Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Hi there!
Since 5.5 came out, we've only got Dragon Delves, and it's not even an adventure module. In September we're getting Deadfall, but it's just 128 pages in total.
What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks in advance for answering. 😊
All adventure content is fully backwards compatible with 5e, so I'm assuming their reasoning is that they want to update all the player content that was more strongly impacted by the shift to 5.5 so everyone can use the updated subclasses while they can still play all the classic 5e adventures.
That said, the new Arcana Unleashed book coming out will have an adventure with it that even goes level 1-20, which is a rarity to see an adventure that covers high level play like that.
Overall though, between legacy content and third party media, WOTC makes way more money on player content that their whole fan base will buy, rather than DM content that only a 6th of their fan base will buy. Writing adventures is time-consuming and not the most profitable for selling books, and I get the feeling WOTC is more than happy to leave the bulk of that work to 3rd party publishers while they work on 1 or 2 big adventure titles a year.
Yeah; their polling has apparently pretty consistently come back that the vast majority of tables run homebrew settings and such rather than official, so it wouldn't track for them to spend a lot of their dev time on books that even many DMs will pass on.
The basic problem with publishing adventures is that the market for adventures is smaller (DM only, vs DM+players) and the number of adventures an average DM needs to actually buy is also quite small (as a DM, you can realistically buy a ten or so rulebooks and expect to get some use out of all of them, but you're never going to use ten campaign books).
Just to clarify - Deadfall covers 11-20, though there's small tie-in adventures.
A short Level 1 starter in Arcana Unleashed (Tomb of the Shadow Serpents) and, if you purchase the complete bundle there's a preorder bonus 3-5 adventure (Red Wizards’ Gambit).
I do wish WotC did more adventures. The annual-ish themed anthologies they had been doing in particular were great. As people have said, it largely comes down to sales.
I think they changed some plans and slowed down the pace when there were management changes, and a lot of new hires.
And they are expected to make some big announcements about the upcoming year at gen con. And there is a livestream planned for next Thursday, July 30.
It's sad to see that the decision has to do with making profit. I mean, yes, they are not a NGO, but has these last 12 years really been that bad, financially speaking? I doubt it.
I think it's a pity, because I love WotC adventure modules. I wish they made more. Even if the stories are not perfect, they bring a lot of lore and you can change the parts you don't like.
It's a business, and they have finite resources; money put into adventures is money not put into something else that maybe people want more. It's not like they aren't producing any adventures, they're just prioritizing other things more.
Well, if you have a look at what they are doing, I doubt that's what people really want to see. I mean, they are just "revamping" stuff: The Horrors Within and Arcana Unleashed are basically updated old content. They are barely creating anything new.
Moreover, I don't think the 10 years of 5e 2014 had been a disaster financially speaking: people bought the adventure modules.
What I'm trying to say is I don't see an improvement in the quality of the content they are publishing. If they had stopped creating adventure modules in order to give us other things with a better quality, I'd accept it, but, in my humble opinion, that's not what's happening, and it's sad.
I’ve been reading a lot of the 3e Eberron stuff recently and it’s made me realise that the mammoth 300+ page campaigns we’ve had the last ten years are a fairly new phenomenon, older editions the campaigns seem to have been much shorter in length with much less exact details in favour of just giving a general idea of the plot. I’m not saying that’s necessarily better or worse but does point to Deadfall’s relatively short length as being an experiment in returning to that rather than it being disappointingly short.
Also as others have pointed out we should finally hear next year’s roadmap in the next couple of weeks so might be too early to write them entirely off as not releasing campaigns. Those things take a long time to write so between being busy creating 5.5 and changes in leadership it’s possible they’ve simply not had the time for anything to be in the pipeline
I'm surprised those have been scaled back, tbh. Even if you're doing a homebrew campaign world, there was almost always something in those you could pluck out and drop into your setting with some minor tweaks
Active characters:
Edoumiaond Willegume "Eddie" Podslee, Vegetanian scholar (College of Spirits bard)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Peter "the Pied Piper" Hausler, human con artist/remover of vermin (Circle of the Shepherd druid)
PIPA - Planar Interception/Protection Aeormaton, warforged bodyguard and ex-wizard hunter (Warrior of the Elements monk/Cartographer artificer)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Arcana Unleashed: Deadfall is a 10-20 full Campaign. Settle petal.
And the Forgotten Realms book has more adventures than a campaign in it.
That's also true. They've probably been busy creating 5.5 and now they are going to start with new campaigns.
In my opinion, I like the 300 pages adventure modules of 5e, because it allows you to follow the adventure as written or to change whatever you wanna change, whereas the other way around will leave those who wanna know more details confused.
But if I compare Deadfall to a similar adventure (Vecna Eve of Ruin), Vecna's has 250 pages (170 more pages for the same amount of levels). That said, I obviously haven't read Deadfall yet, and it might be the best module adventure ever created. However, I just feel certain amount of simplification in all 5.5 stuff, that's why I'm a little bit worried about the path WotC is taking.
Adventures take a while to write and one of the biggest concerns during the 5 to 5.5 transition was Player Options. It was what people both Adventure runners AND From Scratch Campaign runners would need, and they have just barely gotten that done with artificer last year. The design team can only work so fast, and they do need to sleep.
They are going to need time to cook unless you want an adventure that is halfbaked at best.
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
I am not sure it is really fair to accuse Wizards of making this decision based on profit. Yes, profit is a motivation, but the underlying reason their current release plan is more profitable is because they are focusing on what the majority of players want. As has already been pointed out, there were 17 full adventures (and starter sets and anthologies in addition) coming into 5.5, so a significant amount of compatible content to hold folks over while they lay the foundation for the new system.
I also think it is important to note the new development team has a very strong adventure writing background - but their strength comes from their unique and diverse styles. This was a pretty big - and, frankly, necessary - transition for internal culture at D&D. Sourcebooks are more factual in their nature, meaning they do not have the same degree of the writer’s personality as a narrative adventure. A lot of the recent content was clearly started in development under the old team - and things like sourcebooks are much easier to hand off. We really have not had enough time to see what the new team has cooking, but their background does suggest they too like writing adventures.
I think Deadfall will be the proof of the new development team's path and what we would expect in the next years.
Not sure I agree, we’ve been told before adventures take several years to make so I suspect this is the Red Wizard adventure announced about three years ago (or at least recycled parts of it) so I think it’s more the last gasp of Crawford and Perkins rather than the first release from the new guys, most of whom only started in January. Worth noting Perkins is a huge Ravenloft fan so that book is also probably a hold over
Oh, I didn't know that. I'm not aware of the development teams. Could you enlighten me, please? I don't know who Crawford and Perkins are and why there's a new team right now.