Lago's Kickass D&D-Book Marketing Strategy!

[Crissa]

I'll play other animal people, but I suppose Frank's point stands. I don't mind that my favorite race isn't in the main book.

...I just get annoyed when they're all just rainbow humans when they could be more diverse. Gimme some fur, scales, wings, tusks, crests, you know, big appliques to the races. They need to be different! I can see culturally that gnomes and hobbits are different. And I can see having humans and elves. But don't give me humans, blue (demon), yellow (celestial), elves (white), orcs (green) unless they're seriously different.

-Crissa

[Ganbare Gincun]

So we're open to the ideas of introducing new races in new sourcebooks. But what about new classes? Say for example that you want to play a Shaman or a Cavalier or something like that. Would it be acceptable to propagate new classes, or would players be expected to modify an existing class or bolt on a prestige class to get what they wanted?

[Username17]

So we're open to the ideas of introducing new races in new sourcebooks. But what about new classes? Say for example that you want to play a Shaman or a Cavalier or something like that. Would it be acceptable to propagate new classes, or would players be expected to modify an existing class or bolt on a prestige class to get what they wanted?

If you're going the powerful races route, which D&D's kitchen sink setting is basically married to, and you're talking subclasses (which we seem to be), then a new race and a new class can be the same thing. That is to say that being a Minotaur is basically just you having a minimum level and having the mandatory subclass "minotaur." There would also be a subclass "giant" that let you play anything from an Ogre to a Fire Giant (each giant race would have a different base template and minimum level). While certainly the several pages of Giants could all work on the same giant subclass, they also rather obviously don't go into the main PHB. They go into whatever book you talk about Cloud Cities in.

For the really powerful races, you actually make them a racial main class and let them subclass into a normal class. So if someone plays a Black Dragon, they take the Black Dragon racial template, the Dragon main class, and maybe like subclass into Necromancer or Rogue. And of course, that shit goes into the Cloud Cities book too.

But this being D&D and thus inherently prone to kitchen sink setting bloat, you could throw new classes at it here and there. Want something that has the combat role of a ranger with the character position of the hero and the equipment layout of the rogue? Sure, write a Swashbuckler class. Something kind of like that should be in every major release.

So let's look at Law of the Jungle and Castles in the Sky for marketing purposes. Both of them are going to want to be ~192 pages for print cost purposes (you print in bundles of 16 pages). Like how Races of Stone and Races of the Wild were exactly 192 pages each, because that is precisely 12 printing units. And they don't have indices, because they are extremely sloppy and just fiddled with layout until they got 192 pages. But what they could have done is just set aside 3 or 4 pages for the index, and then give themselves 188 pages to fill with content and then just move the font size on the index up or down to make it fit into the allotted space.

Anyways, let's start with Law of the Jungle:

• One of the main selling points of Law of the Jungle is going to be that it has new stuff for Druids and Rangers. And it will totally do that. But you also want some stuff for everyone. So while it will certainly have some alternate beasts and different battlefield control abilities for different terrain themed characters (using this book, your Druid could have all of their battlefield control powers based on Sand or Wind or Crashing Waves). But it's also important to get beasts that just anybody can ride around on. So a section on using Displacer Beasts or Manticores as mounts. Go nuts.
  
  And of course, you'll want two new classes and their associated subclasses. These can be pretty fast to write, because people don't actually care if some expansion option like Shaman or Hunter only makes sense when subclassed with Paladin or only makes sense as a subclass to Necromancer. It's an expansion option, all it really has to do is proide at least one playable build and not break the game.
  
  And then of course, you want to throw down all the basic beastfolk races. That's a bit over a page in description for each one and the rest of a page with some art of one and the mechanics. And the mechanics are basically the same kind of ability package that Gnomes or Drow get in the PHB. Except of course that while the Gnome ability "Creative Attack" has to work for every PHB class, people won't be terribly upset if Gnolls only work well as Druids or Kenku only make sense as Rogues. So they aren't that hard to write, since you don't have to guaranty 13 (and preferably 156, since you want all the subclasses to work) playable builds, but just one.
  
  Then you throw up a few powerful races, who each get their own subclass.
  
  And you tie it all together with some rants about jungle adventures, and going to fight monsters in places that can't be effectively scouted from the air and for which there aren't good maps. Crawling around on the ground while giant snakes attack FTW!
  
  So your page layout looks something like this:
• New Class: Shaman (14)
• New Class: Hunter (14)
• Class Options: Druid (8)
• Class Options: Ranger (8)
• Jungle Adventures (40)
• Equipment for the Jungle (6)
• New Mounts (10)
• New Beasts (20)
• Adventure Seed: Cities of Gold (10)
• A rant about including new races in your game (8)
• Aaracockra (2)
• Abeil (2)
• Armand (2)
• Catfolk (2)
• Crucian (2)
• Fire Newts (2)
• Gnoll (2)
• Grippli (2)
• Ibixian (2)
• Kenku (2)
• Lizardfolk (2)
• Mongrelfolk (2)
• Nerra (2)
• Ophidian (2)
• Raptoran (2)
• Satyr (2)
• Vanara (2)
• Yuan Ti (4) [Includes powerful race: Anathema!]
• Yurian (2)
• Centaur (2)
• Desmodu (2)
• Harpy (2)
• Mnotaur (2)
• Scorpionfolk (2)
• Index (4)
  ---
  192 Pages

Right? That's an Expansion book.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

May I also suggest including Shifters or some other kind of "animal people race", given the popularity of such races amongst certain geek subcultures?

Frank is right. Unless you're writing a furry rpg its not worth trying. Even a tiger won't satisfy a lion fan.

I can see a place for kobolds, they're popular from their underdog status, crpg airtime and good art in 3e. Minotaurs are another good bet, they're totally iconic and I imagine they picked up a lot of support from the WoW tauren. The important thing being they both have a reason to be in the game other than appealing to 'certain geek subcultures'.

[Username17]

So other expansion books to put on the docket (all 192 page hard-cover masterpieces):

• Castles in the Sky:
  • Extra Gish options
  • Extra Elementalist Options
  • A Tirade about Gith culture
  • The Dragon Base Class
  • The Giant Subclass
  • Skyships and Dragonriding
  • Cloud Castles
  • Epic Level Adeventuring
  • Racial Templates for a bunch of Dragons and Giants
• Shadows of the Underdark
  • Rant about Drow Culture
  • Rant about Kobold Culture
  • Rant about Dwarf Culture
  • New Class: Psychic Warrior
  • New Class:
  • Extra Psion Options
  • Spelunking 101
  • Oh Noes! Mindflayers!
  • Racial Subclass: Troglodyte
  • Racial Subclass: Grimlock
  • Racial Subclass: Umber Hulk
• Might of Empires:
  • Rant about Humans
  • Rant about Hobs
  • New Class: Ninja
  • New Class: Warlord
  • Extra Bard options
  • Extra Hero Options
  • Making Empires
  • Owning Castles
  • Imperial Adventures
  • Lost Empires
  • Racial Subclass: Bugbear
• Chaotic Frontiers:
  • Rant about Orcs
  • Rant about Halfings
  • Rant about Goblins
  • New Class: Pirate
  • New Class: Chaos Mage
  • Extra Rogue Options
  • Rant about adventuring on frontiers.
  • Defending Villages
  • Establishing Order.
  • Beast Within: the Lycanthrope Subclass
• Book of Gears:
  • Rant about Gnomes
  • Rant about Warforged
  • Extra Artificer Options
  • Extra Monk Options
  • New Class: Geomancer
  • New Class: Alchemist
  • New Class: Snowscaper
  • Making Stuff
  • Giant Robots
  • Bionics
  • Adventuring in the snow
  • Steampunk Adventures in D&D
• Banemire
  • Extra Necromancer Options
  • New Class: Deathknight
  • New Class: Sohei
  • Rant about Swamp Adventures
  • Rant about the Undead
  • A million things about Poison
  • Subclass: Vampire
  • Subclass: Ghoul
  • Subclass: Lich
  • Subclass: Mummy
• Sands of Eternity:
  • Rant about Elves
  • Extra Warlock Options
  • Extra Paladin Options
  • New Class: Conduit
  • New Class: Sha'ir
  • The Fiend Class
  • The Genie Subclass
  • The Celestial Class
  • Racial packages for the Daeva, the Archons, the Eladrin, several Fiend types, and the Genies.
  • Planar Adventures
  • Desert Adventures
  -Username17

[Username17]

So you got those 8 "big" books that are about 2/3 Player Information, right? Each of Them is pretty damn scattershot, but written in such a manner as to hang together thematically. Ideally every player would at least kind of want to own every one of those eight books. Not just because with extra race and class options scattered around here and there it's likely that your particular character would be getting some toys in two or more books - but because the expanded Leadership rules are in Might of Empire, the higher level mounts are in Law of the Jungle, the epic armors are in Sands of Eternity, and the advanced crafting rules are in Book of Gears. And if you want to cement it, you find room for like 8 pages of Prestige Classes that are seriously open to people of every race and class in each book. Like Giant Slayer, Storm Lord, and Dragon Master in Castles in the Sky.

The other key is that since each of the books has a recognizable, but different format. So you don't feel like you're reading the same book over and over again with the serial numbers filed off, and you don't just "skip to the crunchy bits" because it's an actual book. While Law of the Jungle spends 30% of its pages on catering to furries, extra races are just a six page appendix in Shadows of the Underdark.

The number one mistake that the Book of Exalted Furries made was not being different from the Book of Vile Darkness. That's not even an exaggeration for effect. If you open BoVD to page 71 you get a PrC (Thrall of Orcus), and if you open BoED to page 71 you get a PrC (Skylord). Both of them even have a medallion shaped picture in the middle of the page. Open up to page 125 in one you get Demogorgon, and in the other you get Barachiel. When players feel that they've "already read" the new book by reading one of the older ones, they start skimming. And that makes them less likely to buy it or hold onto it. The 4e books like Arcane Power are a little better about that, but only because there are a different number of classes in each power type. Each class gets a 20-26 page list of bonus options, and the entire book is 10 printer units long (160 pages). If it wasn't for the fact that there are 4 Divine Classes and 5 Arcane classes, those two books would be literally identical page for page. Being uninteresting is a worse sin than being of limited scope (which of course, is also a problem that 4e books have in spades).

So for release schedules, you're going to want one of these to come out every two or three months. Which, since you want to publish something every month (though not four things every month, that's just insane), means that you need other things on the schedule. Now those are going to fall into three categories:

• Campaign Setting Books (304 pages, hardcover)
  • Eberron
  • Forgotten Realms
  • Planescape
  • The 5e Flagship Campaign Setting that you put video games and shit in
• Bonus "Core" Books (320 pages, hardcover)
  • Monster Manual 2
  • Player's Handbook 2
  • Fiend Folio
  • DMG 2
  • Monster Manual 3
• Glorified Magazines (80 or 96 pages, softcover)
  • Arms and Equipment Guide
  • Stronghold Builder's Guidebook
  • Return to the Revenge of the Saga Against the Giants
  • Sword and Fist
  • Draconomicon
  • Servants of Lolth
  • And many more!

So the basic idea is that you make one of these softcover, 6 dollar books every month. You might even call them "Dragon Presents: [Fill in Name]" And you publish one major supplement, Setting, or "core" book every month. Once you have that going, you can expand it to publish a bonus softcover book about one of your pet settings every month too. You can call those "Dungeon Presents: [Fill in Name]" if you want.

And that's 2 years of reasonably dense publishing on the table where connoisseurs of the hobby would want to buy something every month. One of the keys is that even in the month where your "major" release is the Eberron Campaign setting, you produce a Softcover of near universal appeal like the A&EG, and you put your more specialist mnor titles like Draconomicon in there with a guaranteed seller like PHB2.

-Username17

[Ganbare Gincun]

So how many levels of advancement would we talking about here? And what would a "monster" subclass look like, and how would it compare to a "regular" subclass?

[NoDot]

Quick question: where would Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic, and Magic of Incarnum go? Softcover? Trash bin?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Alternate rules-set books should not be scheduled in advance.

They should come very late in the edition's lifecycle (at least after four or five years), that way you can collect the opinions of people who didn't enjoy certain parts of the rules or wanted to see something that didn't come to fruition.

Tome of Battle was one of the biggest success stories of 3.5E, but that's only because it came out a year and a half before the edition got retired. If it came out in the first two years, before people realized that there was something with sword-based classes, it'd be dismissed as a bunch of munchkinny crap. Remember all of the whining about how material in Oriental Adventures was overpowered and how Shintao Monks were the most broken thing ever? Yeah.

There might be a demand some day for a mass-combat minigame or an adaptation of the rules that makes it work for a futuristic campaign. Don't publish these books until you can get a good read for your audience. d20 Modern was a relative success, the Miniatures Handbook was a relative failure (even though I think it's one of the best books written for 3.5E).

[IGTN]

Quick question: where would Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic, and Magic of Incarnum go? Softcover? Trash bin?

Those were mechanics testbeds for 4e, not actual real "3e" books.

Tome of Battle was a cool book, and so they based 4e's mechanics on it. Ideally, though, there wouldn't be a need to write a special "fix the fighter" book if the fighter isn't broke to begin with. So ToB doesn't get written anywhere like the way it stands.

Tome of Magic has a bunch of new mechanics and new subsystems for alternate kinds of magic. Incarnum is the same way. I can see these being written as setting-specific books. A book with an elaborate martial arts system could fit in, in the same way.

As for where to put them:
Pactbinding goes either in a setting with an oppressive religious orthodoxy and no good guys, just more and less bad. Probably its own setting with severely restricted regular classes.
Shadow Magic goes in a setting that deals heavily with shadows.
Truenaming could also have a setting devised for it, but I have no idea what it would look like since truenaming is really generic.
Martial Arts goes in the East Asia setting, since that's where martial arts movies are set.
Incarnum, with its present associations, goes somewhere that has very prominent alignments, balance of opposing forces, and symmetry between the Law-Chaos axis and the Good-Evil axis.

Most of these could be dropped into, say, Planescape or maybe Spelljammer, without too much trouble.

Each one would probably be either a chapter or three in a campaign setting book, or its own softcover.

So I can see room for Pactbinding and Martial Arts in clearly-defined settings. These are cheap settings that don't necessarily get heavy investment, but they are there.

The rest, if there isn't a good place to put them, get outsourced to the Planescape grindhouse. I could also see cross-demand for these books, if generic enough, for people building their own worlds.

[NoDot]

Those were mechanics testbeds for 4e, not actual real "3e" books.

I was speaking of alternate rules in general, not fix-the-fighter and new-edition-testbed.

[Lago PARANOIA]

So what power system should the new edition use? I'm becoming increasingly partial towards Winds of Fate, but I don't know how that will go over. The easiest thing I can think of is to reverse the core assumptions--all of your powers are available to some extent but certain powers get More Better depending on how the WoF thing works out. Which of course sucks for two reasons:

1) You actually have to make sure that people will want to take higher rolls on the WoF. In 4E there are quite a few builds that want to use their At-Wills over their encounter powers because they have more resources invested in them, but that just breaks the system.

2) Some people might ignore the mechanical bonus anyway. Some jackholes will keep spamming Fireball even though the WoF machine tells them that they'd get a lot more mileage this round out of Cinder Cloud or Dragonfire.

The problem is... I can't think of any better systems to use for powers than WoF. Shadowrun's, maybe? But that's so limited in scope.

But that's not the point. We're talking about marketing. 4E D&D actually really screwed itself over by making powers the way they did. Players don't get that many of them and what they can get is so rigid that people ignore entire books because they know ahead of time that there's nothing they want.

Sadly, I think 3E's uber-incestuous Vancian system of having generic spell lists produces the most sales.

[Username17]

Sadly, I think 3E's uber-incestuous Vancian system of having generic spell lists produces the most sales.

How many people have told you that Complete Champion was a good book because it had one acceptable feat somewhere in it? Or Complete Scoundrel because of one skill trick? Or Complete Mage because of one prestige class?

People buy Arcane Power, even though in 30 levels, they will probably only use two or three powers and one or two items from it. Now, granted that only Wizard and Bard players buy Arcane Power, but the players that buy the 160 page tome don't get much actual use out of it.

The sad fact of the matter is that D&D players are not very discriminating when it comes to books that have - somewhere in them - stuff that a player could use. And that's why you take all the prereqs off of the paragon paths/prestige classes. Seriously, all the prereqs. If an Elementalist wants to jump ship and become a Beastmaster or a Giant Slayer, he just can. Not only does this get rid of the trope of PrCs whose prereqs are so steep that they might as well not exist, but it automatically means that every Expansion and Setting book has life paths that your character could take and might want. When Angel Knight is a path that anyone can take, there will be a lot more interest in it - certainly more than when it's a path only available to Paladins who sub Monk and invest skill resources into Singing and Goldsmithing.

The problem is... I can't think of any better systems to use for powers than WoF.

I don't see that as a problem. Every power system has problems, but the fact that every power system has problems is not itself a problem.

The two big competing pulls are:

• The more powers that players have access to, the harder it is to play the game (mechanically) or to explain the capabilities of a character t other players (narratively).
• The less powers that players have access to, the less use players have for new material (financially), and the less interesting their character is (narratively).

Finding the narrative sweet spot is a tough one, since for one thing it varies from person to person. But I think we all remember the failure of feats, where people wanted to make all kinds of things into feats, to the point that 3.5 ended with several thousand of the fuckers before we included the 3rd party producers who had made several thousand more. And yet, players pretty much got four feats before the end of the game, and a lot of them were just there as prereqs for other feats.

But that's not the point. We're talking about marketing. 4E D&D actually really screwed itself over by making powers the way they did. Players don't get that many of them and what they can get is so rigid that people ignore entire books because they know ahead of time that there's nothing they want.

The no-prereqs paradigm can help there too, of course. If you publish a new ability, people should be able to grab it and use it the next time they get to select an ability. If you put in a selectable ability of "ninja flip" into Might of Empires, you should be damn certain that people don't have to have already selected "barrel roll" from Frontiers of Chaos before it becomes available. Because if they do, it basically just grays out for everyone. And if it's Ninja only, it grays out for almost everyone, which is just as bad.

I was speaking of alternate rules in general, not fix-the-fighter and new-edition-testbed.

As has been pointed out, any set of alternate rules is going to be a mechanical test bed for the next edition. If the 5e version of the Totemist is more popular than the 5e Monk, chances are pretty good that the 6e PHB will have a Totemist instead of one of the other basic PCs. Just look at how the Bard and Monk got bumped for the Warlock and Crusader in 4e.

But your alternate rules books are going to want to be planned 2 years or more into the cycle - after you've gotten a lot of feedback from the community at large. If you have a big contingent who thinks that Druids are not Pokemaster enough and want to skip the battlefield control and just have a big summoned monster out, you can make some Id Monster or Pokmaster who does that. If a lot of people are paralyzed by the options given by the WoF system, you can make an alternate rules book that has classes that are simpler and spam at-wills. But you're not going to be able to anticipate these niches until you get marketing feedback.

Or to put it another way: 4e did not know that there was a market for a new skill challenge system until the system that they made turned out to suck ass. You could put out a whole book on sneaking and talking, because the basic skill challenge rules are grossly unsatisfactory.

-Username17

[ggroy]

[Lago PARANOIA]

Is there any strong evidence that WotC has paid much attention to any feedback at all in the first place?

Believe it or not, WotC does pay a lot of attention to feedback. The nerf-happy errata cycle was directly spawned by the Errata forum over in the WotC-boards; and Mike Mearls has openly, if cattily, admitted the failure of the controller role and the Skill Challenge system.

People buy Arcane Power, even though in 30 levels, they will probably only use two or three powers and one or two items from it. Now, granted that only Wizard and Bard players buy Arcane Power, but the players that buy the 160 page tome don't get much actual use out of it.

I agree, that's what we used to do In The Old Days but with the release and success of the Character Builder I don't think that is going to fly anymore. If a book only has a couple of usable things in it then it's not worth buying; wait a month and that one power card you want is already going to be up there--contrast the Monster Manual for instance.

Books should in the future focus on printing a lot of things people want and not just one or two Next Big Things like Weapon Expertise; this is why I heavily advocate people pay out the ass for artwork.

And yet, players pretty much got four feats before the end of the game, and a lot of them were just there as prereqs for other feats.

I really don't know what to do about this. On the one hand, you and K's Tome-style feats are easy for a beginner to grok (because it eases them into all of those abilities) while actually giving them a lot of abilities. On the other hand, the Tome-style feats kind of put people on the rails. Sadly, having more feat slots sells more books because people won't go 'this is a cool feat, but all of my slots are already filled up'. At that point you either lose the ability to sell more feats or you get into the power creep game. On the third hand, even expert players would have trouble juggling the 25 or so feats and subfeats a mid-level player of Tome can expect to have.

I think that the spell list of a 20th-level 2E D&D Wizard is about the level of complexity most people can expect to handle. I don't have any concrete evidence, it's just my personal opinion.

[Username17]

But your alternate rules books are going to want to be planned 2 years or more into the cycle - after you've gotten a lot of feedback from the community at large.

Is there any strong evidence that WotC has paid much attention to any feedback at all in the first place?

What exactly was their method of determining what feedback data was more reliable?

The method appears to have been to have some of their people wander through internet conversations and pick some out to address. So two years of people complaining about the multicaster problem they attempted to "fix" it with the Mystic Theurge. Two years of people trying to play Minotaurs and they made Savage Species. Two more years of the Mystic Theurge failing to solve the problem, and they made Magic of Incarnum to try to handle it from the other end. Two more years of Savage Species failing to meet peoples' hopes of actually having playable monsters and they produced Lost Empires of Feyrun, Eberron, and the Planar Handbook, that just had level adjustment zero versions of many popular monsters. Larger volume problems, like Polymorph, had a much faster turnaround - Polymorph was rewritten every six months or so from 2000 until 2006. It only stopped getting rewritten when it became so complicated that people could no longer have discussions about it that made any sense, and thus the volume of traffic devoted to Polymorph discussions went to zero.

I'm highlighting these cycles of feedback and response as much to show what's wrong with their system as to praise it. Certainly, "every time you get enough total complaints, fuck with it and see if there are less complaints after the flurry of initial discussion goes down" is problematic n that the completely shitty things get no discussion just as the completely functional do. Obviously, you'd want better QA than that.

But the system isn't bad at identifying problems. It's just that Andy and Mike just fucking ignore those problems as actually stated because they are myopic designers and egomaniacs.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

MP

[Lago PARANOIA]

NT

[Starmaker]

this is why I heavily advocate people pay out the ass for artwork.

This has now been implemented: viewing galleries requires a D&D Insider subscription.

[ggroy]

[Username17]

this is why I heavily advocate people pay out the ass for artwork.

This has now been implemented: viewing galleries requires a D&D Insider subscription.

Lago of course is suggesting that the publisher invest in art. What this boils down to is the very legitimate question "Why would I want to actually own a copy of [fill in book]?" And that's a pretty good question. And the answer is going to come in one of two forms:

• To read. (Like, at home, as a book)
• To use. (Like, at the table, as a reference)

And let's bust out a quote of Lago's that is very apropos:

I agree, that's what we used to do In The Old Days but with the release and success of the Character Builder I don't think that is going to fly anymore. If a book only has a couple of usable things in it then it's not worth buying; wait a month and that one power card you want is already going to be up there--contrast the Monster Manual for instance.

The fact is that, as Josh has pointed out many times, carrying books to a game can be something of a pain in the ass. The game doesn't always take place at the home of the guy who owns all the books. Sometimes it's at a game store or a cafe. And it's just not reasonable to expect every player to drag all the books to every game. Expansion books like Races of Whatever and the Complete Fiasco series way about three quarters of a kilo each. The projected 8 book expansion set would weigh in at 6 kilos. That's not a small amount. Consider that each core book weighs in at over a Kilo, and you have a fundamental impossibility of actually getting people to want to bring all the books to any particular game.

Clearly, getting people to buy all the books in order to bring them all to a game as a reference is a losing proposition. There are various solutions that have been tried:

• Get people to bring books to games sequentially. This is obviously the case for books like adventures. People buy the book, and they bring the book to games until the adventure is over, and then they get a new one. These kinds of books work pretty well, and of course you'd be doing it. Books like Stronghold Builder's Guidebook work well here. And to an extent regional books like Law of the Jungle and Banemire can work like that. The players can take Shadows of the Underdark to the game while they are underground and when they go topside they can start taking Might of Empires to game instead.
• Encourage different players to bring different books to game. The game is in a sense wedded to this idea, since of course only the DM and maybe the Summoners need to bring the Monster Manual to game. So it's natural that D&D would be inclined to take it a bit farther. I think that is a mistake. The net result of the 4e system is that Wizard players don't even own Martial Power. It's not just that they don't take it to game, they don't even bother purchasing it or even borrowing it from a friend. Primal Power could be written by J. R. Shakespeare, and I would never know. But worse than that, no Fighter, Cleric, or Wizard player would know that either. So while I see this as an occasionally effective division of labor, I don't see it as a good way to sell more books.

Certainly, from a sales perspective, I would like people to have to work out amongst themselves who has to bring what book to game, because that implies that people are buying a lot of kilograms worth of books. And that's a lot of money. But even that has a limit. Eventually you're going to have to get people to read books for the purpose of having read them and then put them onto their shelf and buy more books.

And that means that the books need to be good to read. In the way that like, the Blackest Night saga or The Boys is good to read. And part of that is good art. Including an actual comic book of 16 pages or so in every major release would not be a bad marketing move. But you couldn't pussy out and make it be a shitty comic. Getting Alex Ross to do an issue about Jenielest your iconic Drow Necromancer would go a long way to get people to want to own Banemire over and above the page space given over to new Necromancer powers. In the future, people are going to want to get those powers on index cards and leave the book at home - and you want them to do that too! So that they can carry more books and therefore buy more books. So the value in owning (and by extension buying) the book has to be in the parts of the book that are not transferable to power cards. That's basically Art, Story, Prose, and Campaign Ideas. So you have to make sure that you deliver all four of those in every major release.

So for example, in your Planescape setting book, you're going to include the whole High Adventure on the Outer/Inner/Transitive Planes section. Because that has Story, Prose, and Campaign Ideas. If you throw in some snazzy art, people will want to own the book even if they aren't bringing it to game every week.

On the one hand, you and K's Tome-style feats are easy for a beginner to grok (because it eases them into all of those abilities) while actually giving them a lot of abilities. On the other hand, the Tome-style feats kind of put people on the rails. Sadly, having more feat slots sells more books because people won't go 'this is a cool feat, but all of my slots are already filled up'. At that point you either lose the ability to sell more feats or you get into the power creep game. On the third hand, even expert players would have trouble juggling the 25 or so feats and subfeats a mid-level player of Tome can expect to have.

There are advantages to having bitesize feats and advantages to having the scaling feats that K and I eventually championed. But for the purposes of selling books, there's just no competition: bitesize feats win hands down. Everyone gets a feat every level. That's not even a hard decision to make. The key is making sure that feats do not Voltron out of control and that each of them is giving a real ability. A key portion of this method and the lack of prereqs on things means that out of any feat list, players will be grabbing the shit they want most first, which means that any list will get inherently poorer for them the more feats that they have - meaning in turn that periodically releasing new feats totally at random is liable to be a boon to the player.

I think that the spell list of a 20th-level 2E D&D Wizard is about the level of complexity most people can expect to handle. I don't have any concrete evidence, it's just my personal opinion.

That's a lot of complexity. As I recall, that's around 35 spells per day that are prepared off a list of circa one hundred known spells plus several dozen limited use items such as scrolls and wands.

-Username17

[Korwin]

this is why I heavily advocate people pay out the ass for artwork.

This has now been implemented: viewing galleries requires a D&D Insider subscription.

At least the old (3.X) Art Galleries are still there...

[Lago PARANOIA]

That's a lot of complexity. As I recall, that's around 35 spells per day that are prepared off a list of circa one hundred known spells plus several dozen limited use items such as scrolls and wands.

-Username17

I know. I'm just looking for a ceiling before we start worrying about advancement. Spellcasting can get considerably more complicated than that, such as your example sorcerer. The wizard does have a lot of mojo to sort through, but it's not that bad when you consider the mitigating factors:

The wizard prepares their 35 spells from effects that they expect to use in the day. This takes the most amount of planning and thus time.
The wizard picks the next 100 spells from effects that they think might become useful in the near-future. This requires less planning than the above. They don't have to make a decision based on current events, just spells that they think might come in handy in the near-future or in their downtime like Permanency or Guards and Wards.
The wizard then gets the rest of their spells from contingency effects. A scroll of rope trick might come in handy. So would a scroll of break enchantment. And so on.

Finally, and most importantly, the wizard player usually doesn't have all of their spell knowledge dumped onto them at once. Considering D&D's hardon for starting players off at level one, it's more likely that the wizard starts off with like 10 spells, 4 to prepare, and the game keeps adding more stuff. Since after a certain point lower-level spell slots don't change system mastery is divided into bite-sized chunks.

[Username17]

It's just that Andy and Mike just fucking ignore those problems as actually stated because they are myopic designers and egomaniacs.

A better question is whether these guys actually know that something is wrong in the first place, or are they completely oblivious to anything outside of their own isolated "cocoon".

Oh, they are certainly aware enough to have an errata cycle going. Skill Challenges have been revamped what, three times? Officially? In the year and a half since the DMG hit the shelves in 2008. That's a lot of rewriting. That's an incredibly fast errata cycle, and since they still don't work, it's a good bet that the DMG3 will overhaul them again.

The problem is that since none of these erratas are actually playtested or even focus grouped beyond possibly their own lunch time campaigns, and no one has thought to do an in-house mathematical analysis of any of this shit, none of the reworkings are any good. Even after all the errata, This is what a current skill challenge discussion looks like among the faithful.

Like others have said, explaining the exact game mechanics beforehand and rolling initiative is usually a bad idea.

Get that? The rules for skill challenges are so bad, that the people who use them admit that actually letting people know what the rules are is a bad idea. Because if people actually look behind the curtain they can see the strings and just pull the one that makes them win. It's seriously that bad - the only way to make it a game at all is to replace it with a game of Mastermind or Simon Says. And that's from the people who haven't scrapped the system in disgust - which appears to be a minority.

Finally, and most importantly, the wizard player usually doesn't have all of their spell knowledge dumped onto them at once. Considering D&D's hardon for starting players off at level one, it's more likely that the wizard starts off with like 10 spells, 4 to prepare, and the game keeps adding more stuff. Since after a certain point lower-level spell slots don't change system mastery is divided into bite-sized chunks.

The Level 1 problem is a big one. On the one hand, starting people at any level other than "Level 1" is completely counter-intuitive and people don't like it. On the other hand, a level-based game doesn't well handle people being "zeroth level" let alone "negative fourth level" so it's pretty hard to make a system that adequately makes player characters that start at "Level 1" and still makes them an effective foil for a mighty house cat.

The hard lower bound of 1 and 0 affect dice pool systems too of course, since it's wildly impractical to have anyone or anything roll substantially, much less differentially less than 1 die on any task. Theoretically, a d20+ Mods vs. TN should scale infinitely in any direction. If your "bonus" is -46 and you need to beat a DC of -32 you are going to succeed 35% of the time. But be that as it may, no level system is ever gong to generate a bonus of negative forty six if a starting human paladin is level 1.

The only way I have to reconcile those facts is to create hard tiers - like with Black Forest. The players start at level 1 in the "Champion" Tier. And cats and squirrels can be some level or another in the small furry animals tier. And then you don't have to worry about hamsters outside of magical hamsters or swarms of hamsters. Such a tier system could allow you to renormalize the RNG every so often so that it didn't get too divergent. Boom, everyone hits Immortal Tier and suddenly everyone has to take levels in Immortal classes and have their bonuses renormalized to Immortal Tier standards. That kind of thing.

I know. I'm just looking for a ceiling before we start worrying about advancement. Spellcasting can get considerably more complicated than that, such as your example sorcerer.

Oh, it can get really fucking hardcore into crazy town, and fairly easily. But even working with that as an upper bound, you've still got a fair amount to sort through.

Let's assume for the moment that your Subclass gives you a fixed ability every level. It's going to have to be enough to let your character feel like a Frost Giant or a Stone Giant after being high enough level for you to play one. Assuming for the moment that we hand out a Sub Class at level 3 (to pick an arbitrary number that has been brought up already), that would be 18 abilities at level 20. And that's your subclass. Your real class is giving you more than that, by definition. Add a feat every level, and you've got 38 powers before your class does a god damned thing at 20th level. If you got two things a level from your base class, that would be 78 powers by level 20. Less spells than an AD&D Wizard has to comb through, but more slots than they get in a day.

Of course, we could cap it at a lower level. In 10 levels, the same progression would only give 38 abilities. Or we could have any number of those powers replaced by later level powers. Technically, you could get to 20th level and just have 23 abilities if your class features and subclass features just replaced themselves every level. At 20th level you'd have two 20th level main class features, one 20th level subclass power, and 20 feats. That's kind of silly actually, but with even half the powers being replacements rather than additions we could see people get to 20th with an even 50 tags - which seems pretty manageable considering that normally 20th level characters are written on five or six pieces of paper.

-Username17

[ggroy]