The question is discussed in this podcast episode.
Cynthia Williams is out at WotC, which begs the question: If you were hired as the new CEO, what would you do to right the ship of game and sail us all to safer waters?
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Do what Paizo did and make all rules free. Charge for books that contain art and adventures. Hire or contract with good writers for high quality adventures. Playtest the hell out of everything and have a robust QA department. Keep or hire diversity consultants to prevent other scandals.
Invest in the other classic settings more and revisit esoteric FR locations.
Actually balance the game for high levels and magic items. Standardize magic and item descriptions while keeping the effects and flavor.
Integrate dndbeyond with other vtts and sell content on them. Sell PDFs. Call Over D&D 6e or 5.5e ffs.
WOTC has greater resources than Paizo so they could theoretically do the same thing better (if they were so inclined). I’d love to see them turn D&DBeyond into a first party AON analogue. But with better UI, faster updates, a powerful API, maybe a featureful character builder, etc. all available. Maybe they could charge for the character builder and API, but the game content should be free just like PF2e.
Exactly what I was thinking. PF1/2e allowing AoN to use ALL of their content and display it makes getting into the game and seeing all your options ridiculously easy. It doesn’t have the best interface which could easily be expanded with a company that was paying to develop it.
What I really want to see DnDBeyond do is complete their Homebrew creator. It has SO many problems and doesn’t even implement all of the rules from content WOTC releases (can’t lower hit dice except by spending in short rest, some magic items do this). And I want to be able to create my own classes and item types like new weapons. And also some weird rules that aren’t allowed like changing weapon damage dice.
And they could really lean into 5e’s greatest strength: their 3rd party support. 5e being so popular means there’s a HUGE 3rd party scene that’s doing so much to keep 5e alive and fresh. DnDBeyond is just starting to embrace them now but they could really open it up as a marketplace in the same way they have the DMsGuild. Then 3rd party publishers could at their own leisure add their own content and sell dndbeyond licenses (or include them in their books) for their content. This would mean people who prefer to use dndbeyond’s character sheet (it really is one of the best digital ones that integrate with VTTs, foundry’s sheet is subpar sadly [haven’t tried 3.0 yet]) are able to do so while using any 3rd party classes and content they wanted.
Right now, I buy 3rd party content and then add as much in as possible to dndbeyond but I can’t do that for whole classes and I often run into roadblocks where I simply can’t add in certain features and there’s no automation for some things.
Make dndbeyond good/better, invest in 3rd party VTT integrations, and keep selling books through those channels. Keep partnering with 3rd party content creators to get a cut of their profits selling through dndbeyond.
I’d stop trying to disrupt the industry or chase massive profits, and just be okay with reasonable profits.
They’d oust me in a week.
I second this.
The problem is that investors are no longer tolerant of ‘We made money, here is some money you get for doing nothing’.
They demand ‘We made more money than last year! And not only did they money go up, it went up more than the last time it went up! And next year, we expect it to go up again, and go up faster than it went up this year! And go up more and faster each year until our product is the primary commodity of all people, at which point we’ll create new life and make that our emerging market.’
Nothing is enough for these people.
Most people hear “<blank> bubble” and think “oof, that’s not a good thing.”
Capitalists (the ones with the actual capital) hear the same thing and think “just imagine how rich I’ll be if I get out right before it pops! Blow more hot air into it! Quickly!”
keep selling books through those channels
They need to start writing books worth buying again, first.
Surrender the entire property to creative commons.
Well that’s not why she’s been hired. She’s been hired to squeeze every possible piece of money out of the property.
If you were a CEO who cared about the property and not about making the most money possible, you’d never be hired in the first place.
Assuming I actually wanted to keep my job and not just open source everything? Probably buy Paizo and mend the schism, then build a d&d which is streamlined and friendly to beginners but can have 1001 extensions and options for the keenos. Then maybe buy roll20 and make it into the ultimate virtual tabletop; the rules can be free and the books can be cheap if you’re making a good enough VTT that people will want to pay for a subscription!
Fold into Paizo.
Honestly there isn’t anything in D&D worth saving that hasn’t been done better elsewhere. Making it good requires rewriting the system and lore from the ground up - they tried with 4e, but didn’t have the time to complete either so all the classes functioned like casters and the setting was literally lifeless. 5e has just been a “best of” collection, dressing up like old favourites and reissuing classic adventures.
PF2e alone is everything 3.x, 4e, and 5e wanted to be, has a massively detailed and extensive setting that isn’t filled with cliches and problematic elements, and has only had to undergo minor canon changes rather than universe changing events between editions. It has accessibility, diversity, and inclusion out the wazoo, heavily supports the player community, and a steady supply of high quality adventures. PF2e fits the exact same niche as D&D, while being an all around improvement, even on price.D&D is fine… do you mean save WotC?
@bradorsomething @copacetic WotC still owns the vast majority of D&D. The CC-BY release of the 5.1 SRD isn’t even all the core books of one edition… and we had to shout at them in order to make them release even *that* much, and not just the bits they didn’t think they could defend in court as a PR stunt.
In our current socioeconomic climate, I’m not sure anyone who’d *buy* D&D off of WotC’s corpse would want to *save* D&D like WotC did two decades ago, as opposed to copyright trolling.
If my intention as CEO is to save Dungeons & Dragons and not make a boatload of money, saving my job, and get richer, then I would dedicate every single D&D product of which my Wotzi still has a copyright to the public domain; liberating both the rules (which can’t be locked down anyway), the fluff/lore, and the awesome name.
Does D&D needs to be saved ?
It has a huge market share, is one of the few RPG generating money. Sure, there is some work for a CEO, but seems more about finding a way to generate more money, than about finding a way to not loose money like 99.9% of RPG out there
Is D&D in danger? D&D is in this weird place where it’s in the middle of a lot of things. It’s honestly pretty complex compared to actually rules light systems, but it’s still much less complex than Pathfinder. If folks want more crunch they go to Pathfinder.
D&D has two pillars. Combat and everything else. I know that WotC defines it differently but generally I think it’s easier to view like this. Everything I’m combat is extremely rigid. Everything outside is pretty flexible. Sure, exploration has more rigid rules than social interactions but I genuinely don’t believe many people use rigid exploration rules. I think a lot of players dislike combat for a big variety of reasons. There are extremely few class-specific special things some classes can do outside of combat. Do fighters get anything special? Not really. And a lot of spells can totally negate specific things other players might be able to contribute.
It would be really nice to have flexible combat but I don’t think there’s a good way to do it without fundamentally changing the game. Instead, I believe every class needs to have meaningful ways to contribute to each pillar of play that cannot be one-upped by spells.
Another thing, I believe every class should have the same amount of limited resources more like 4th edition but I don’t think there’s a way to fix that in 5th edition or the new version without fundamentally rewriting everything.
I wouldn’t D&D is sooooo boring honestly I prefer games using IRL maps
