The state of Post-OSR content

DangerousPuhson said:
People barely remember what happened in the last session, let alone what happened twenty sessions ago. And because the megadungeon is a singular unit, all the keys go to existing locks, all the McGuffins go to NPCs, all the factions link with other factions... and breaking that stuff up over the long term just caused things to get lost in the shuffle.
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To be fair, we're suffering the same problem in the Ptolus city campaign I'm currently playing in... Sometimes the DM just needs to take a note from CRPG's and cue the players that they already have the key/MacGuffin/dialog note necessary to advance the story.
 
DangerousPuhson said:
ones with really small, mostly independent levels (e.g. Barrowmaze)
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I feel like you and I have entirely different versions of Barrowmaze. There's no breaking "Barrowmaze Complete" up into pieces. And I continue to argue that at 300+ rooms, it doesn't matter if it's only one dungeon level, it's a megadungeon.
 
<greyhawk>
The1True said:
Sorry, could you expand on this, please?
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If you use Darlene's maps with the population figures for the various nations given in the guide you get severely underpopulated lands. I remember someone doing the calculations and finding that most nations didn't even make one person per square mile. The most likely explanation is that Gary and Darlene didn't get the scale right. I think though that LotR may have had an influence as well, since the 'nations' of Middle-Earth are mostly empty too (though there was an in-world reason for that).

(Personally, I'd retcon this by saying 1) those are the borders claimed by the various nations, but they only control much smaller, densely populated core lands so the figures don't truly reflect the population in the area and 2) since this is a fantasy world, to truly approximate population density you would need to include all of the various races in your calculations. Humans are the only intelligent species on Earth, but that's not the case on Oerth. edit I think I am aiming for carrying capacity here. Based on the area and terrain these lands should hold many more people. In the real world, only humans are people, while in a fantasy world this needs to include demihumans, humanoids, and who knows what else.)


The Heretic
 
The1True said:
I feel like you and I have entirely different versions of Barrowmaze. There's no breaking "Barrowmaze Complete" up into pieces.
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Is Barrowmaze not a region of several detached cairns, mostly independent from one another except by general geographic proximity?

Secondly, I agree that there can be one-level megadungeons. I too define them by the room count rather than the level stacks.
 
The Heretic said:
<greyhawk>


If you use Darlene's maps with the population figures for the various nations given in the guide you get severely underpopulated lands. I remember someone doing the calculations and finding that most nations didn't even make one person per square mile. The most likely explanation is that Gary and Darlene didn't get the scale right. I think though that LotR may have had an influence as well, since the 'nations' of Middle-Earth are mostly empty too (though there was an in-world reason for that).

(Personally, I'd retcon this by saying 1) those are the borders claimed by the various nations, but they only control much smaller, densely populated core lands so the figures don't truly reflect the population in the area and 2) since this is a fantasy world, to truly approximate population density you would need to include all of the various races in your calculations. Humans are the only intelligent species on Earth, but that's not the case on Oerth. edit I think I am aiming for carrying capacity here. Based on the area and terrain these lands should hold many more people. In the real world, only humans are people, while in a fantasy world this needs to include demihumans, humanoids, and who knows what else.)


The Heretic
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The main human continent in Eberron is Khorvaire. The creator, Keith Baker, thought it should be pretty small, and that all the countries should be the size of European countries. He got overruled, so in the 3.5 edition they ended up with a continent a bit bigger than North America excluding Greenland,* with sixteen countries.

There must have been problems with that, I assume when they started designing modules that involved a lot of travel and realized that a caravan could, optimistically, take more than 4 months to go from one end of the continent to the other. Because for 4e, 5e and 5.5e/DnD 2024 they shrunk the area to something like 40% of what it was previously. Which is still pretty big, but at least a little bit more manageable.

Populations are about a tenth what they should be using the smaller map, but that's an easy fix.

* Don't, just don't.
 
Beoric said:
There must have been problems with that, I assume when they started designing modules that involved a lot of travel and realized that a caravan could, optimistically, take more than 4 months to go from one end of the continent to the other. Because for 4e, 5e and 5.5e/DnD 2024 they shrunk the area to something like 40% of what it was previously. Which is still pretty big, but at least a little bit more manageable.
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Eberron has trains and airships, though. How worried are we about travel times for caravans?
 
yeah, the original Barrowmaze was just the cairns of the Barrowmoor, I think. "Barrowmaze Deluxe" connects them to the maze beneath.

"Highfell" is a bunch of wizard's towers on a floating island (that would've benefited from a similar connecting dungeon imo) that could easily be cannibalized for parts, though.
 
Alexander Moonbeam said:
Eberron has trains and airships, though. How worried are we about travel times for caravans?
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They are both expensive, and both new. The lightning rail is limited to where its tracks go, and both east-west links were destroyed in the war. The western rail serves four countries, and the eastern only serves one, while there are 16 countries/regions on Khorvaire. There also aren't many lines, basically big cities, and smaller centres that are on the way to big cities. Goods going elsewhere go by caravan or ship.

Airships can go elsewhere, but mostly don't. Only the large cities have docking towers. They cannot actually land because of their architecture, so if there is no docking tower, people and goods embark/disembark by ladder or crane, and the ship must be tethered to keep it from floating or wandering away (the propulsion for the airship being provided by a bound elemental). You could, in theory, charter one, but: (a) you have to compensate them enough to justify the other income they are going to forgo; (b) you have to pay a big risk premium; and (c) they are already making good money, so why are they going to take that risk exactly? An airship can only be piloted by a member of House Lyrandar who has a dragonmark, and the House own most of the airships and do not allow those kinds of risks. There aren't very many independent pilots, so chartering an airship costs 17,000 gp/day. You can buy an airship at 92,000 gp, plus the cost of a dragonmarked Lyrandar captain and a dragonmarked Lyrander pilot (at least), engineers, and a crew. But obviously here we are getting into high level play.

So to compensate for the ludicrous size of the presumptive adventuring area, you end up with modules where a wealthy patron is paying 17,000 gp/day to charter an airship, while entrusting the mission to low level PCs, to whom they are paying peanuts in comparison.

To be clear, I don't mind the pricing. I think it is good that it costs a small fortune to buy/charter flexible transportation. Fast, flexible transportation should be part of the reward for being high level with cash to blow. But I do think the distances should be smaller even than the reduced, 4e/5e size.
 
I mostly agree with the commenter. I think another factor for me is price-point. 3.5e moved over to hard cover books for everything and I didn't have space in my shelf, enthusiasm for the material, or money in my wallet for it. Meanwhile, 3.5e Dungeon Crawl Classics was putting out fun, lavishly illustrated products that were an easy purchase that made a Saturday morning trip to the game store worthwhile. I think somewhere around there, the internet became reliable enough that I started to hunt for and collect older material. But at no point could I afford all those boxed sets. I still lament not picking up the incredible Planescape boxed sets describing the outer planes, now worth hundreds of dollars on Ebay. I think the reason that everybody had a copy of S3 and A1 and G1-3 back in the day, like the commenter noted, is because you could afford these products in a casual trip down to the game store, but as the products became more ambitious, they priced the majority of their consumers out of the market.

Now that I can afford it, I miss boxed sets, and I wish Drivethru would find a way to print them. I'd love to see some TSR reprints, I'd love to see some of the more ambitious community content presented in this more usable format (instead of stuffing megadungeons into 500 pg paperbacks that split down the spine 5 minutes after you start using them at the table), hell, I'd love to make my own boxed set!
 
The1True said:
(instead of stuffing megadungeons into 500 pg paperbacks that split down the spine 5 minutes after you start using them at the table)
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Yeah, my year old reprint of the 1e MM is already telling me how it's going to die. The one it replaces was printed in 1979.

The latest Eberron offering I bought from WotC started to break the day I unboxed it. I wasn't expecting much, since the creator, Keith Baker, was only a "consultant", and yet somehow it still disappointed.

Really I only got it to keep WotC interested in the setting, but there is a reason the Eberron material Baker writes and sells on DMGsguild consistently outsells WotC products. The content is way better, as is the quality of the books.
 
The1True said:
I mostly agree with the commenter. I think another factor for me is price-point. 3.5e moved over to hard cover books for everything and I didn't have space in my shelf, enthusiasm for the material, or money in my wallet for it.
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I remember this coming up in the 4e/PFRPG era. Someone had a blog post or something about how soft cover books were money drains for WotC and Paizo. It doesn't surprise me that Hasbro doesn't do soft cover books anymore.


The Heretic
 
The Heretic said:
I remember this coming up in the 4e/PFRPG era. Someone had a blog post or something about how soft cover books were money drains for WotC and Paizo. It doesn't surprise me that Hasbro doesn't do soft cover books anymore.


The Heretic
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I'd be interested to read that. Like I mentioned, my theory is that old paperbacks made an easy casual purchase for many hobbyists, whereas prestige hardcovers and boxes reduced that pool of consumers significantly. If the actual truth is that that smaller group of consumers were still spending more overall than the large casual group, that's interesting to me. Like how does that work?
 
The1True said:
I'd be interested to read that. Like I mentioned, my theory is that old paperbacks made an easy casual purchase for many hobbyists, whereas prestige hardcovers and boxes reduced that pool of consumers significantly. If the actual truth is that that smaller group of consumers were still spending more overall than the large casual group, that's interesting to me. Like how does that work?
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There are two separate things that were happening, IIRC. First, sales were great when the core rulebooks came out, but that could only last so long before that market is saturated. As you alluded to, DMs were the smaller group of consumers that were spending more than the overall group. You didn't need to buy much more if you were a player. The second issue was the the profit margin was worse for the softcover books. The big corporate overlord only cared about profit. To increase profits, WotC changed their business model. They started to release more splat books that would appeal to the player base, and they favored hardcovers over softcovers.

Profit margins are a big deal. The band New Order lost a lot of money during the first printing of the 10" for the song "Blue Monday", because their label spent so much money on the cool, futuristic packaging that they ended up losing several cents for each copy sold. Doh!

I wonder if the piracy had something to do with this too. It would be easier (and less destructive to the source) to scan a softcover book than a hardcover book.

Ineffective Voulging said:
The casual player buys or pirates the pdf?
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Probably either pirates the PDF or ignores the product completely. At the tail end of the 3.x era, I remember my group chipping in to buy some of the splat books for themselves. At that time hardcovers were easier to use at the table, particularly if you were only using a few of them.


The Heretic
 
The 3e era was the zenith of splatbooks, hardcover and everything. Wizards deffo dialed it back in 4e... and while they're trying to make headway with more 5e offerings (mostly modules and settings), I think they've hamstrung their own efforts by designing the 5e system to be imminently more modifiable on-the-fly because the bounded-accuracy rules nucleus is so straightforward and concise.
 
DangerousPuhson said:
The 3e era was the zenith of splatbooks, hardcover and everything. Wizards deffo dialed it back in 4e... and while they're trying to make headway with more 5e offerings (mostly modules and settings), I think they've hamstrung their own efforts by designing the 5e system to be imminently more modifiable on-the-fly because the bounded-accuracy rules nucleus is so straightforward and concise.
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Have all of the 4e and 5e splatbooks been hardcover?

(I think I remember Monte Cook saying that the design team was surprised that the third party publishers filled the market with splat books. They thought it was going to open the floodgates for adventure modules. Alas.)

The Heretic
 
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