Zero Buzz on 5E...Is It Dead Out The Gate?

[deaddmwalking]

Local game stores have been disappearing along with regular bookstores. The folks who can get their fix from a specialty shop is a lot lower now than it used to be. Even those shops that are still around seem to be devoting less space to RPGs.

Amazon is a universal channel for people 300+ miles from a game store, so it's huge unless you have a direct channel like Paizo does. I'm surprised that Wizards doesn't push an online store front in that manner.

[Insomniac]

Local game stores have been disappearing along with regular bookstores. The folks who can get their fix from a specialty shop is a lot lower now than it used to be. Even those shops that are still around seem to be devoting less space to RPGs.

Amazon is a universal channel for people 300+ miles from a game store, so it's huge unless you have a direct channel like Paizo does. I'm surprised that Wizards doesn't push an online store front in that manner.

In the last 4 towns I lived in, all of which were quite small, 2 of them had Friendly Local Gamestores and 2 of them didn't. The 2 game stores that did weren't dummies. They knew what buttered their bread. They pushed Magic: The Gathering, Yu Gi Oh, Pokemon, miniatures and board games heavily. The RPG section might have had 3 or 4 rows, very little of it 4E or 5E. As little as, "20 or 30 books in a small bookshelf tucked away in the corner of the store." The majority of the Dungeons and Dragons stuff was ancient 3.0 and 3.5 backlogs, 1E and 2E special edition snazzy suff and Pathfinder. I have to imagine that Amazon is a much bigger deal than brick and mortar by now.

I think they rationalize it as a partnership with Amazon is quick and easy and it means Hasbro doesn't have to spend money (cuz they're done with pen and paper RPGs as an "ongoing concern") and nobody at WOTC has to work. I heard that if you bought through Amazon you could save 40 percent off list price. Plus whatever little cut Amazon took off that. Frank's already explained that RPG margins are slim as a motherfucker so I don't know why WOTC thinks giving up 50 percent off the top before they even see a penny is a good thing.

[ishy]

I live in a town of about 60k+ inhabitants. Don't think there is a local game store there.
But I live adjacent to a city (~350k inhabitants), though sadly my local game store stopped selling RPG books over a decade ago, just MtG and board games etc.

In fact while there are many, many book stores in the city, none of them sell RPG books.
To get to the only store that sells RPG books is, you have to go through a tiny book store, down the stairs hidden in the back, leading to a closed door with a a4 print reading: Warhammer 40k store on it. Open the door to enter the cellar, where they have 1 bookshelf filled with RPG products.

[virgil]

I know of roughly a dozen stores that have a bookcase (or more) dedicated to RPGs, all within half an hour of where I live (depending on traffic), and I'm not really one to search. And they all have D&D 5th on them to some extent. This also doesn't count the fact that at least three Wal-Marts I've been to have the 5E Basic Set on their shelves. A notable percentage of the gaming circles I hang with have had positive opinions on the system as well; at least two campaigns currently.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating that 5E is doing well, but that anecdotal evidence swings both ways when it comes to saying how prevalent something is. And as I pointed out, going by RyanD's decade-old numbers, you can have a huge reduction and *still* be within his margin of error.

[erik]

To get to the only store that sells RPG books is, you have to go through a tiny book store, down the stairs hidden in the back, leading to a closed door with a a4 print reading: Warhammer 40k store on it. Open the door to enter the cellar, where they have 1 bookshelf filled with RPG products.

What? You don't have to bare their mark and give the cypher? Standards are slipping.

Anywho. Insomniac mentioned margins being slim as a motherfucker

but I believe as Frank noted that is after the 40% cut that amazon gets, not before. Otherwise obviously they couldn't give that discount. So they are still making some of that 40% difference via selling through game stores, their main POS.

I know that when I'm trying to buy a game I like I try to support a local game store or buy direct and I don't think I'm alone. A lot of gamers are like that. The sad thing for 5e isn't that their main sales are via amazon, cuz they're not. The sad thing is that is the best hype they can muster, that and selling something is a big uptick relative to selling nothing (what a tear!).

[ishy]

And as I pointed out, going by RyanD's decade-old numbers, you can have a huge reduction and *still* be within his margin of error.

Well the numbers I know off posted by Ryan are these:

They[WotC] also know roughly how many units the buyers at the big chain bookstores are going to take long before the books are printed. The solicitation cycles for the bookstores are longer than the production cycles which means Wizards often has the luxury of "printing to order". When I left the company [IIRC 2002], book store sales were about 50% of the total volume. Since there's been about a 50% dieoff in hobby gaming retailers since then I assume that the ratio is now closer to 75%. The book chain buyers have very good data warehouses and are able to inspect sales on a title by title, store by store basis. While they don't always do as much research as they could, they often do enough to get pretty close to the expected run rate for a given title. They too are "information rich".

[vagrant]

Last place I lived, Barnes and Nobles had 2! shelves dedicated to RPG books. There were 2 local gaming stores, both of which had relegated RPG books to a single bookshelf in a corner in the back with an eclectic mix of shit. (Indie and not.) The only games that regularly ran was PF and oWoD, of course.

[Username17]

From the forbes article linked earlier:

Where are you selling most of your product –hobby shops, bookstores or retailers like Amazon?

The ratios remain the same for us –the hobby stores and the book channel both are tremendous for us, and they both do a big chunk of the business. Amazon, I think, has been a much bigger player this launch than before, for obvious reasons. But you’ve also seen the decline of lots of big box stores –Barnes & Noble doesn’t have as many locations as it did at the last launch, there’s not as many big book stores out there. So I think Amazon is definitely seeing a lot of that kind of mass market purchase, but the hobby store still remains the hardcore place, when your fans are going in there weekly playing games and they can get it products a little bit early. We see a pretty even split between the two channels and that’s consistent with our business for years.

I'll admit, I'm sceptical though. It is really weird that the ratios are still the same as 10 years ago, even though Amazon is a much bigger player for obvious reasons.

I think he's saying that broadly "mass market sales" and "hobby store sales" are roughly equal piles of sales. And that Amazon counts as "mass market sales." So what he's essentially saying is that Amazon's growing share of the pie has come almost exclusively out of Crown Books' lost share. Which I could believe.

Overall, it does kind of look like D&D 5e is going to end up selling all books combined in the first year about what 3e sold of just PHBs in the first month. So... basically about where 4th edition was. Whether that's enough to not get fired or not remains to be seen. It's possible that Hasbro's expectations are sufficiently reduced that it is.

-Username17

[Ferret]

to continue WotC's lurching failure of a hype machine, today CriticalHits' Dave Chalker reports that a new Dragon Magazine has appeared...

in the iOS App store. Story here; http://www.critical-hits.com/blog/2015/ ... ios-store/

I'm checking it out now. I can't believe they didn't release a peep of this OR the FantasyGrounds support for official 5e stuff. Has there even BEEN an official press release from Wizards on the FantasyGrounds deal?

Looks like the issues are going to be free, and they're....surprisingly well designed. Not a lick of crunch to be found, though. I didn't uninstall it, I'll see what the next couple issues are like.

[nockermensch]

to continue WotC's lurching failure of a hype machine, today CriticalHits' Dave Chalker reports that a new Dragon Magazine has appeared...

in the iOS App store. Story here; http://www.critical-hits.com/blog/2015/ ... ios-store/

I'm checking it out now. I can't believe they didn't release a peep of this OR the FantasyGrounds support for official 5e stuff. Has there even BEEN an official press release from Wizards on the FantasyGrounds deal?

Looks like the issues are going to be free, and they're....surprisingly well designed. Not a lick of crunch to be found, though. I didn't uninstall it, I'll see what the next couple issues are like.

So they wrote Press Release: The Magazine, and branded it as Dragon? How exciting.

People who consume D&D products want crunch. This is probably the only lesson that's impossible to miss if you examine D&D history.

[Smeelbo]

At the store where I work, we have one wall (about 5 long shelves) of PathFinder books, basically everything they have in print, which we reguarly restock. That would be about 20 hardcovers, each about 2 deep, plus maybe a couple hundred different softcovers, Adventures and Adventure Paths, Setting and Player Companions. We generally let the softcovers sell out and replace only a select few, but all of the hardcovers are "evergreen," that is they continue to sell week after week.

We have one heavy shelf of unsold 4th Edition D&D books, which sell very rarely. We have one thin shelf of 5th Edition D&D. which sell occasionaly, but which we still restock. We only carry them 1-2 deep.
We have several heavy shelves of 3.5 and OGL, mostly on deep discount.

Everyone I know who plays in a "D&D" campiagn actually plays PathFinder, we reliably sell multiple copies of new PF books. There is a local Meetup group that plays D&D 4th and 5th edition, but that group is composed of all the players who cannot find a table in a home game, and with whom you would never play with by choice.

All the D&D I play is PathFinder, and I have absolutely no interest in playing 5th Edition. You could literally not pay me to DM 5th Edition (and yes, the store offered and I refused).

We also have FATE, Burning Wheel, Savage Worlds, and ShadowRun games and campaigns loosely associated with the store.

As for statistics, I am compiling a list of games offered at the three major game conventions in Northern California: DunDraCon, KublaCon and Pacificon over the last five years or so, and will post them when I'm done.



Smeelbo

[MfA]

People who consume D&D products want crunch. This is probably the only lesson that's impossible to miss if you examine D&D history.

Ever since groups not run by Gygax started playing high level games the elitists have been telling them they are having wrong bad fun ... no one in this era has the sophistication to handle more player agency than that.

Somehow those inmates are running the asylum now ... I thought it would have crashing down by now, but they're hanging in there.

[Dogbert]

Somehow those inmates are running the asylum now ... I thought it would have crashing down by now.

It's all cycles. 5E was just a formalization of things coming full circle. We're back in the Bad Old Days, and we'll have to wait until people once again get fed up with the viking hats for the cycle to move once again to the next phase (which, sadly, may or may not be the idiotic hyper-realizms period).

[tussock]

@MfA, the compaints in the OD&D era from designers where that their rules only really supported going up to around 14th level, but people were playing 40th level characters and complaining that the rules didn't provide any challenge any more.

Yes, they were rightly dismissive of that complaint, and officially placed the Gods as 16th-20th level PCs with one or two unique powers each (and +100 hp) and politely suggested people accept victory and retire. That works pretty well in 3e too.

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@Smeelbo, #stats, excellent, looking forward to it.

[ishy]

@MfA, the compaints in the OD&D era from designers where that their rules only really supported going up to around 14th level, but people were playing 40th level characters and complaining that the rules didn't provide any challenge any more.

Yes, they were rightly dismissive of that complaint, and officially placed the Gods as 16th-20th level PCs with one or two unique powers each (and +100 hp) and politely suggested people accept victory and retire. That works pretty well in 3e too.

This message is brought to you by Tussock Is Always Wrong About Everything(TM).

It is often a temptation to the referee to turn his dungeons into a veritable gift shoppe of magical goodies, ripe for plucking by his players. Similarly, by a bit of fudging, outdoor expeditions become trips to the welfare department for heaps of loot. Monsters exist for the slaying of the adventurers — whether of the sort who “guard” treasure, or of the wandering variety. Experience points are heaped upon the undeserving heads of players, levels accumulate like dead leaves in autumn, and if players with standings in the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s of levels do not become bored, they typically become filled with an entirely false sense of accomplishment, they are puffed up with hubris. As they have not really earned their standings, and their actual ability has no reflection on their campaign level, they are easily deflated (killed) in a game which demands competence in proportionate measure to players’ levels.

God of the Hyborians, this being has no known form, but his worshipers like to present him as a perfectly formed human male. Mitra is a 40th level magic/cleric type and uses the astral spell with no range limitation.

[OgreBattle]

Did Gygax ever run a level 30-40 campaign?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Similarly, by a bit of fudging, outdoor expeditions become trips to the welfare department for heaps of loot.

I've long known that this guy was a douchebag, but god-fucking-damn. What a douchebag.

[tussock]

This volume is something else, also: our last attempt to reach the so-called "Monte Hall" DM's. Perhaps now some of the 'giveaway' campaigns will look as foolish as they truly are. This is our last attempt to delineate the absurdity of 40+ level characters. When Odin, the All-Father has only(?) 300 hit points, who can take a 44th level Lord seriously?

The highest level PCs in the original Greyhawk campaign by Gygax were about 16th level by then. After they got castles and shit the game turned into a PvP thing where they'd sometimes try to loot each other's stuff, people would follow another group through the dungeon under Castle Greyhawk as an easy way to get deeper with no effort.

Dungeons deemed suitable for that top level PC were things like the Tomb of Horrors, with all the "read the DM's mind or die" traps, which is what EGG always meant by player-skill. The story of one attempt was getting close solo with a Fighter using an army of Orcs to show up the right options, but running out of them and dying to the juggernaut, while a group full of casters made it through with few losses but chose the wrong ending so missed the treasure (and decided not to try again). Totally playtested, death of characters lost therein permanent.

You can imagine, if Tomb of Horrors suits player-skill appropriate for level 16, what he means by player-skill appropriate to "20's, 30's, or 40's of levels". At level 10 you should beat hordes of giants by subterfuge and raising rebellions, at level 13 a whole city of Drow should be no problem because player-skill, at level 15 you kill a God on their home plane, at level 16 take on a Demi-lich on home turf full of no-save-just-die stuff if you grab the wrong lever or go left instead of right. Later authors said by level 18 you were supposed to raid the Abyss and kill Orcus to save the Realms, after managing thousands of demons, a city of liches, multiple Tarrasques, green slime and worse traps abounding, and a dragon who could deal 3000 damage in an area, save for half (because what, you went to the lower planes and forgot your fire immunity? LOL).

But early D&D was crazy all the time. They used plane-shift traps and ended up in the old west or in space facing death-ray guns in the hands of invulnerable robots for a few weeks, a Wizard ended up on Mars solo without a spellbook and had to John Carter his way home, all before 10th level. Shrinking and other Wonderland stuff, which is where all the giant mushrooms come from (that and the 70's). There was no rest in the base Dungeon or anything, you made it out every session or you died in there. Then you started back at 1st level, on rolled stats, every time (though they used a whole bunch of dice for stats).

[Blasted]

Tomb of Horrors and similar adventures such as To The Aid Of Falx were competition modules, run with a specified set of adventurers at cons. The winners were chosen by who either won, or survived with the most loot. As such those modules in particular are full of closet trolls and in general created to provide TPKs to all but the most lucky parties. They were never (originally) meant to be run as an adventure where characters are expected to survive.
So to claim it as an example of a 16th level adventure expected by EGG is disingenuous. You need to look at the published adventure modules to see what was expected of such parties.

Not to say that, for instance, Temple of Elemental Evil didn't have the occasional closet troll. But these adventures didn't continually aim to kill the party in the same manner as the competition modules.

In spite of his character killing reputation, EGG was known to have "do-overs" on occasion and similar "lenient" policies on single player death. Certain nostalgic players like to wax about the deadly early editions of AD&D, but from what I've heard from the originators and my own experience I don't believe that it ever existed quite like that.

The weirdness of AD&D is well established though. That Barrier Peaks adventure certainly gave my group a jolt on the first play through.

[tussock]

Gary Gygax would giggle like a small child when people fell into his death traps, and do the same thing when his characters fell into other people's. Arneson and Gygax both were constantly inventing new rules to make the game harder as their players got better at playing it. Rapidly powering up Fighters and nerfing Wizards (all removed for 3e), which they mostly deployed the power-ups at 1st level and the hard-mode stuff higher up.

Gygax invented the Drow with their +3 kit that you can't have, the earseeker, the rot grub, the mimic, the cloaker, poison potions and cursed scrolls, the backbiter spear, the rust monster and the disenchanter, the beholder and the gas spore, the fireball that kills all your henchmen and the lightning bolt that kills the mage who casts it, the shrieker you have to immediately charge and the violet fungus that looks just like it which kills you for coming close. All of that shit happened to his players. All of it.



I have no doubt that they fudged the odd resurrection survival roll and ignored the level limits on demi-humans and dual-classing restrictions on humans, that they got huge stats and better hit points at 1st level, that the first few levels of Castle Greyhawk were pretty cruisy, that every single one of the fiddlier rules was ignored to let the game run quicker. Maybe once or twice a death trap went off without any clues to remind people of after and it was funnier if they didn't die.

None of this modern bullshit about elite heroism either, enslaving morale-failure victims for trap duty was normal, as was dodging fights, running away, leaving folk to grisly fates for lack of reward, occasional pet dragons, and accoutrements from other planes. They had plenty of things to help, but the game was completely lethal if you played it outside optimal strategies, and lots of EGG's players never got past mid levels (and the ones who did were mostly his kids and his DM).

---

I see your ToEE and note the giant frogs right at that start that just kill 1st level PCs who forget that all water is death.

The tourney modules were certainly compact, but Gygax wrote several times about how crap the players were at them, disgusted at how much they must have all been coddled to not even bother checking the magical darkness inside the front door with a 10' pole. Obviously it was a no-save death-trap, what else do you go to the effort of putting permanent magical darkness over?

[ishy]

What I’m getting at here is a phenomenon called the killer campaign, something that even a GM with the best of intentions can precipitate if he is not careful and does not have a strong sense of the scope and spirit of the game. In this kind of activity, the GM thinks nothing of putting unbeatable foes and insurmountable obstacles before the PCs at every turn. The result, of course, is that the PCs are killed or so severely incapacitated that they are no longer viable. But this is of no import to the “killer GM” or to the players who meekly or ignorantly tolerate his methods; after all, new PCs are a dime a dozen, aren’t they?

No, they’re not! The killer campaign basically defeats the principal reason for becoming involved in RPG activity, for it eliminates the vehicle via which participants gain ongoing satisfaction-their PCs, which are created and which exist so that they can be developed and nurtured. Unless the game system is specifically designed to accommodate dime-a-dozen NPCs (and, as pointed out before, this type of game is not common), then anything even remotely resembling a killer campaign is simply not the way to play.

[virgil]

Have we talked about the fact there were at least two layoffs during 5E's release?

[Previn]

Have we talked about the fact there were at least two layoffs during 5E's release?

We did briefly.

[deaddmwalking]

Look for Ferret's post near the bottom.

[tussock]

Last one, I'm done.

In this kind of activity, the GM thinks nothing of putting unbeatable foes and insurmountable obstacles before the PCs at every turn.

He's not exaggerating. He means it's OK to have an insurmountable obstacle to the front, and unbeatable foe to the left, so long as you can go right and there's a clue somewhere for the players so they can do that. It's the difference between a DM intending to beat the PCs, and one giving the players a chance to fail.