D is a setting, a modified D20 system is what it is built on. but i get what your point is.
It's a system primarily, and a genre secondarily. It's good for a specific type of fantasy game, but that's not specific enough to call it a setting.
its a system designed and written specifically for a fantasy setting/genre, every rule us made with fantasy (specifically dungeons and dragons) in mind. settings do not have to be specic, those would be "campaign" settings.
Fate, Cortex, HERO, Gurps, Fuzion, D20, D6, FUDGE, Savage Worlds, Palladium system are all systems that are not designed for a specific genre
Folk, a reminder again that the topic of the post is the 2024 Core rules. Discussions of what D&D is as a whole would be better off in it's own thread and discussions of other TTRPGs would be better as a new thread in Adohand's Kitchen.
Folk, a reminder again that the topic of the post is the 2024 Core rules. Discussions of what D&D is as a whole would be better off in it's own thread and discussions of other TTRPGs would be better as a new thread in Adohand's Kitchen.
Sorry. We are easily distracted.
To bring it back to 2024, I think that much of what has was changed was positive, but I can understand why people see more complaints because that is the way the internet works. If you want to know how people truly feel, just ask a few people at your Friendly Local Game Store and ignore the click bait on social media.
*Disclaimer: By "we" I do not mean everyone in this thread, just those of us that get caught up in irrelevant details described by the DM or hyper fixated on NPCs that the DM never meant to play a part of the story beyond "shop keep".
Folk, a reminder again that the topic of the post is the 2024 Core rules. Discussions of what D&D is as a whole would be better off in it's own thread and discussions of other TTRPGs would be better as a new thread in Adohand's Kitchen.
Sorry. We are easily distracted.
To bring it back to 2024, I think that much of what has was changed was positive, but I can understand why people see more complaints because that is the way the internet works. If you want to know how people truly feel, just ask a few people at your Friendly Local Game Store and ignore the click bait on social media.
*Disclaimer: By "we" I do not mean everyone in this thread, just those of us that get caught up in irrelevant details described by the DM or hyper fixated on NPCs that the DM never meant to play a part of the story beyond "shop keep".
That is a pretty common sentiment among fans, but to be frank, if I look in my local area.. aka, the entire country of Sweden, virtually no one is playing D&D at all right now. I know that is not empirical evidence of anything specific, but you have to understand that Sweden is a pretty BIG gaming country, you name 10 RPG's and I promise you at least 3 of them were written by a Swede. The table top gaming tradition here is huge.
The common sentiment around my gaming group is that "we have already played a lot of 5th edition D&D". Meaning that 2024 is just not different enough of a game that trying it is somehow going to change the experience. It's not a new role-playing game for us; there is nothing exciting or interesting we haven't seen before, and there is no novelty to the release. I mean, it's 5th edition D&D...again. Most role-players at least in my parts are interested in playing new games, but when 2024 came out it really didn't qualify as something new. For example, I just got my 2024 monster manual, I browsed through it for 5 minutes and realized... yeah... I'm not sure why I bothered buying it.. its basically a reprint of the same book I already have.
[REDACTED]
I just don't think there is anything exciting happening in D&D right now, especially if you have no interest in online play. The fact that everything they are releasing is severely overprized is also a big problem and getting worse.
Folk, a reminder again that the topic of the post is the 2024 Core rules. Discussions of what D&D is as a whole would be better off in it's own thread and discussions of other TTRPGs would be better as a new thread in Adohand's Kitchen.
Well, the issues are closely related to the core rulebooks because all the negative stuff Hasbro and WOTC did and are still doeing, are bleeding into all of the 2024 Core Rulebooks. Hard to keep them separated when leadership of the company is killing the immersion with stuff from reality and very bad decisions, includeing driving out core audience?
Folk, a reminder again that the topic of the post is the 2024 Core rules. Discussions of what D&D is as a whole would be better off in it's own thread and discussions of other TTRPGs would be better as a new thread in Adohand's Kitchen.
Well, the issues are closely related to the core rulebooks because all the negative stuff Hasbro and WOTC did and are still doeing, are bleeding into all of the 2024 Core Rulebooks. Hard to keep them separated when leadership of the company is killing the immersion with stuff from reality and very bad decisions, includeing driving out core audience?
The fact some people had issues with Wizards for reasons other than the 2024 rules and are unable to divorce their feelings about Wizards from their feelings about the rules is an explanation for the hate 2024 receives. That is relevant to the conversation, but already established in this thread, and does not really require further discussion - there is really nothing further to say on the topic, other than acknowledging the well-documented existence of folks prejudging 2024 based on Wizards’ actions independent from the 2024 rules.
The actually issues themselves are irrelevant to this thread. The issue raised is why so much hate for 2024 is seen - and that can be answered, in part, with the simple phrase “some folks hold grudges against Wizards and that colors their perception of 2024.” The nature of those grudges, the merits of those grudges, and the legitimacy of those grudges are not relevant to the discussion - it is only the existence of the grudge and the effect of the grudge that ultimately matters to the question. Everything else is an ancillary element of the conversation on topics that do not actually answer OP’s question.
.. virtually no one is playing D&D at all right now ..
It's estimated that the best selling RPG in Sweden in 2024 is ..... D&D, with 15.000 units sold, with Draker och Demoner coming in second at 12.000. I'm going to just state frankly that I think that number is exclusive of digital copies. D&D is the dominant RPG in Sweden. Edit: I should add - the other statement is more than true - 5 out of 10 of the 10 most sold games in Sweden are written by Swedes.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
.. virtually no one is playing D&D at all right now ..
It's estimated that the best selling RPG in Sweden in 2024 is ..... D&D, with 15.000 units sold, with Draker och Demoner coming in second at 12.000. I'm going to just state frankly that I think that number is exclusive of digital copies. D&D is the dominant RPG in Sweden. Edit: I should add - the other statement is more than true - 5 out of 10 of the 10 most sold games in Sweden are written by Swedes.
Sales do not translate to play. Case in point, I don't know anyone in my circles who didn't buy all three books of this new edition, we are all D&D fans, of course, we are going to get the new edition, but I also don't know anyone who bought the game and is actually playing it.
Looking at the local clubs and the sorts of RPG's people are playing, D&D is not making any lists anywhere, there are very few events or store-supported gaming taking place. I wasn't suggesting that D&D is not successful and not even that the game is not popular, what I'm saying is that D&D 2025 is not having the same impact as a new game as did the 2014 edition. It's not being adopted as some sort of novelty or exciting modern game. It's being treated more like a ... reprint of an existing game.
Its basically like the downturn of a 10 year old edition which is a perfectly normal thing to happen, simply continued even after 2024 was released. Its essentially as if nothing was released from a play perspective. I'm not surprised people bought the new edition, that is to be expected, no one who plays D&D is going to opt out of buying new edition... all Im saying is that it had no impact on increasing the already declining amount of people who are playing the game. People bought it but aren't suddenly starting new campaigns and starting up new groups.
From what I can see, whether Wizards of the Coast did or did not release 2024, it had no impact on local gaming at all one way or the other.
I think and would expect the initial sales to be very good of the 3 core books, but I suspect everything else that they release will be largely ignored. I predict that we will be looking at a new re-fresh/re-designed edition of D&D within 3 years from now because 5th edition, as a game, has had a lot of success, but its kind of over now. New ideas, new designs, new settings.. that's what people are looking for and 2024 simply doesn't offer that and I don't think online play is going to grow.. its peaked.
So the best selling game is the one no one plays. Yup.
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Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
.. virtually no one is playing D&D at all right now ..
It's estimated that the best selling RPG in Sweden in 2024 is ..... D&D, with 15.000 units sold, with Draker och Demoner coming in second at 12.000. I'm going to just state frankly that I think that number is exclusive of digital copies. D&D is the dominant RPG in Sweden. Edit: I should add - the other statement is more than true - 5 out of 10 of the 10 most sold games in Sweden are written by Swedes.
Sales do not translate to play. Case in point, I don't know anyone in my circles who didn't buy all three books of this new edition, we are all D&D fans, of course, we are going to get the new edition, but I also don't know anyone who bought the game and is actually playing it.
This is an anecdote. One person's experience is not representative of a whole country. I trust comparative, country-wide sales figures like Acromos posted more than one person's experience.
So the best selling game is the one no one plays. Yup.
Short answer.. Yeah.. kind of. I mean I think it's an exaggeration to say "no one plays it", even if that is true in my local area. But yeah, compared to 2014, it's shocking how few people are playing 2024. It doesn't match up with the proposed "best-selling D&D of all time", which I will remind you is the exact same thing WotC said about 4th edition. It took about 2 years before D&D fans and supporters of 4th edition were willing to accept that the game was not only doing poorly, but was outright failing as a product. I predict it will be the same with 2024.
Again bringing it back to the OP's topic. The problem with 2024 edition is that it's fundamentally the same game, essentially a reprint. The fact that people buy the product is not surprising at all. When D&D gets a new edition, every D&D fan is going to buy it. But when you realize that playing 2024 is the same as playing 2014 which you have already played the crap out of, essentially you end up in a place where you where before the new edition was launched.
Aka... waiting for a new edition. In the absence of a new edition (or an edition you want to play as the case was with 4th edition and to a degree 2nd edition), you seek out other games.
The success of all of these kick-starters and alternatives to D&D would not be successful if we were in 2014 and Wizards just launched 5th edition as a new game no one has played before. I mean during that period, there was no way to launch a successful alternative to D&D, EVERYONE was on the 5e D&D train.
That is not happening right now, 2024 is not having that impact, in fact, quite to the contrary, its because of the release of 2024 that all of these others games are so successful. They are offering something new and D&D is not currently, nor will offer anything new for many years to come. Its going to be 5th edition for at least another 3-5 years so as a D&D player, if you not excited about continuing to play the same old 5th edition, you are looking at other games and that is precisely what I think is happening right now.
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Just a minor note - the Moria book for TOR/LotRRP isn't really an adventure book. It's better described as a setting or source book.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Technically D&D is a setting, a modified D20 system is what it is built on. but i get what your point is.
Regarding why adoption of a system/mechanic matters, if someone buys a book where X feature is a selling point and the mechanic doesn’t impress, they probably won’t be particularly interested in buying another book that leans strongly on X. And even if the company changes up the mechanics, if X, Y, and Z all fail to impress, then the hypothetical customer might well be put off any “check out our new mechanics” books from the company based on the track record. That said, I do take the point that some 3PPs trying to do their own thing have done well, but the counterpoint is what’s the ratio of success stories to flops there? This is a fairly subjective market when it comes to quality of these things, so I can see why they play it conservatively. And from the look of things I’d guess their plan is more to let 3PPs stick their feet in untested waters and then look at Beyond partnerships for successful ones. Captures a smaller slice of the market, but at fairly low time investment to risk on an idea that bombs.
But they really are? Where's the official sales numbers for this WOTC modules?
Not released, of course, but we can tell from WotC's own behavior (note: I don't consider any of the YTers I've seen talking about the topic reliable or trustworthy sources, but that doesn't mean they're wrong).
This tells us pretty clearly what level of sales D&D considers important. We don't know exactly where their own products fall, but for non-core books it's likely in the ballpark.
Now, on the topic of lore: let's say I'm running a custom or quasi-custom campaign. What do I actually want from a monster?
I AM glad that WOTC (or Hasbro or whomever) in the last few years too the move to license some of these big 3PP supplements for DND Beyond. Everybody wins with that approach.
And while I'd love to see WOTC hire some proven writers/creators and let them get their freak on WRT settings and adventures (no, I don't literally mean WOTC should publish sexually explicit content), at the very least I hope they continue to partner with third party creators to get some of these distinctive settings and supplements on DNDB.
The problem is that this has already happened and sub-section of the tabletop community that has already made the permanent shift represents all there is in the market. What remains, what these companies think they will be able to do, is carve out a bigger part of the tabletop community that prefers to play face to face and bring them into the digital fold. I don't think this is going to happen and what is happening right now in the market is evidence of that.
The reality is that Covid forced a lot more people online than would ordinarily prefer to do so, especially in role-playing games and miniature games. These two hobbies have an intrinsic physical component to them and playing offline is the point of these two hobbies. There is no more growth available in the market for digital online play. Case in point, the most popular miniature game in the market today is Warhammer 40k, in second place is Nolzur's Marvelous Miniatures... aka.. miniatures for D&D.
The only reason and way you might be able to get more people to play online is if playing online is a lot cheaper, but Wizards of the Coasts intends for the exact opposite to be true. Not only do you already pretty much pay full price for digital books, but now there are subscriptions to various services and tools that you also need to pay for and the content you purchase will be tied to these tools. I predict that playing D&D online using the standard digital tools will be at least 2x if not 3x more expensive than playing offline. More importantly playing any other RPG, other than official D&D is soooo much cheaper already.
Wizards of the Coasts wants to sell a digital product, but the reality is that D&D is a game about books. That's what it means to sell a product called D&D, printing and selling books. WOTC wants to change that, but there isn't much hope for it. There is a digital-online market to a point that exists and effectively WOTC has already captured that market, but there is not much else out there. It certainly isn't a billion dollars worth.
I predict the most successful gaming companies out there over the next 3-4 years are going to be those that sell a great physical product that you can bust out on your kitchen table. Simplicity and accessibility as well as low price will be the keys to success.
Either the success or failure of 2024 will have nothing to do with the rules, gameplay or anything else. It's a fine game, I don't see why anyone who was a fan of 2014 would have a problem with 2024. All they have really done is cleaned-up the game and give us a better edit of the same game with some rules tweeks. I don't think the game itself is the problem. The problem is that Wizards of the Coast thinks they are a company that has a digital franchise and ... they don't.
Worth bearing in mind that this is exactly why the OGL was first created. TSR went bust and got bought by WotC largely because they were producing too many books that weren’t selling and were gathering dust in warehouses. They spread themselves too thin. The first OGL was intended to shift that risk to third party publishers, let them do the crazy niche releases with a small but dedicated market, but shift that risk in a way that forced everyone to keep coming back to D&D to buy the vanilla setting agnostic rule books
Are they comparable? 3-4 million translates to probably less than 100,000 copies. (Kickstarters are complicated.)
We don't actually have numbers, but I'm pretty sure WotC would consider a book that only moved 100,000 to be a failure. (They claim a player base of many millions, including ~18 million DDB accounts. If we assume all D&D players have an account (they don't), and only 25% of the accounts are active, that's still 4.5 million players. 100K out of 4.5M is not that hot, even given that lots of people play without ever buying a book.)
WotC's economics are just different from everybody else in the business. A big hit for anybody else (most RPG publishers likely will never sell 100K books total in their existence) may not be worth their time at all.
It's a system primarily, and a genre secondarily. It's good for a specific type of fantasy game, but that's not specific enough to call it a setting.
its a system designed and written specifically for a fantasy setting/genre, every rule us made with fantasy (specifically dungeons and dragons) in mind. settings do not have to be specic, those would be "campaign" settings.
Fate, Cortex, HERO, Gurps, Fuzion, D20, D6, FUDGE, Savage Worlds, Palladium system are all systems that are not designed for a specific genre
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ModeratorFolk, a reminder again that the topic of the post is the 2024 Core rules. Discussions of what D&D is as a whole would be better off in it's own thread and discussions of other TTRPGs would be better as a new thread in Adohand's Kitchen.
D&D Beyond ToS || D&D Beyond Support
Sorry. We are easily distracted.
To bring it back to 2024, I think that much of what has was changed was positive, but I can understand why people see more complaints because that is the way the internet works. If you want to know how people truly feel, just ask a few people at your Friendly Local Game Store and ignore the click bait on social media.
*Disclaimer: By "we" I do not mean everyone in this thread, just those of us that get caught up in irrelevant details described by the DM or hyper fixated on NPCs that the DM never meant to play a part of the story beyond "shop keep".
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
That is a pretty common sentiment among fans, but to be frank, if I look in my local area.. aka, the entire country of Sweden, virtually no one is playing D&D at all right now. I know that is not empirical evidence of anything specific, but you have to understand that Sweden is a pretty BIG gaming country, you name 10 RPG's and I promise you at least 3 of them were written by a Swede. The table top gaming tradition here is huge.
The common sentiment around my gaming group is that "we have already played a lot of 5th edition D&D". Meaning that 2024 is just not different enough of a game that trying it is somehow going to change the experience. It's not a new role-playing game for us; there is nothing exciting or interesting we haven't seen before, and there is no novelty to the release. I mean, it's 5th edition D&D...again. Most role-players at least in my parts are interested in playing new games, but when 2024 came out it really didn't qualify as something new. For example, I just got my 2024 monster manual, I browsed through it for 5 minutes and realized... yeah... I'm not sure why I bothered buying it.. its basically a reprint of the same book I already have.
[REDACTED]
I just don't think there is anything exciting happening in D&D right now, especially if you have no interest in online play. The fact that everything they are releasing is severely overprized is also a big problem and getting worse.
Well, the issues are closely related to the core rulebooks because all the negative stuff Hasbro and WOTC did and are still doeing, are bleeding into all of the 2024 Core Rulebooks. Hard to keep them separated when leadership of the company is killing the immersion with stuff from reality and very bad decisions, includeing driving out core audience?
Pen and Paper Addict
The fact some people had issues with Wizards for reasons other than the 2024 rules and are unable to divorce their feelings about Wizards from their feelings about the rules is an explanation for the hate 2024 receives. That is relevant to the conversation, but already established in this thread, and does not really require further discussion - there is really nothing further to say on the topic, other than acknowledging the well-documented existence of folks prejudging 2024 based on Wizards’ actions independent from the 2024 rules.
The actually issues themselves are irrelevant to this thread. The issue raised is why so much hate for 2024 is seen - and that can be answered, in part, with the simple phrase “some folks hold grudges against Wizards and that colors their perception of 2024.” The nature of those grudges, the merits of those grudges, and the legitimacy of those grudges are not relevant to the discussion - it is only the existence of the grudge and the effect of the grudge that ultimately matters to the question. Everything else is an ancillary element of the conversation on topics that do not actually answer OP’s question.
It's estimated that the best selling RPG in Sweden in 2024 is ..... D&D, with 15.000 units sold, with Draker och Demoner coming in second at 12.000. I'm going to just state frankly that I think that number is exclusive of digital copies. D&D is the dominant RPG in Sweden.
Edit: I should add - the other statement is more than true - 5 out of 10 of the 10 most sold games in Sweden are written by Swedes.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
Sales do not translate to play. Case in point, I don't know anyone in my circles who didn't buy all three books of this new edition, we are all D&D fans, of course, we are going to get the new edition, but I also don't know anyone who bought the game and is actually playing it.
Looking at the local clubs and the sorts of RPG's people are playing, D&D is not making any lists anywhere, there are very few events or store-supported gaming taking place. I wasn't suggesting that D&D is not successful and not even that the game is not popular, what I'm saying is that D&D 2025 is not having the same impact as a new game as did the 2014 edition. It's not being adopted as some sort of novelty or exciting modern game. It's being treated more like a ... reprint of an existing game.
Its basically like the downturn of a 10 year old edition which is a perfectly normal thing to happen, simply continued even after 2024 was released. Its essentially as if nothing was released from a play perspective. I'm not surprised people bought the new edition, that is to be expected, no one who plays D&D is going to opt out of buying new edition... all Im saying is that it had no impact on increasing the already declining amount of people who are playing the game. People bought it but aren't suddenly starting new campaigns and starting up new groups.
From what I can see, whether Wizards of the Coast did or did not release 2024, it had no impact on local gaming at all one way or the other.
I think and would expect the initial sales to be very good of the 3 core books, but I suspect everything else that they release will be largely ignored. I predict that we will be looking at a new re-fresh/re-designed edition of D&D within 3 years from now because 5th edition, as a game, has had a lot of success, but its kind of over now. New ideas, new designs, new settings.. that's what people are looking for and 2024 simply doesn't offer that and I don't think online play is going to grow.. its peaked.
So the best selling game is the one no one plays. Yup.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
This is an anecdote. One person's experience is not representative of a whole country. I trust comparative, country-wide sales figures like Acromos posted more than one person's experience.
Short answer.. Yeah.. kind of. I mean I think it's an exaggeration to say "no one plays it", even if that is true in my local area. But yeah, compared to 2014, it's shocking how few people are playing 2024. It doesn't match up with the proposed "best-selling D&D of all time", which I will remind you is the exact same thing WotC said about 4th edition. It took about 2 years before D&D fans and supporters of 4th edition were willing to accept that the game was not only doing poorly, but was outright failing as a product. I predict it will be the same with 2024.
Again bringing it back to the OP's topic. The problem with 2024 edition is that it's fundamentally the same game, essentially a reprint. The fact that people buy the product is not surprising at all. When D&D gets a new edition, every D&D fan is going to buy it. But when you realize that playing 2024 is the same as playing 2014 which you have already played the crap out of, essentially you end up in a place where you where before the new edition was launched.
Aka... waiting for a new edition. In the absence of a new edition (or an edition you want to play as the case was with 4th edition and to a degree 2nd edition), you seek out other games.
The success of all of these kick-starters and alternatives to D&D would not be successful if we were in 2014 and Wizards just launched 5th edition as a new game no one has played before. I mean during that period, there was no way to launch a successful alternative to D&D, EVERYONE was on the 5e D&D train.
That is not happening right now, 2024 is not having that impact, in fact, quite to the contrary, its because of the release of 2024 that all of these others games are so successful. They are offering something new and D&D is not currently, nor will offer anything new for many years to come. Its going to be 5th edition for at least another 3-5 years so as a D&D player, if you not excited about continuing to play the same old 5th edition, you are looking at other games and that is precisely what I think is happening right now.