I hinted that this was coming last week in the NWN2 thread, but I’m not really happy with it.
I mostly like the 3.5 changes, but don’t really think any of them are necessary. It just renders all the other books and materials less useful. Arbitrarily changing the rules to force the few players who have stuck with your game to buy new rulebooks ever few years seems like a pretty cynical, crappy way to do business. It’s almost as if they’ve completely given up on the brand, and are just going to continue to milk their shrinking player base as long as they can.
A month ago my campaign finally switched over to 3.5.
I’m using the first adventure path from Dungeon as published about 3 years ago (and the hardcover compilation that came out 2 years ago). We’re at 11-12th level and the campaign is written to go to 20th. It’s taken 3 years to get this far.
We won’t be switching to 4E at least until this campaign is over, which should be another 2-3 years.
The problem with D&D revenue streams is that the actual game takes so long to play. I can have fun for 5-6 years with a single book. A campaign can go for 10 years on the core rulebooks alone-- heck, a campaign can go on forever with the core rulebooks and dice. The selling point of “unlimited adventures” is also what keeps them from making money-- like that gum that lasts so long that you don’t need to buy more.
I think it will be good if they have online supliments available. If they could somehow protect thier data, I think it would be great to have some digital version of the books that was fully searchable. It would be even better if they had a player tool, DM tool, and encounter tool, so a PnP GM could easily manage the entire game. I do not like the idea of a subscription though, you should just buy it once and keep it forever, kind of like some audio books.
There are some videos of the gencon reveal presentation up on YouTube. They’re worth looking at before we get all crazy about how “we don’t need” another edition of D&D.
Which isn’t to say I’m sold on the idea. Just that, you know, we could all stand to become a little better informed about what exactly it is before having a conniption fit. ;)
The solution, of course, is to use modules as your money maker. DMs can always use more source material for actual game sessions; that can be a huge time-saver, even if you run a homegrown campaign. But it’s easier to fill pricey hardcover books with a random assortment of unnecessary new rules, or sell revisions of old rulebooks, I guess.
If there were really a great deal of demand for official adventures, I would expect to see a lot more of them on the market than there have been in a long, long time. And mind you, I would personally much rather buy things of that sort than so-called splatbooks, (one reason why I’ve tended to prefer Dungeon to Dragon magazine, at least once Dragon stopped running things like reviews.), but even the giants on the field have a pretty low official adventure release level compared to the rest of their supplements. White Wolf, for example, seems to see adventure books more as a way to demonstrate the sort of things you can do in the system and (until recently) forward metaplot than a serious revenue stream.
The problem with modules and other story/content products that do not contain new rules is that they hold no appeal to the munchkins. The munchkins want more feats, more classes, more items, and more spells to powergame with.
Yeah. I don’t know where I got 8 products at launch, probably being tired couple with my poor reading comprehension. My internet connection is pretty iffy right now, but made it through the first video. The fact that they were booed when technology was brought up should say something about their customer base. I didn’t like the dig at attacks of opportunity. They were weird when it first came out, but I think that’s actually one of the better additions to D&D.
I’ll try to get to the other videos as my connection allows. Thanks for the links. I’m still pretty skeptical of tying it into Gleemax, but I was right about using 4E to tap into their competitor’s revenue stream by licensing them the 4E logo.
It’ll be interesting to see how the open system survives and which publishers (if they can) go with D20 logo versus 4E.
I really liked Dungeon. It’s cool to learn from refined professionally developed adventurers and as an added bonus it acted as a collection of basically short stories that were fun to read. A lot of our games were a bit more loose than that, and it looks like they are going to try and move the rules toward how more groups play. I guess that’s a good thing. I’m surprised at some of the artwork that’s come out. It looks very retro, which may be just the promo style.
Even if there are 8 products at launch, that doesn’t say anything about what sort of products they’d be. My guess would be the three core rulebooks, maybe a campaign setting, maybe a module or two, and fill out the rest with splats.
Ryan Dancey was behind the D20 and opening the system up for others to create stuff with. He was pretty forthcoming about the market realities for table-top RPGs, and accessible for conversations. He stated that of the rule-set books: only the Player’s Handbook is a profit center. Even the splat books geared towards players more than the DM weren’t big profit centers. (This was pre 3.5 and splat book deluge post 3.0 release, but I doubt that changed the equation much).
The other big profit center was non-game material. Forgotten Realms novels and the like (I doubt the repeated attempts at comic books broke even). Thus, the whole setting competition ending up with Eberron or whatever. New setting for new novels (though I haven’t actually noticed a lot of Eberron novels at the bookstores).
Oh my. Animated 3D dice rolled in a 3D box in DND Insider. What a waste of time.
Except, I’ve been waiting for someone to write an app like that for a while. Something based on the Virtual Pool engine, so you can use your mouse to ‘flick’ the dice with english or what have you.
The presentation skills are sorely lacking, true (double true!). But the info in there is solid, if WAY early (the stuff doesn’t drop until May/June/July 08).
The give a quick and VERY early look at a couple of the PC tools, that seem good in principle. One is a character creator that lets you make your virtual character sheet with a 3D miniature model you can customize and pose and stuff. Then you can take that model and use it as a “virtual miniature” in the second part, which is the virtual internet tabletop. Basically it’s the tiles and miniatures, dice rolling, that whole part of the game on a shared internet app. With voice (and text) chat. The DM sets up the adventure in there and the players move their miniatures and tells the DM what they’re doing and stuff, and the DM runs it all.
It’s not like Neverwinter Nights though, where there’s a whole PC game running in the background. The DM still runs the show - it’s more like a 3D, D&D-specific shared whiteboarding type of thing, it seems. All that stuff starts in the 3rd video.
Here are a couple more videos - not stage presentations and a bit easier to watch. But it’s the same presentation, the same two guys:
You should look at Fantasy Grounds. It’s basically 3.5 version of what they are talking about. You can even look up rules from within it I believe. It’s really slick looking, but the additional prep work for the DM, formating everything to put it into the program, seems like it would be a pain in the ass.
Christ. Now I feel so frickin’ old. Like Jeff Green “get outta my yard” old.
I haven’t played since first edition. I still own all my old first edition, sitting in a box down in my basement (my wife was not amused when she accidentally opened this box and found 50 pounds of role playing books plus all my old lead figurines).
I bet this old stuff is worth money. If i could bear to part with it.
Humbug! Hackmaster’s preserved the entertainment for me. 2nd Edition unbalanced goodness, with every supplement tossed in the mix, a twenty hit point kicker at the beginning, and a tongue in cheek sensibility? Pure crunchy frog glee.
