D&D 5e has failed

[TiaC]

5e fanboys keep saying that the "publish a fuckton of books" model doesn't work anymore, but that's exactly what Pathfinder is doing and they're making a lot of money.

Pathfinder's rules however are also available free in an online searchable format.

Something that not only doesn't hurt their sales but which I am convinced is a VERY major component of their success.

Remember that they went with a compromise. You can play a game just fine without any books, but often the only game in town is PFS, and you do need books for that.

[tussock]

This concept that you can't sell books, Amazon has put book shops out of business, not book printers or publishers, Amazon's still got huge growth in books (and ebooks).

Back in 1996 when an independent Wizards bought TSR out of bankruptcy, they put out a huge customer interest survey. 3e was written based on the desires found in that survey, with a real playtest by very experienced groups. In 1998 pretty much everyone said tabletop RPGs were dead (because everyone was going broke publishing terrible fucking books that no one wanted) and CRPGs and Magic cards were all there was forever.

Then they put out 3e in 2000 and made tens of millions of dollars selling the books, and also saved every other company in the entire industry by getting them to make support products for it. The splats were even the nice light ones full of crunch that was short enough to read through in a reasonable time and also connected to the setting material.

3.5 was an exercise in getting everyone to buy all those books again, heavier, in larger print, with far more whitespace, for more money than they paid the first time, with more bullshit, full of worse mechanics, full of useless crap no one asked for, while screwing the 3rd party market and also all their distributors and retailers.

4e was fucking horrible. Have you all tried just reading one of those fucking things? Sitting down and going through them? It's a really bad experience. 5e isn't a whole lot better, it's readable but horribly disorganised and still a large-print heavy-ass artbook.

It's not that people stopped buying good games. Wizards just stopped printing good games in a usable format that people want to read and use, and screwed everyone who tried to do it for them by fucking with the golden-goose licences and churning out closed content better than the open stuff. No one can support a game with Warblades and Warlocks in it, they could've at least opened the basic chassis for each.


The who tabletop thing is massively easier to play now, with a half-decent app, softcovers full of power-creep balancing, and a set of core rules that people actually want (using real survey techniques, not listening to the loudest asshole on webforums, hi there) there's no reason they couldn't just churn out the tens of millions again.

Regular non-gaming people fucking love fantasy stories full of elves and winged horses and shit like that. Harry Potter sold a lot of fucking books and those people would all totally play a Wizard who slowly gains power through adventure against horrible things in dark tunnels, while trying to find better spells! Only D&D could give them a setting that was less pointlessly oppressive, you weren't surrounded by better Wizards all day, and where you could go left instead of right if you wanted, and also play a sort of sparkly vampire (by another name) if need be.

[fearsomepirate]

I'm not arguing that you can't sell books. I'm saying a TTRPGs won't ever match MTG in revenue. You can have a profitable, sustainable business model for a TTRPG. Paizo's proven that. But Magic is a $200m game. Pathfinder is a $10m game. I don't see how you can match card games' revenue without having all of:

To get casual players, you need:
* Easy-to-learn, hard-to-master rules that anyone can learn in 10 minutes.
* Simple win/loss gameplay that doesn't require repeated attendance to game sessions.
* Low-cost buy-in for new players.

To translate casual players in money, you need:
* Non-replicable material that every player has to have in order to play. (i.e. my players can all share a PHB or pirate PDFs; can't do that with MTG cards)

To keep milking dedicated players, you need:
* A mechanic that is essentially unlimited in its ability to expand options without becoming unwieldy.
* Very low marginal cost on game expansion.
* Non-sharable expansion. (If I buy the Eberron books, my whole table is now playing in Eberron. Magic booster packs don't work that way.)
* A mechanic that all but requires players to continue buying expansions to stay current.

I don't think a TTRPG can hit all those points and stay recognizable as a TTRPG. Which is fine! I like my dice-throwing story game as an enthusiast hobby and feel it would lose something if it changed enough to become a hundreds-of-millions rather than tens-of-millions industry. It's the same thing video gamers worry about when their favorite niche titles expand to more casual audiences. They always lose what made the original players love them.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I don't think a TTRPG can hit all those points and stay recognizable as a TTRPG.

What about 4E D&D's DDI? I don't know the ins and outs of MTG, but I'd bet that they'd kill to have an average player buying a 6.95 starter pack every month for four years. And the DDI was viewed fairly positively and had tens of thousands of subscribers even after the edition was dead and buried.

This was despite the fact that DDI A.) was woefully incomplete and B.) was chained to an edition that sucked horse anus. If Hasbro made a good-faith effort to give us an edition that had the digital tools they originally promised back in 2008 and gave us a TTRPG at least as good as 3E D&D, then it could start competing with Magic again.

D&D and even second-tier TTRPGs have the framework to be profitable, they just need some competent project managers and need to get rid of all of the 'oh, woe is us, TTRPGs are the next slot cars and model trains; it's certainly not US poor industry folk who is making the product unprofitable'.

[Previn]

I'm not arguing that you can't sell books. I'm saying a TTRPGs won't ever match MTG in revenue. You can have a profitable, sustainable business model for a TTRPG. Paizo's proven that. But Magic is a $200m game. Pathfinder is a $10m game.

Magic isn't the best comparison. It's effectively the father of all CCGs that all CCGs want to be, and it holds the crown with a lot fo critical mass in the player base size. There are a lot of CCGs that are sub 10m in income.

I don't see how you can match card games' revenue without having all of:

To get casual players, you need:
* Easy-to-learn, hard-to-master rules that anyone can learn in 10 minutes.
* Simple win/loss gameplay that doesn't require repeated attendance to game sessions.
* Low-cost buy-in for new players.

You can make an RPG where players can get playing in 10 minutes. FATE for example. Trying to do the same in MtG without someone there to guide you takes considerably longer than 10 minutes. Even with someone, the best way to learn MtG is to have an experienced player walk you through playing your first game, and that takes way more than 10 minutes. Probably at least a half hour, and there are still going to be questions the more you play.

Low cost buy-in isn't really something that exists in MtG unless you're deliberately playing that way. Heck, the core set fat pack is 40$ and that's close to the minimum to play, unless you're going with the pre-cons with are 13$ each. I could grab FATE Core for 25$ and have everything to play a game of FATE.

Really the ability to sit down play and then move on with no prep or followup is the biggest selling point.

To translate casual players in money, you need:
* Non-replicable material that every player has to have in order to play. (i.e. my players can all share a PHB or pirate PDFs; can't do that with MTG cards)

I can print any MtG card I want and sleeve it to play with friends, or just write BLACK LOTUS on one of the 40 bajillion land cards and play. I can play MtG through cocktrice with any card. I can't go play in official tournaments that way, unless I'm willing to play for counterfeits from China for a fraction of the cost.

To keep milking dedicated players, you need:
* A mechanic that is essentially unlimited in its ability to expand options without becoming unwieldy.
* Very low marginal cost on game expansion.
* Non-sharable expansion. (If I buy the Eberron books, my whole table is now playing in Eberron. Magic booster packs don't work that way.)
* A mechanic that all but requires players to continue buying expansions to stay current.

Your first point isn't unique to CCGs in the ability to be executed, or even carried out well(banding does what?).

Your second point seems to miss that unless you're buying from the secondary market, getting a playset of MtG cards for a single deck for a new expansion can and often is more expensive than an equivalent hardcover RPG book. If you're looking chase rares in the secondary market, a single copy of the new hot card could run you more than an entire hardcover RPG book.

You can share magic cards, you just have to have enough of the cards everyone wants to use. SO yes, your entire table totally can share magic cards. I get that you're trying to say that we have to go out and buy cards, except that we'll just proxy the things unless we're going to a tournament anyways, and then we'll buy our decks card by card from the secondary market.

You don't have to have a mechanic that forces players to buy to stay current. Frank was right that people will buy a quality product with good content.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I don't know the ins and outs of MTG, but I'd bet that they'd kill to have an average player buying a 6.95 starter pack every month for four years. And the DDI was viewed fairly positively and had tens of thousands of subscribers even after the edition was dead and buried.

A player who goes to FNM every week and drafts is spending about $10 every week. (Varies by store, and has probably gone up a little bit since I last went to a game store)

[rasmuswagner]

Man, if you guys can find a disgruntled former employee, I'll chip in some money to get the PCP and assault rifle we need to get D&D back on track.

[Lago PARANOIA]

A player who goes to FNM every week and drafts is spending about $10 every week.

Yeah, but is that a typical player? That's about five hundred dollars a year; I have a hard time imagining that person representing anyone more than the mid tens of thousands.

Maybe I'm off-base, but I imagine that a much bigger portion of the playerbase spends about 200 USD/year on cards and promotional equipment. That's considered fairly typical for your average video-gamer. And certainly most 14-22 year olds can't be dropping more than a couple hundred dollars a year on the game even if they really love the damn game.

[Chamomile]

Man, if you guys can find a disgruntled former employee, I'll chip in some money to get the PCP and assault rifle we need to get D&D back on track.

Someone kickstart it.

[erik]

Given their history. Poor taste.

[edit: or I should say, that's in especially poor taste]

[tussock]

Threatening death on people is not only a bad thing but is also against the board rules, even subtly and in jest. Y'all should know that.

[hogarth]

I'm not arguing that you can't sell books. I'm saying a TTRPGs won't ever match MTG in revenue.

Likewise, top tier TTRPGs are dwarfed by top tier video game RPGs by several orders of magnitude.

[fearsomepirate]

@Previn, I play about one draft game a year, and play Magic a total of about three or four times a year. In that one draft game, Wizards gets more money out of me than they do out of any of the players at my D&D table.

Even if I don't buy in, someone else has to buy in for me. A friend can join my game for a net $0. Download a dice app, print a sheet, and you're good to go. To play a Magic game, *someone* needs to have bought a deck. Five people need five decks. Five D&D players do not need five PHBs. That's what I mean by "no sharing." Five people can't play with one MTG deck. WOTC doesn't care who bought cards; just that someone did. Pirating and sleeving cards is probably not as cheap as you think, especially when factoring in the time investment. I'll bet most people who do this have already spent more on cards than I, as a relatively dedicated 4e DM, did on books.

Let me put it in perspective. Over the entire life of 4e, which I started in either 2009 or 2010, all the content I acquired represented a total of about $475 to WOTC at point of original sale, and that includes the Insider subscription, which I paid for two years of. And that's because I was the DM. The average *player* at my table represented maybe $20 (estimating about half of the players obtained a book of some kind)...and that's maybe a dozen players over about five years.

If we'd bought everything brand new, which almost none of us did, that comes out to eleven dollars per player per year. MTG draws revenue at a far higher rate. And that's because the minimum commitment is much lower, and the cheapest thing they sell is much cheaper than a PHB.

[MisterDee]

I think D&D can be a hundred-of-millions game. It wouldn't even be that complicated to make it happen. Hard, but not complicated.

It just has to be designed and managed properly.

D&D would need to stop chasing the storygame/ruleslite crowd and return to being a robust game. That's a necessity for a big game, because a significant share of those millions has to come from splatbooks, and more to the point, a big game needs an active community nowadays, and that means having enough depth and width to support an healthy charops and rules discussion community.

(On that particular point, I think rules modules were one of D&D5's good ideas - your ideal rules discussion is something like "what kind of brawler-type character works best when using Version 3 Grapple rules?", not Pun-Pun bullshit.)

Also, the game needs interesting, engaging settings (again, because you need the number of books just to hit the hundred-of-millions, but also because you need common ground for a community to form.) At this point, it's probably best to just to bite the bullet and let FR and Greyhawk fall to second-tier status (that's what they probably are anyway.) Honestly, there's probably a window of opportunity open to just dump them entirely, but whatever.

Finally, WotC would need to be really aggressive with the IP. In the heyday of AD&D, you didn't have "a D&D RPG". You had the Goddamn Gold Boxes (plus a truckload of other games worth playing.) D&D3.x got launched in the Baldur's Gate era (and the BG brand and product identity got leveraged HARD.) And you had cartoons and movies too. Not to mention books that can legitimately be defined as genre-defining (Dragonlance and Salvatore's books), even if the genre is "gaming fiction".

The galling thing is - the window of opportunity is going to be there. Pathfinder forums read EXACTLY like early end-of-AD&D era forums. They're not clamoring for a new edition yet, but the idea is there. People are going to want a new edition of the game soon - not a reinvention like D&D4 or D&D5, but an actual major evolution of the 3.x engine. WotC has time to design the game and build the relationships it needs to push it out with a bang... but they won't do it because they're gambling it all on Mearls' latest thalidomide baby.

Man, sometimes I wish I was in the Seattle area

[Previn]

A player who goes to FNM every week and drafts is spending about $10 every week.

Yeah, but is that a typical player? That's about five hundred dollars a year; I have a hard time imagining that person representing anyone more than the mid tens of thousands.

Maybe I'm off-base, but I imagine that a much bigger portion of the playerbase spends about 200 USD/year on cards and promotional equipment. That's considered fairly typical for your average video-gamer. And certainly most 14-22 year olds can't be dropping more than a couple hundred dollars a year on the game even if they really love the damn game.

I think that you'll find that they drop much more than that just to keep on the current card set. A single booster every week will get them up to ~165$ in a year. If they split a box with their friends (which is pretty common) for each new set in a year, then you're looking at ~265$ a year. I could easily see 400-500$ in a year for a casual MtG player since 3$ boosters are often impulse purchases that are easily done as opposed to 60-70 for a video game and if a friend impulse buys in your little play circle, there's more incentive for you to do the same.

words

You post is so vapid and wrong that this is the only response you get from me:

[Username17]

I think D&D can be a hundred-of-millions game. It wouldn't even be that complicated to make it happen. Hard, but not complicated.

It just has to be designed and managed properly.

D&D would need to stop chasing the storygame/ruleslite crowd and return to being a robust game. That's a necessity for a big game, because a significant share of those millions has to come from splatbooks, and more to the point, a big game needs an active community nowadays, and that means having enough depth and width to support an healthy charops and rules discussion community.

I broadly agree with you there. A caveat I would make is that it needs not only the depth and width to support a healthy charops and rules discussion community, but also several other kinds of communities. Magic is so successful because they sell to Timmy and they sell to Johnny and they sell to Spike. And they sell to these different people who have different buying patterns and ways of interacting with the game with the same packs of cards.

You need to sell to the guy looking to make a new character. You need to sell to the girl who is tinkering to make her character better. You need to sell to the person who doesn't even play the game anymore but likes to keep up with the stories. You need to sell to the obsessive collector. You need to sell to the new player who is attracted to shiny objects.

Back in the 90s, when D&D was going bankrupt and White Wolf was eating their lunch, White Wolf and FASA were basically doing just that. Each new book had new character options for established characters to take. But they also had new character types you could play. And they also had new storyline material that fans wanted to read.

When a new book comes out like Peaches and Pearls, it needs to come out with new options to make a new character, like the Nezumi Race or the Samurai Class. But it also needs doodads that established characters can get. That means shit like magic items, paragon classes, or advancement options that don't have prereqs that players can have already missed the boat on. And it needs to have metaplot in it that people can read and collect and argue about.

-Username17

[Blasted]

I've just joined a 5e game because it's the one available when I am.
Lo and Behold I've discovered that WotC still doesn't offer the rules in any type of ebook. WTF? Is it selling so badly they're not even going to put in that basic amount of effort? Or they think that it's going to drive players to the hardback?

[Username17]

I've just joined a 5e game because it's the one available when I am.
Lo and Behold I've discovered that WotC still doesn't offer the rules in any type of ebook. WTF? Is it selling so badly they're not even going to put in that basic amount of effort? Or they think that it's going to drive players to the hardback?

When they did the Scribd court case they claimed in court that the PHB2 had been downloaded at least a thousand times and their brand manager in an interview justified taking down the legal sales of pdfs by saying that they had proof that pdfs were downloaded illegally more than 10 times for each time they were legally purchased. Put those two together and it's entirely possible that e-books of the 4e PHB2 sold less than a hundred copies.

Back when I used to have insider information at FanPro/Catalyst, the breakeven on an ebook was something like 50 to 70 copies. So leaving aside what damage the suits think piracy enabling does to sales, I don't think WotC ever figured out how to make money selling pdf downloads. The current crop of people aren't exactly a font of new ideas, so I wouldn't expect them to solve that particular puzzle.

-Username17

[ishy]

When they did the Scribd court case they claimed in court that the PHB2 had been downloaded at least a thousand times and their brand manager in an interview justified taking down the legal sales of pdfs by saying that they had proof that pdfs were downloaded illegally more than 10 times for each time they were legally purchased. Put those two together and it's entirely possible that e-books of the 4e PHB2 sold less than a hundred copies.

Back when I used to have insider information at FanPro/Catalyst, the breakeven on an ebook was something like 50 to 70 copies. So leaving aside what damage the suits think piracy enabling does to sales, I don't think WotC ever figured out how to make money selling pdf downloads. The current crop of people aren't exactly a font of new ideas, so I wouldn't expect them to solve that particular puzzle.

-Username17

To be fair, I seem to recall that the legal pdfs for the 4e PHB2 were online for less than a day, before WotC pulled all legal pdfs.
And they did release pdfs of previous editions this year, so I assume, they believe they can make money by selling pdf downloads.

In fact, after checking just a minute ago, it appears they released the 3.5 DMG this week. Guess that is what they've been working on for the past year

[tussock]

Didn't they try to charge, like, ridiculous prices for the 4e ebooks? Hmm, google says they hit at the same price as the hardcovers, after promising 30% off and not delivering that, while Paizo was (and still is) about 75% off for the pdf, or free if you buy the book from them.

Where Wizards went for $40 for the book, and another $40 for the ebook. Then didn't sell many and so gave up. Ironically the only place you could get the pdf then was for free from the internet. Google 4e phb pdf or something, you'd probably find all three, if you cared to.

They're selling more 3.5 books on dndclassics than they can give away free 5e material. I mean, the 3.5 stuff is just new and you can get the 5e stuff at the wizards website, but still, the juxtaposition is lovely.

[Lago PARANOIA]

D&D would need to stop chasing the storygame/ruleslite crowd and return to being a robust game. That's a necessity for a big game, because a significant share of those millions has to come from splatbooks, and more to the point, a big game needs an active community nowadays, and that means having enough depth and width to support an healthy charops and rules discussion community.

D&D needs a campaign setting, like, yesterday. If someone picks up the pieces from 5E D&D, that should be the first thing that they work upon. Before they even hire mechanics guys, they should use their money to attract the most talented fantasy authors that they can get and spend several months brainstorming and focus-group testing the hypothetical campaign setting. That's the biggest obstacle to its success.

The second biggest obstacle to D&D's success is finding a way to consolidate the fragmented playerbase and building from there. As I mentioned, a fully-functioning DDI complete with Virtual Tabletop is the best way to do that. The web application should be the central hub of this new edition whether you're a Timmy, Spike, Johnny, or Grandma. I'm imagining a thing where you log in and you have your choice of:

[*] Looking at the latest issue of Dragon and Dungeon.
[*] Playing a Facebook-style game.
[*] Looking at the player-maintained wiki.
[*] Reading the latest webcomic/short story of one of the campaign settings.
[*] Reading some twee designer-focus article.
[*] Ordering some merchandise online, complete with buying sourcebooks from the damn website.
[*] Actually using the Virtual Tabletop.

[maglag]

I broadly agree with you there. A caveat I would make is that it needs not only the depth and width to support a healthy charops and rules discussion community, but also several other kinds of communities. Magic is so successful because they sell to Timmy and they sell to Johnny and they sell to Spike. And they sell to these different people who have different buying patterns and ways of interacting with the game with the same packs of cards.

You need to sell to the guy looking to make a new character. You need to sell to the girl who is tinkering to make her character better. You need to sell to the person who doesn't even play the game anymore but likes to keep up with the stories. You need to sell to the obsessive collector. You need to sell to the new player who is attracted to shiny objects.

Actually, MTG doesn't sell to Spike, because Spike will not buy randomized packs but instead buy second-hand singles from Timmy and Jhonny and/or win tournaments for profit.

Following on that...

When a new book comes out like Peaches and Pearls, it needs to come out with new options to make a new character, like the Nezumi Race or the Samurai Class. But it also needs doodads that established characters can get. That means shit like magic items, paragon classes, or advancement options that don't have prereqs that players can have already missed the boat on. And it needs to have metaplot in it that people can read and collect and argue about.

-Username17

I believe those are drops on the water considering the bigger picture of MTG.

And that bigger picture is official tournaments with official judges and money prizes and shit. You can literally play MTG for a living. And even if you're a casual scrub, you're still going to the release tournaments for fun or gambling addiction (I may just get super lucky and my opponents will never draw a land and I'll win!)

D&D never really got an organized gaming scene. Most people can't even fully agree how the D&D rules work for any edition. If I meet another MTG player, neither of us need to discuss shady wording interpretations or dozens of pages of houserules just to set up a game.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Actually, MTG doesn't sell to Spike, because Spike will not buy randomized packs but instead buy second-hand singles from Timmy and Jhonny and/or win tournaments for profit.

A robust secondary market drives the primary market as well. Spike's demand to buy specific cards increases Timmy and Johnny's demand for randomized packs. It's indirect, but yes, they are selling to Spike.

[maglag]

Actually, MTG doesn't sell to Spike, because Spike will not buy randomized packs but instead buy second-hand singles from Timmy and Jhonny and/or win tournaments for profit.

A robust secondary market drives the primary market as well. Spike's demand to buy specific cards increases Timmy and Johnny's demand for randomized packs. It's indirect, but yes, they are selling to Spike.

Somebody should tell that to Microsoft and EA and several other gaming companies that have an hard-on hate for reselling their stuff in a secondary market then.

[OgreBattle]

What's the best way to push miniatures then? Is there a way for D&D to develop a 'tactical tournament game' scene (something more like Mordheim than warhammer 40k)?