The Gaming Den

Ghremdal wrote:So is there a upcoming product for 5e?

'Cause my theory is that WotC licensed out 5e to third party publisher, but each company that bought the rights made exactly one product. Almost as if they got burned by poor sales and don't want to make 5e shit anymore. The last adventure is a recycle of 4 editions of Ravenloft adventures and published in house.

I am not seeing any upcoming products from their already sparse schedule either. Almost like no one will touch 5e with a 10' pole and they don't have the in house talent to produce something original themselves. I think my theory will be confirmed if nothing comes out or if they do another adventure recycle.

Well you know:

[url=http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/dd-survey-march-2016 wrote:Mike Mearls - 03/25/2016[/url]]At this stage, we’ve begun considering what the first, major mechanical expansion to the game might look like.

Wow. Begun considering... what something might look like.

I wish I could give estimates like that for my projects.

Mearls wrote:Finally, any new expansion must undergo rigorous playtesting and validation by the community of players and DMs. That approach worked out well of the core rulebooks

Yes, the 5e core books are sterling examples of what happens when you pretend to crowdsource your math QA but actually don't bother to do the math at all.

If it was playtested they would have realized most of the rules don't exist.

RelentlessImp wrote:If it was playtested they would have realized most of the rules don't exist.

I think you're overestimating the playtest process of pretty much all ttrpg playtesters.

I still have no idea what the hell they are going to do because the few rules they have are gonna snap like twigs when more shit is added.

erik wrote:Wow. Begun considering... what something might look like.

I wish I could give estimates like that for my projects.

Quite.

And really, you'd think there would be any number of obvious mechanical expansion routes. Psionics for one. I mean, lots of people hate psionics in D&D, but there are people who love them and there's some valuable IP (Mind Flayers, Githyanki and Githzerai, etc.) attached to it.

Also, psionics would be pretty fucking easy to do just by tweaking warlock.

Prak wrote:Also, psionics would be pretty fucking easy to do just by tweaking warlock.

Which means they're inevitably going to do some other off the wall shit. I suspect they'll grab the spell point rule variant out of the DMG and turn that into Psionics.

Probably. Which is bullshit. The Warlock "your spells refresh on a short rest" thing would be perfect for psionic "you just need to meditate." I mean, they could do it with spell points, but honestly, the way spells work in 5th, automatically advancing when cast from a higher slot, is pretty psionic to begin with.

They have psionic preview material out, it looks more like the warlock.

That said, it's like the only thing in the game that attacks Int, so I expect psionics to be completely OP on that basis alone.

Potentially, but in a complete armchair-game designer way, it seems to me that it's not so much whether a lot of things attack a given stat, as whether there are defenses that make something OP.

But, I trust Mearls to make something broken.

Well, it's partially because the 6 stat save system is bad and terrible.

It's not really uniquely terrible, it's just because some of them are far more valuable than others and 6 different defenses are far too many in any case -common failure states for RPG defense setups.

Any idea on the current sales figures of 5e?

Shit, I remember when this topic had like 20 pages.

As of right now, Amazon has sold ~64k copies of the PHB since it was released in 2014 and seems to be averaging roughly 2k/month this year. The DMG has lifetime sales of ~26k, and the Monster Manual is sitting at ~9k. Curse of Strahd sold just under 2k copies in March, and is looking to sell about half that this month. Out of the Abyss sold is ~3.5k lifetime sales and averaging a couple hundred per month. Princes of the Apocalypse sold ~3k.

This is entirely on Amazon's part, so it's not the sole supplier. Executives have gone on record that Amazon is grouped in the same category as chain stores like Barnes & Noble, and holds the lion's share of the sales out of the group; and the total sales from chain stores and websites are roughly equal to the combined selling power of gaming stores.

If I was forced to give an estimate with the above data, I would probably say that the PHB has sold about 500k books over the last twenty months through all venues including international. In addition, the handful of books they've released since the core rules are lucky to have their release month even match the current PHB sales for that month.

EDIT: Data taken from this site

Given the massive discounts Amazon offered for core books, my estimates were that Amazon sold 80-90% of the books of that sector. Which would mean that PHB's sold are in the 150K to 200 K range, with total 5e books probably not going over 300 to 350 K sold.

Ghremdal wrote:Given the massive discounts Amazon offered for core books, my estimates were that Amazon sold 80-90% of the books of that sector. Which would mean that PHB's sold are in the 150K to 200 K range, with total 5e books probably not going over 300 to 350 K sold.

I estimated that Amazon had 30% market share within the mass market group, which would make it proportionally huge compared to its competitors if there were at least 9 other retailers in the market. That explains why your estimate is smaller than mine.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you're wrong. My arguably generous estimate still places the collective performance of 5E to be doing an order of magnitude worse than just the PHB of 3E.

I'm surprised that the DMG outsells the MM by 3 to 1. If that holds even roughly true outside of Amazon, who are all the people who buy the first but not the second?

Schleiermacher wrote:I'm surprised that the DMG outsells the MM by 3 to 1. If that holds even roughly true outside of Amazon, who are all the people who buy the first but not the second?

People who only ever have their PCs kill progressively larger numbers of goblins, and spent all of 3e talking about how fighters are balanced because level 20 fighters are supposed to lose to CR 13 Ice Devils, because Ice Devils are powerful monsters that should beat PCs (but apparently not Wizards).

After all they still need a bunch of sections of rules to point to that say "DM makes shit up, preferably shitting all over the Players because Fuck Players" so that they can continue lording their inherent DM superiority over those filthy players.

Here's a link to one of their forums: http://www.therpgsite.com/forum.php

But obviously your summoned creatures will attack each other!

Wow that forum...

Schleiermacher wrote:I'm surprised that the DMG outsells the MM by 3 to 1. If that holds even roughly true outside of Amazon, who are all the people who buy the first but not the second?

Magic Items are in the DMG, so it can be useful to players. There's even a small beastiary for your summons. I suspect that players buying it for some minimal utility explains part of that 3:1 ratio.

DMG also has another few archetypes for "villains"

Yeah, and people actually want to play blackguards and death priests, unlike the nature paladin