How would you resurrect the D&D brand?

[CapnTthePirateG]

Pretty self-explanatory. You have no products or licensing, no competent staff, and a tremendously fractured fanbase. Is this even salvageable?

[Slade]

Bring back the old editions.

Even if you are making version 6.
Bring back what fans want.

Heck, you can make a bit of 4 or 5 not to please them.

See, this is what 5E promised, something for everyone, but they never delivered.
You don't need that competent staff to do this,

There was a lot of stuff to do still in 3.5, 4 and 5 (if we feel like continuing it).

Yes, it is unheard of to continue an older brand/version, but that is why it is innovative.

By bring back 3.5, we steal from Pathfinder. They goal/creed is "3.5 lives": well, we show we do already.

This can start with a new 3.5 PHB 3 (which encompasses new classes): we will definitely get sales since they will want to see if it is worth it to come back.
If we fail to make a good book, we will have issues there.

But again, we get 4 and 5E books for them.

And while we build that we figure out what makes 6E better. We won't crap at our old fans. That was where we lost fans of 3E when 4 was made.

We also won't promise what we can't deliver: that was where we lost a few 5E buyers.

[Prak]

Step 1- fire all existing D&D staff. Or at least the heads of D&D staff, I am open to the idea that there exists a few low level employees in the D&D pool that have not yet been corrupted.
Step 2- Meet with the creative directors maybe head of Design from the Magic division, talk to them about a commitment to create a game with the narrative and mechanical strength of Magic (it's not perfect, but compared to D&D, it is)
Step 3- Either try to get MaRo to run a Great Designer Search: D&D Edition, or crib notes and run your own.
Step 4- Once you've gotten some fresh blood and tracked down at least one competent designer who wants to work on D&D, start working on a new edition. Keep some trickle of money coming in by quietly replacing the fired 5e staff with your new people, and rely heavily on story stuff that you can freelance out, but make sure every story has a piece of crunch with it. It's not like 5e is focusing on putting out books, so I doubt this would heavily impact finance.
Step 5- When your new edition is past the preliminary playtesting stage, announce it, and do some public (REAL) playtesting. Listen to the public, but have a firm stance on trying to make things as workable as possible. Shoot down anything that is more grognardy than helpful, but politely. At this point, start releasing some tidbits about your new setting, and how new bits and pieces might work in old settings.

Basically, kick out the people who are the problem, end the DMZ between Magic and D&D, and try to get players to play because your game is good rather than the only game in town/the kleenex of gaming.

[Whipstitch]

One of the few times I ever read anyone gush about 4e's "Points of Light" their highest praise was that the lack of details "gave the DM more room for fudging things without being wrong." And you know what? Putting that idea into the "Pro" side of the ledger is exactly the kind of thinking that's been killing the franchise. If you half-ass your books then the players who lack the creativity to fill in those blanks will find your product unhelpful while those who are savvy/invested enough to practically write their own games might realize that they don't actually need you at all. You're fucked either way, and the only way forward is to work hard and hope that you can write enough cool shit that people will keep more more of your work than they throw out. To that end I think one of the healthiest things a new edition could do is launch a strong new campaign setting right out of the gate. Lead with that shit hard and get people excited about the actual fucking product again instead of the god damned edition wars for once.

[Username17]

• Step One: Create Content Chanels.
• Step Two: Fill those Chanels with Content.

4th edition was a bomb. Dropped the player base by an order of magnitude. Back in 2008/2009, the most pessimistic skeptics like myself weren't even suggesting that it might be doing as badly as it actually was even in hyperbolic jest. But even when 4th edition was busy dying there were still a hundred thousand people paying ten bucks a month for insider subscriptions. That's a million fucking dollars a month. That isn't take-home, because running all this shit costs money, but it's certainly indicative. And server costs being what they are, your overhead certainly wouldn't be even doubled if you had ten times as much content on there.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth has been made about how difficult it is to make a virtual table top that is remotely as easy to use as a plasticized mat and a grease pencil. But honestly, mostly people want subscription content to be, well, content. You have a staff of fucking writers. Even if your staff is like six people, you should be able to crank out multiple five hundred word challenges every day. You also have artists. You can drop some basadd monster art every day, and you should. Putting up a weekly dungeon should be trivial. And so on.

You need free content every day. And you need premium content every day. The free content brings in the kids, the premium content brings in millions of dollars. There doesn't have to be a big difference between them. Just the fact that there's moar content in the premium pile will get people paying for it. You also need a campaign world to flog, and the two can go together. You put together a simple Google Earth type deal for your 3rd Edition AD&D default planet, and you put thumbtacks on it for every adventure you sell and every weekly dungeon and every free and premium town writeup. The map isn't just a tool for the players to plan their travels and conquests and kingdom managements - it sells subscriptions and sells books by telling people who click on the City of Bladereach at the end of the blurb that they can find out more in the Banemires book and also in the subscription-only dungeon of the Bladereach Catacombs. Shit like that.

You also want to get the players involved. You can have mini-contests where people submit art or stories and the winners go on the website. Start monthly, but honestly there are enough D&D players who are half assed artists and wannabe Tolkiens that you could swiftly go to weekly user content highlights. You could even do a "shared world" thing, where players could submit their adventures and every so often you'd tack one of them to the world map that everyone could see.

You need to have a good set of rules. You need to have a decent rate of book production. But the bottom line is that you need free and for-money content chanels and you need people to be getting content from them quickly enough that they don't get bored and join another game.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Four of the five most popular games on Roll20 for the past two years are all D&D (including Pathfinder). The ninth is also D&D, and the tenth is a D&D knock-off. 5e currently has more active games (where "active" means "at least one person loaded up the game's virtual tabletop in the last three months") than PF and 3.X combined. 5e games alone make up nearly 40% of the latest sample. Add in PF, 3.X, 4e, and AD&D and you're looking at 75% of all games on Roll20 being some version of D&D, the majority of which are the currently supported edition.

Now, Roll20 is not the entire market. Physical games could be an extremely different story. It's also possible that the Orr Group is just straight-up manufacturing data to lock in their recent official partnership with 5e. Lacking further data or some kind of hard evidence of deception, however, I'm going to assume the shape of things online and off is at least similar as to what's been reported by the Orr Group.

As far as I can tell, the reason why 5e isn't printing more books is not because they wouldn't sell. It's because Hasbro isn't paying very close attention and Mearls would rather collect a paycheck for lazily maintaining low expectations than collect the same paycheck for exceeding them.

[Kaelik]

(where "active" means "at least one person loaded up the game's virtual tabletop in the last three months")

That is quite possibly the worst definition of active that could exist.

I mean, I suppose technically "zero people" would be worse, but come on.

I have games that literally have zero players because I use them to build and structure adventures that I'm not sure will ever see play, I certainly design all my roll20 games ahead of time.

I mean, I don't care about the larger edition war aspects that much, except to lament that my prediction about 5e killing D&D by being just the minimal amount of shitty needed to make people play it is probably coming to pass, but that's basically like measuring the quality of a multiplayer shooter by crowing about the fact that people are playing the campaign.

[hogarth]

• Step One: Create Content Chanels.
• Step Two: Fill those Chanels with Content.

I call dibs on Chanel Number Five.

[Username17]

• Step One: Create Content Chanels.
• Step Two: Fill those Chanels with Content.

I call dibs on Chanel Number Five.

Sure!

It's an internet content delivery magazine. There's no reason or excuse for content to be particularly limited on any axis. Somebody should write up thirty magic items and then the site can show them at the rate of one per day for a month. Somebody can write up a bunch of monsters and then you can have a Halloween Countdown.

Basically you're doing Ancient History's Farcast Yearblog, except you have a dozen people doing it simultaneously and you have an editor and you charge people money for half of it. Because you have a lot of contributors, if someone has a dry spell or has to attend a sick relative or whatever, the consumers shouldn't even notice. You just keep doling out content and have a huge backlog ready to plop down.

-Username17

[Blade]

There are two ways to successfully "resurrect the D&D brand". There's resurrecting it as a beloved PnP RPG franchise (a tall order), and there's resurrecting it as a money-making IP. Both imply different things (even if there might be a happy middle ground somewhere).

At this point, I thnk that having D&D as the RPG we all know or used to know isn't a good solution. It is required to have it, because you cannot afford not to offer it for those who still want it, but success and money lies elsewhere. Just like the Pokémon Company still needs to have regular Pokémon games, but are probably more successfull in a business sense with Pokémon Go and merchandising.

[Whipstitch]

The problem with that sort of thinking is that you're really putting the cart before the horse. The lesson of Pokémon isn't that one facet of your business is more important than the others, it's that each decent product you put out has a halo effect on your other products. E.g., Pokémon Go made an ass ton of money but so did Black & Whitel and weirdly enough both appeared to have boosted console and merch sales even though the former doesn't need one and the latter was a friggin' remake. So at the end of the day I'd argue that you absolutely should treat the TTRPG as the core of your fanbase and make sure that it's a solid product. Whipping up the base is simply too important to the brand's overall image to do otherwise.

[Voss]

There are two ways to successfully "resurrect the D&D brand". There's resurrecting it as a beloved PnP RPG franchise (a tall order), and there's resurrecting it as a money-making IP. Both imply different things (even if there might be a happy middle ground somewhere).
.

D&D the game isn't a money making IP, however. You're pretty much talking about turning a setting into a money-making IP and most of those are tapped out or terrible.

But honestly I don't think a functional and supported game is all that difficult. They did it well for quite a while, before, well, shitting on everything and doing 4e. And paizo continued with the same shit fairly successfully.

Even 5e would have gone somewhat well had they fucking supported it and fleshed it out with more content. A straight up MM2 and a book or two of classes and 'paths,' as well as a sane way to integrate feats into the game without setting your base bonus on fire. Then straight into setting-town, which they desperately need.

[Occluded Sun]

I would look at what parts of past editions actually excited people, and try to create new equivalents, ideally without pandering or 'icing-without-cake'.

A strong setting that engaged players and fired up their imaginations is a good bet. People can always take the mechanics and make their own worlds if a strong world is supplied as an example, and a pre-existing setting would help draw everyone who doesn't have such a world ready to go.

[hyzmarca]

• Step One: Create Content Chanels.
• Step Two: Fill those Chanels with Content.

I call dibs on Chanel Number Five.

Sure!

It's an internet content delivery magazine. There's no reason or excuse for content to be particularly limited on any axis. Somebody should write up thirty magic items and then the site can show them at the rate of one per day for a month. Somebody can write up a bunch of monsters and then you can have a Halloween Countdown.

Basically you're doing Ancient History's Farcast Yearblog, except you have a dozen people doing it simultaneously and you have an editor and you charge people money for half of it. Because you have a lot of contributors, if someone has a dry spell or has to attend a sick relative or whatever, the consumers shouldn't even notice. You just keep doling out content and have a huge backlog ready to plop down.

-Username17

I believe that a certain perfume corporation would sue you for trademark infringement.

Anyway. what you really want to do seems pretty obvious to me: D&DCU - Dungeons and Dragons Cinematic Universe.

Tabletop gaming was a niche market in the 80s when D&D was big. Now, it's a much smaller niche market. But D&D's strangth was never in its rules. D&D's strength was always in its IP. Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Planescape, Ravenloft, Greyhawk, Mystara, any one of these could be a setting for dozens of television series and movies. And D&D has even more of them.

D&D has three movies, two of wich sucked less than the first. It has dozens of video games. Countless novels. It had fucking action figures Licensing is where the money is. So do that.

First of all, you tap Peter Jackson to make a Drizzt trillogy, if he ain't butchering the Similarion instead, get R.A. Salvatore to write the script.

There you go, that's half a billion dollars profit right there.

Then you build out. Make a Dragonlance movie with Lord Soth as a major character, then connect that with a Ravenloft movie by having the same Lord Soth show up in the Demiplane of Dread.

You go with three phases, a total of about 20 movies using the best of the best of D&D's IP, and culminate with a massive multiversal threat that brings all the heroes from the standalone movies together.

[angelfromanotherpin]

There you go, that's half a billion dollars profit right there.

Maybe for the studio. The licensee would see a lot less than that. And that's if the studio doesn't decide to shitcan the license, make the cat sidekick the main character, and attach the script to a gritty reboot of Puss in Boots or what-the-fuck-ever.

[hyzmarca]

There you go, that's half a billion dollars profit right there.

Maybe for the studio. The licensee would see a lot less than that. And that's if the studio doesn't decide to shitcan the license, make the cat sidekick the main character, and attach the script to a gritty reboot of Puss in Boots or what-the-fuck-ever.

You make your own studio.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Oh, of course you do. Then you use your brand new independent film studio to produce multiple giant action spectacle blockbusters. Because that's totally how that works.

[Heaven's Thunder Hammer]

There you go, that's half a billion dollars profit right there.

Maybe for the studio. The licensee would see a lot less than that. And that's if the studio doesn't decide to shitcan the license, make the cat sidekick the main character, and attach the script to a gritty reboot of Puss in Boots or what-the-fuck-ever.

You make your own studio.

Agreed. For all the crap writing that Twilight is, you can't argue with Stephenie Meyer's business sense. She licensed out the rights to the first movie... But then for Books 2, 3 & 4, licensed the rights to her own newly created film company. She then hired another study to film the movie for her film company, and kept a MUCH bigger chunk of the profits.

[hyzmarca]

Oh, of course you do. Then you use your brand new independent film studio to produce multiple giant action spectacle blockbusters. Because that's totally how that works.

That's pretty much exactly what Marvel did.

[Chamomile]

Oh, of course you do. Then you use your brand new independent film studio to produce multiple giant action spectacle blockbusters. Because that's totally how that works.

That's pretty much exactly what Marvel did.

Step 1: Convince Merill Lynch to give you five hundred million dollars.

[Dogbert]

Step 1: Convince Merill Lynch to give you five hundred million dollars.

You mean:

Step 1: Find a team that actually produces a blockbuster d&d movie.
Step 2: Repeat three times so the execs see the endeavour is profitable.
Step 3: Convince Merill Lynch to give you five hundred million dollars.

Mind you, roleplaying games could survive becoming "accesory industry for a movie studio" with much more dignity than the comicbook industry.

But then, step 1 (let alone 2) sounds as feasible as saying "Step 1: Win a land war in Asia."

[Voss]

Oh, of course you do. Then you use your brand new independent film studio to produce multiple giant action spectacle blockbusters. Because that's totally how that works.

That's pretty much exactly what Marvel did.

Marvel had a more money than the D&D division of WotC does. It's maybe seven people who go home when the MtG team decides to turn the lights off and lock the building.

D&D makes so little money for Hasbro, they don't even bother including the figure in annual reports. They crow (or used to, its been several years since I dug up a Hasbro annual report) about MtG, and then it maybe gets mentioned that WotC has miscellaneous other projects that aren't in the red.

That isn't the basis for a film studio.

[Mask_De_H]

Channel has two Ls, yeah.

Consistent, valuable production seems like the general way to be successful in any creative written endeavor.

If you were looking to usurp D&D, what would you do on top of create and produce for content channels?

[Voss]

Pick the damn pace up, do something about options paralysis during play.

I know they tried it during 4e, but they damn well did it wrong, both with the asinine way they track condition end points, and with even more shitty bullshit bonuses floating around slowing everything to a crawl. Which also means no padded sumo, or the math failures involving CR and monster HP that infest 5e. Monster HP needs to revert to BECMI/1e numbers, where you fucking murder things in the course of 2-3 actions, because no one has time for 2 hour combat encounters with minions (or even bosses).


Whatever the fuck is going on at the table (combat, negotiations, exploration, whatever), it needs to go snappily and everyone needs to be involved. If Bob and Kate are stroking their phones, you've gone and done it wrong.

[rasmuswagner]

For the TTRPG rules, two things:
1. Everyone should reasonably be able to participate in every minigame.
2. VAH *must* be a reasonable lifestyle choice.
3. There must be plenty of between-sessions game (shopping, crawling the website for that perfect spell or sword technique your character wants).
4. Get at least one competent rules guy. Seriously, Paizo's allround level of rules quality went *down* when Sean K. fucking Reynolds left.