Besides the principle of self-competition is silly, what difference does it actually make to them whether I give them 50 bucks for a 1st edition book or a 5th edition book? They are just products. Especially when you consider that a 1st edition reprint of the players handbook today will cost you about 250 bucks today. Why would you not profit on that?
Because making products is expensive. It's not some sort of black box that you can just pour IP in one end and get profit out the other. You have to pay all the people who work on the book- the writers, the artists, the editors. Then you've got to have it printed, warehoused, shipped. That all costs the company money. And the fanbase does not have unlimited money to spend on new products every month, so they have to choose what they're going to spend it on. If they're making a choice between two (or more) products you produce, it means that you've just had twice as many expenses without twice as much profit. Companies have tried to run like that in the past- TSR being one, Atari was another. Pretty much every time it's happened, the outcome has been the same- the company starts losing money, goes bankrupt, and gets bought out by a competitor.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I know people believe that this is how it works, but it really doesn't. The expense increase for running 1 type of product is going to be only slightly higher if you have 3 products, no where in business does diversifying products cost twice as much. The first product is always the most expensive and every product after that is cheaper, resource sharing is core to smart business strategy. Besides that, the cost is irreverent if you can predict your return. That requirement isn't based on or is any more or less risky if you have 1 product or if you have 3 different products. In fact, in business, diversifying your portfolio of products is how you avoid business disasters and I would have thought they would have learned that lesson after 4th edition. You put your eggs all in one basket and you have no outs if the basket breaks.
TSR ran D&D and AD&D very successfully for over 15 years and at no point in their entire history did they have trouble moving product and 40 years later, D&D and AD&D still have no trouble moving product, hell I just spent 200 dollars on 1st edition books last week. They didn't go bankrupt because they couldn't sell D&D products, they went bankrupt because they didn't know how to properly manage their revenue and its because no one that was involved with that company at any point had even the faintness clue about running a business. No amount of money they made would have prevented their inevitable failure as a business because they would make 1 million and spend 5, when they made 5 they would spend 20. They treated their company earnings like lottery winning crack heads.
You are oversimplifying the product diversification question though. Selling an RPG is not the same thing as selling potato chips or selling software. The RPG market is not as predictable as sales of most products. It is entertainment and marketing entertainment successfully is where a lot of the difficulty is. By diversifying too much, Wizards runs the risk of diluting their brand and confusing newer consumers. The reason why 5th edition is so successful is partly because of its low barrier of entry. If they start selling 3 or 4 editions worth of books and they are all called "Dungeons & Dragons" something or other, that dilutes the ability of new converts to RPGs to buy the proper desired product. RPGs are not a well-established field of entertainment to most people. It isn't like football or a rom com, either. It requires active participation from its "consumers" and the concept is still far more nebulous for most people. As such, bringing back older editions could actually hurt sales unless WotC is very careful about its branding and marketing, which also requires hiring and training people to do those things. Again, money.
I also don't see the point of commencing a new version in term of game:
The 5e is easy to learn, easy to GM and easy to adjust (with homebrew classes/races/rules). I really like the streamline done on this one without being barebone at all (with things like Advantage/Disadvantage, or almost everything is basically a d20 roll + bonus or the bounded accuracy is a fantastic concept).
And I was a DnD 3.5 big fan. ADnD 2 was just too unintuitive for me with the TAC0 the lower the better but it can even be negative.
In term of products, the quality of the books is quite nice too. The stats block for monsters is a nice example, you have everything you need on it one stat block (no need to crosscheck rules/traits, there is only the Recharge trait which is very simple), it's clean. I really like the Xanathar book and the Mordenkainen book in term of quality too.
Bounded accuracy means 2 things : your characters will be just fine, if you give them tons of magic items or little magic items, which is neat (even against high level monsters). And some low level monsters will still be able to hit the characters at high levels, so low levels monsters are not just pesky insects. So it goes both ways. It adds some freedom and tension. The GM is more free in term of rewards and so he doesn't have to estimate if the characters are behind or not in term of items. It also means that he can create a low fantasy (or epic) without reviewing the stats block. He can also make less but bigger treasures without being worry about items balance.
Sure the stats blocks exist from the beginning, I was comparing D&D with the direct competitor where you have tons of monster traits not explained the stat block of the actual monster.
Advantage/Disadvantage streamline some awkward sub systems in D&D for calculating malus and bonus for concentration check or range attack or jumping high or in lenght, with each their own tables with some base DC and malus/bonus to apply. It was a bit too much. Advantage/Disadvantage is huge in term of stats but it speeds up the game.
We need the contest tool, because in some situation it makes sense and it is more natural. That being said, a lot of bad effects against a creature often resolve with a saving throw which is rolling against the average DC of the creature, and speed the game because there is only one roll to do. The DC is very often already on the stats block or on the character sheet.
I honestly think we will see a 5.5 that expands the current system as options much like the bloat in 3.5 (which to be honest, i loved it). the reintroduction of skill points that would add to the basic ability checks we have now (like you want a better jump, put a skill point and add that to athletics for your jump role).
You want to talk about a complex character creation...3.5 ...could be a brutal character creation session.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I just want to tell everyone "happy gaming" and actually mean it. Whatever your game is, just have fun with it, it is after all, just a game.
The difference is that the actual ability score makes a difference. There is a difference between rolling a 7 and having a 12 strength and rolling a 7 and having a 10 strength. Your ability score in classic D&D actually mattered, it wasn't just a sliding scale to see if you have a +1 or +2 modifier, a 12 was better than an 11 and the system accounted for that.
Yeah, but after like 5th-level in 3e, the die roll barely mattered anymore. If your skill modifier is like +20, very little variance is left to the roll, on average. It also almost completely rules out the off-chance that an untrained character can successfully use a skill. Some people like that once in a blue moon the party wizard can intimidate a raging barbarian, or that the party fighter can occasionally figure out the puzzle quicker than the expert. Also, since monsters would be power-gaming as much as PCs, skill selection was an illusion of choice. You either max out the key stats for your class or get killed. One might say that there should be balance, but really any move away from bounded accuracy removes almost all of its benefits. Once we're back to base attack bonus, adventure design becomes more difficult. You'd have to optimize adventures for a given party level AND for the choices the players have made in their advancement.
In any event, it doesn't look like Wizards is going ot make the mistake of having a large amount of self-competing products for D&D any time soon.
Actually abandoning editions has already lost Wizards of the Coast far more money then any self competition could.
Because they stopped supporting 3rd edition we have Pathfinder and Paizo, because they stopped supporting Basic & AD&D we have the entire OSR movement. Had they put out a 3.6 edition, fixed up 3.5 a bit and kept the game going, there is no way Pathfinder would have been as successful and had they kept Basic and AD&D in print, the word OSR wouldn't exist. These things where born out of Wizards of the Coast taking sides in edition wars.
Abandoning edition has created the only competition they actually have in the market today that is worthy of note.
Besides the principle of self-competition is silly, what difference does it actually make to them whether I give them 50 bucks for a 1st edition book or a 5th edition book? They are just products. Especially when you consider that a 1st edition reprint of the players handbook today will cost you about 250 bucks today. Why would you not profit on that?
Its silly for them to make these books unavailable for purchase, there is literally no logic to it whatsoever, if you have customers that want to buy your products, sell them, thats how you make money. More importantly it sends a message to the community, "Hey we love all versions of D&D and we support them all, play the one you like!" A far better message then "hey remember that 500 bucks you spent on your books, throw them in the trash, we have a new version that will cost you 1,000 bucks instead!"
The biggest hit to them was putting out the OGL and the SRD, without those there would be no pathfinder
Ha! You should try playing GURPS or Shadowrun 4th Edition some time.
Shadowrun 4 is super easy... you look up the base Karma cost (Rank * 2 for skills, Rank * 5 for attributes) and write down the skills you want to have.
Takes about 5 minutes if you know what you want to play.
Actually creating a D&D 5 character requires more effort since you have to read through 2 dozen races, classes, subclasses and features first, where in SR if you want to know how to shoot a gun, you just buy 6 points in Pistols / Automatics / whatever. And unlike D&D you can always change the direction of your character later on, if you suddenly realize that fast-talking guards is more fun than shooting them.
You can see in that system, your ability score and skill made a big difference. The difference between a 12, 13 or 16 was HUGE as was the difference between basic training in a skill a grand master who would get a whopping +5.
I mean, it's a factor of 2. For a given difficulty (DC in recent times, penalty in AD&D), an ability score modifier in 3e+ only gives roughly half the benefit, since ability score modifiers only increase on an even advancement. One could get the same out of recent D&D by making an ability score modifier = ability score - 10, rather than (ability score - 10)/2.
Basic lasted that long? The last I'd heard of it was the 80s.
Anyway it was really TSR's long history of corporate mismanagement combined with sudden loss of market share as Magic and other CCGs suddenly gained popularity that drove the company under.
True. They tried to compete with Spellfire, but it couldn’t stand against the M:tG juggernaut.
The Basic Set was not "D&D" in that it was not the original White Box set but rather a trimmed down version of AD&D that was published parallel to the launch of AD&D. The current 'Basic Rules' is the modern incarnation of that original Basic Set.
I don’t believe we meant “The Basic Set” but instead basic D&D (OD&D as opposed to AD&D) in that conversation from 3 months ago, but I might be mistaken.
Consider for example the narrative logic of the fact that in 5e if you want to be wise scholar in Arcane knowledge, the best thing to be is a Rogue, not a Wizard and no amount of levels will ever change that. That is what happens in a poorly designed bound accuracy system.
Yeah I agree completely here. I have been thinking about it recently since I'm starting a new campaign in a month and I was toying with the idea of few changes to the skill system.
I plan to adjust the system in two ways:
1) Class-based DC adjustment: for instance, a DC of 15 in Arcana would turn into a DC of 10 when a wizard makes it.
2) Class-tailored information: achieving the same roll, the information a rogue gets will never be of the same quality as the wizard.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Because making products is expensive. It's not some sort of black box that you can just pour IP in one end and get profit out the other. You have to pay all the people who work on the book- the writers, the artists, the editors. Then you've got to have it printed, warehoused, shipped. That all costs the company money. And the fanbase does not have unlimited money to spend on new products every month, so they have to choose what they're going to spend it on. If they're making a choice between two (or more) products you produce, it means that you've just had twice as many expenses without twice as much profit. Companies have tried to run like that in the past- TSR being one, Atari was another. Pretty much every time it's happened, the outcome has been the same- the company starts losing money, goes bankrupt, and gets bought out by a competitor.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
You are oversimplifying the product diversification question though. Selling an RPG is not the same thing as selling potato chips or selling software. The RPG market is not as predictable as sales of most products. It is entertainment and marketing entertainment successfully is where a lot of the difficulty is. By diversifying too much, Wizards runs the risk of diluting their brand and confusing newer consumers. The reason why 5th edition is so successful is partly because of its low barrier of entry. If they start selling 3 or 4 editions worth of books and they are all called "Dungeons & Dragons" something or other, that dilutes the ability of new converts to RPGs to buy the proper desired product. RPGs are not a well-established field of entertainment to most people. It isn't like football or a rom com, either. It requires active participation from its "consumers" and the concept is still far more nebulous for most people. As such, bringing back older editions could actually hurt sales unless WotC is very careful about its branding and marketing, which also requires hiring and training people to do those things. Again, money.
I also don't see the point of commencing a new version in term of game:
The 5e is easy to learn, easy to GM and easy to adjust (with homebrew classes/races/rules). I really like the streamline done on this one without being barebone at all (with things like Advantage/Disadvantage, or almost everything is basically a d20 roll + bonus or the bounded accuracy is a fantastic concept).
And I was a DnD 3.5 big fan. ADnD 2 was just too unintuitive for me with the TAC0 the lower the better but it can even be negative.
In term of products, the quality of the books is quite nice too. The stats block for monsters is a nice example, you have everything you need on it one stat block (no need to crosscheck rules/traits, there is only the Recharge trait which is very simple), it's clean. I really like the Xanathar book and the Mordenkainen book in term of quality too.
Bounded accuracy means 2 things : your characters will be just fine, if you give them tons of magic items or little magic items, which is neat (even against high level monsters). And some low level monsters will still be able to hit the characters at high levels, so low levels monsters are not just pesky insects. So it goes both ways. It adds some freedom and tension. The GM is more free in term of rewards and so he doesn't have to estimate if the characters are behind or not in term of items. It also means that he can create a low fantasy (or epic) without reviewing the stats block. He can also make less but bigger treasures without being worry about items balance.
Sure the stats blocks exist from the beginning, I was comparing D&D with the direct competitor where you have tons of monster traits not explained the stat block of the actual monster.
Advantage/Disadvantage streamline some awkward sub systems in D&D for calculating malus and bonus for concentration check or range attack or jumping high or in lenght, with each their own tables with some base DC and malus/bonus to apply. It was a bit too much. Advantage/Disadvantage is huge in term of stats but it speeds up the game.
We need the contest tool, because in some situation it makes sense and it is more natural. That being said, a lot of bad effects against a creature often resolve with a saving throw which is rolling against the average DC of the creature, and speed the game because there is only one roll to do. The DC is very often already on the stats block or on the character sheet.
I honestly think we will see a 5.5 that expands the current system as options much like the bloat in 3.5 (which to be honest, i loved it). the reintroduction of skill points that would add to the basic ability checks we have now (like you want a better jump, put a skill point and add that to athletics for your jump role).
You want to talk about a complex character creation...3.5 ...could be a brutal character creation session.
I just want to tell everyone "happy gaming" and actually mean it. Whatever your game is, just have fun with it, it is after all, just a game.
You think D&D 3.5 was bad?
Ha! You should try playing GURPS or Shadowrun 4th Edition some time.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Yeah, but after like 5th-level in 3e, the die roll barely mattered anymore. If your skill modifier is like +20, very little variance is left to the roll, on average. It also almost completely rules out the off-chance that an untrained character can successfully use a skill. Some people like that once in a blue moon the party wizard can intimidate a raging barbarian, or that the party fighter can occasionally figure out the puzzle quicker than the expert. Also, since monsters would be power-gaming as much as PCs, skill selection was an illusion of choice. You either max out the key stats for your class or get killed. One might say that there should be balance, but really any move away from bounded accuracy removes almost all of its benefits. Once we're back to base attack bonus, adventure design becomes more difficult. You'd have to optimize adventures for a given party level AND for the choices the players have made in their advancement.
And players needing to chase down every last stackable bonus in order for characters to stay competitive.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
The biggest hit to them was putting out the OGL and the SRD, without those there would be no pathfinder
Shadowrun 4 is super easy... you look up the base Karma cost (Rank * 2 for skills, Rank * 5 for attributes) and write down the skills you want to have.
Takes about 5 minutes if you know what you want to play.
Actually creating a D&D 5 character requires more effort since you have to read through 2 dozen races, classes, subclasses and features first, where in SR if you want to know how to shoot a gun, you just buy 6 points in Pistols / Automatics / whatever. And unlike D&D you can always change the direction of your character later on, if you suddenly realize that fast-talking guards is more fun than shooting them.
Still no 6e announcements, right? We really, really don't want a 6th edition right now.
Sixth Edition isn't going to get announced via a web video.
It's a big deal when a new edition gets announced- Wizards saves stuff like that for GenCon events.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I mean, it's a factor of 2. For a given difficulty (DC in recent times, penalty in AD&D), an ability score modifier in 3e+ only gives roughly half the benefit, since ability score modifiers only increase on an even advancement. One could get the same out of recent D&D by making an ability score modifier = ability score - 10, rather than (ability score - 10)/2.
Rookie. All the real gamers play FATAL.
Obvious /s
Another medical problem. Indefinite hiatus. Sorry, all.
Nobody plays FATAL. They just stare at the book for a while and decide to summon Nyarlathotep instead.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I could see 6e having less stats being dependent on race, and more on class and background.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
This is essentially Pathfinder 2nd Edition
I don’t believe we meant “The Basic Set” but instead basic D&D (OD&D as opposed to AD&D) in that conversation from 3 months ago, but I might be mistaken.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
6E guaranteed will be more like Dungeon World or Masks with open playbooks and fewer skills but more robust progression.
Yeah I agree completely here. I have been thinking about it recently since I'm starting a new campaign in a month and I was toying with the idea of few changes to the skill system.
I plan to adjust the system in two ways:
1) Class-based DC adjustment: for instance, a DC of 15 in Arcana would turn into a DC of 10 when a wizard makes it.
2) Class-tailored information: achieving the same roll, the information a rogue gets will never be of the same quality as the wizard.