Tag Archives: Ryan Dancey

D&D’s Biggest Controversies Ranked—3. Wizards of the Coast Attempts To Revoke the Current Open Gaming License

In 1997 Wizards of the Coast bought Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR, rescuing the company from bankruptcy. New D&D head Ryan Dancey looked for ways to turn the game into a healthy business. Dancey saw fan contributions as an enhancement to the D&D community that strengthened the game’s place in the market. Support from fans and from third-party publishers encouraged more people to play D&D. Dancey wrote, “This is a feedback cycle—the more effective the support is, the more people play D&D. The more people play D&D, the more effective the support is.” Besides, the numbers showed that the D&D business made money selling core books. Why not let fans and other companies bear the weight of supporting the game with low-profit adventures, settings, and other add-ons?

Dancey’s thinking led to the introduction of the Open Gaming License and the d20 License. Using these licenses gamers and gaming companies could create and distribute products compatible with the D&D rules. Sometimes the products competed with Wizard’s own publications, but the overall contributions from the community helped the game flourish. Other role-playing game companies recognized the success of this strategy and introduced similar licenses for their games.

The OGL granted a perpetual license, encouraging game publishers to view the OGL as a safe agreement to base investments on. “When v1.0a was published and authorized, Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast did so knowing that they were entering into a perpetual licensing regime,” Dancey said. However, the OGL does not grant an irrevocable license, and to lawyers, perpetual licenses can sometimes be revoked.

In 2022, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks and Wizards of the Coast CEO Cynthia Williams appeared in a presentation for investors. Williams touted D&D’s popularity but described the game “under monetized.” Wizards aimed to do a better job of gaining income from the game, bringing more earnings to stockholders.

With monetization in mind, Wizards executives probably looked at other publishers profiting from D&D-compatible products and felt D&D’s owner deserved a cut. Royalties on a million-dollar Kickstarter for a D&D-compatible product would hardly move the bottom line of a company the size of Hasbro, but multiply that cut by 10 or more multi-dollar dollar kickstarters per year, every year, and the payoff adds up. So, the company asked lawyers to find a way break the OGL, and the legal team found a potential out in the word “authorized.”

The OGL states, “You may use any authorized version of this License.” What if Wizards simply declared current version of the license “unauthorized,” and then replaced the OGL with a new version containing terms that favored the company? Wizards prepared a FAQ that explained, “OGL 1.0a only allows creators to use ‘authorized’ versions of the OGL which allows Wizards to determine which of its prior versions to continue to allow use of when we exercise our right to update the license. As part of rolling out OGL 2.0, we are deauthorizing OGL 1.0a from future use and deleting it from our website. This means OGL 1.0a can no longer be used to develop content for release.”

The new OGL license required publishers to register their products, demanded royaties from larger publishers, and enabled Wizards to revoke the new agreement. Wizards surely knew such a move would meet resistance from the D&D community, but they made some allowances to minimize criticism.

  • The new OGL introduced some high-minded changes such as rules that prohibited material that is “blatantly racist, sexist, homophobic, trans-phobic, bigoted or otherwise discriminatory.” Wizards undoubtedly supported such additions, but they also gave the company a way to claim that the new agreement came from noble goals. In a FAQ, Wizards states, “OGL wasn’t intended to fund major competitors and it wasn’t intended to allow people to make D&D apps, videos, or anything other than printed (or printable) materials for use while gaming. We are updating the OGL in part to make that very clear.”
  • The new OGL only demanded royalties from the few companies who grossed more than $750,000 on D&D-comparable products. Wizards probably hoped that this would leave the vast number of D&D creators with no cause for complaint. That proved a miscalculation, perhaps because most D&D creators eyeing a million-dollar Kickstarter think, someday that could be my project.
  • The high-royalty rates in the new OGL only represented an opening offer in a negotiation. In late 2022 Wizards gathered about 20 third-party creators to outline the new OGL and to offer 15% royalty rate rather than 25% to publishers willing to sign a separate agreement. For growing companies, the OGL promised, “If You appear to have achieved great success…from producing OGL: Commercial content, We may reach out to You for a more custom (and mutually beneficial) licensing arrangement.”

Likely Wizards executives hoped big publishers would come to terms before the new OGL became public, smaller publisher and fans would consider themselves unaffected by the OGL, and any lingering objections would be forgotten. They miscalculated. A draft of the new OGL leaked, igniting a firestorm of criticism.

For eight days, Wizard’s avoided commenting on the leak. According to insiders, the company’s managers saw fans as overreacting and calculated that in a few months everyone would forget the uproar. The company drafted a FAQ they hoped would soothe fans and help speed acceptance.

Meanwhile, many of the biggest OGL publishers announced plans to drop the OGL or to introduce their own gaming licenses for their product. A fan-led campaign to send a clear message to Wizards by canceling D&D Beyond subscriptions went viral. So many gamers went to the site to stop payments that the traffic temporary shutdown the page. The story reached mainstream news.

Wizards of the Coast got the message. They scrambled to make accommodations, first by promising to remove the most onerous provisions from the new license, and then by committing to keep the existing OGL. Ultimately, Wizards put the Systems Reference Document for D&D 5.1 into the Creative Commons using a perpetual, irrevocable open license agreement outside the company’s control.

Related: The Legal Fight Over Happy Birthday and What It May Tell Us About D&D’s Rumored OGL 1.1

Next: Number 2.

TSR vs. the Internet Part 2—From They Sue Regularly to Open Gaming

In 1994 TSR, the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, struck two blows aimed at containing fan-created D&D content on the Internet. (See TSR Declares War on the Internet’s D&D Fans.)

First, administrators running servers offering D&D content received email from TSR representative Rob Repp. “On behalf of TSR, Inc. I ask that you examine your public net sites at this time and remove any material which infringes on TSR copyrights.” Because universities hosted most of these sites, the notices led to a quick wave of shutdowns.

Second, TSR insisted that fans who wished to distribute their D&D creations exclusively use a server run by their licensee MPGNet. Fans hated that loss of control, but the real blow came from a disclaimer that TSR demanded fans add to their content.

This item incorporates or is based on or derived from copyrighted material
of TSR, Inc. and may contain trademarks of TSR. The item is made available
by MPGNet under license from TSR, but is not authorized or endorsed by
TSR. The item is for personal use only and may not be published or
distributed except through MPGNet or TSR.

The last line seemed to imply that TSR gained the right to publish or distribute independent creations, and that proved most alarming. “This statement looks more like a release of distribution rights than a disclaimer,” wrote Jim Vassilakos.

Sean K. Reynolds would soon become TSR’s online coordinator. In an interview, he explains the roots of TSR’s online policy. “They came up with the idea that if you express something in D&D format, it belongs to TSR because TSR owns D&D.“

Jim Vassilakos took the full force of TSR’s legal assault. He edited The Guildsman, a roleplaying fanzine with D&D-related content, and then he distributed it online from a server named greyhawk at Stanford University.

Before legal notices forced the Stanford server to shut down, TSR’s affiliate MPGNet had copied the Guildsman archive, transferred it to their servers, and added the disclaimer, all without permission. This led Vassilakos to write MPGNet head Rob Miracle.

“You (MPGN and TSR) have basically taken a vast quantity of material from Greyhawk, including the six Guildsman magazines which total over 400 printed pages, and proclaimed yourselves as the sole distributor of this material. I think that, given this situation, you should be able to see clearly enough why people are upset at this unexpected turn of events. In any case, my contributors are telling me that they’d prefer that their material not be kept at MPGN under this sort of condition.”

Rob Miracle wrote a conciliatory response. “First, let me say that we took over Greyhawk so that it wouldn’t die. We had lost other great sites and didn’t want to lose probably the best site. I will do whatever you wish, because they are your files. Just let me know.”

Of course this dispute just samples the furor raging in the Internet’s community of D&D fans. Fueled by distrust of TSR, people considered ways the company could benefit from seizing control of so much online content.

Many creators feared that TSR would bundle their creations in a CD-ROM or start charging for online access. Did the disclaimer enable the company to reap profits without paying anyone for their work? The more conspiracy-minded worried that TSR would simply gather content and pull the plug, eliminating a source of competition. Certainly some folks sought free and illegal online copies of D&D products. The crackdown made such sources harder to hide.

TSR claimed good intentions. “I can tell you that the intent we had when we started working with MPGNet was not to derive revenue from that site,” Rob Repp wrote. “I find it unlikely in the extreme that a company with as sharp a legal team as ours is going to simply grab someone’s stuff and publish it without permission. I don’t think that’s lawful, and I’m certain the legal people would mention it during some meeting or other.”

Rob Miracle explained, “MPGNet has nothing to gain from offering this service other than the satisfaction that there is a net home for gaming material.”

Meanwhile, many wondered if TSR really needed to take such steps to defend their intellectual property. Some fans did extensive legal research. TSR cited drow as a monster of their own creation. Gary took the name from folklore, but few of the specifics. (See The Stories Behind D&D’s Iconic Monsters.) So did TSR own the drow? Perhaps not, but they surely owned mind flayers, beholders, carrion crawlers and other monsters Wizards of the Coast now reserves as D&D’s product identity. TSR couldn’t copyright game mechanics, but could they copyright terms like armor class and hit dice? TSR felt their steps were required.

Many gamers saw TSR’s defense of their copyrights and trademarks as overreaching. If fans saw it, then TSRs lawyers saw it too, and fans supposed that revealed a bad-faith strategy working toward a hidden agenda. Benjamin Lake wrote, “Imagine how much cash TSR would have if every copy of Ultima (for example) was taxed for using the concept of levels and experience points.”

Perhaps Rob Miracle began regretting his company’s affiliation. “There is no conspiracy. MPGNet has no hidden agendas and as far as we know, TSR does not have a hidden agenda.”

During the furor, one fan asked, “Does TSR regard it as illegal to play AD&D with a dozen or so people over the Net, as opposed to playing it with a dozen or so people in my living room?”

“We certainly do not,” Repp explained before adding a catch. “Saving up all the moves, however, and republishing them as a separate work would probably be an infringement.” Such a recounting of a D&D game resembles an actual play podcast or even a streaming game. This interpretation would forbid the content powering much of D&D’s current surge in popularity.

Rob Repp got tired of bearing the Internet backlash, and tired of fans pointing out how TSR fought copyright infringement now, but had used balrogs and hobbits without permission 20 years earlier when the company operated from Gary’s basement. Sean K. Reynolds explained Repp’s plight. “To put it bluntly, he pissed off a lot of people with his attitude and posts. Not all of it was his fault. TSR’s online policy was draconian and unproductive. Rob was just tasked with enforcing it, but not being a gamer he couldn’t relate to the fans’ side of the story.”

In May 1995, Repp posted to the AD&D mailing list announcing a job opening for an online coordinator at TSR. The job’s responsibilities included managing TSR’s web presence and AOL site. Reynolds saw the listing. “I felt I could do a better job of it than he was; he was making people mad when he didn’t have to.”

Reynolds got the job. Two days later, Repp quit. Reynolds landed in charge of the online policy that he had argued against. “My first act was to go to the lawyer and say, ‘What can we do about this? We have this policy. I think it’s kind of unreasonable—actually very unreasonable.’ We stopped doing the cease-and-desist letters threatening people posting their own monsters or whatever, and started focusing on people doing actual copyright infringement. Without actually changing the TSR policy, we just kind of mitigated our enforcement of the policy.”

Reynolds served as online coordinator for 2 years. “A lot of people badmouthed me for a long time because of that policy, but while I was TSR’s online coordinator not one website was shut down for D&D material that wasn’t an actual copyright violation (such as posting scans of books or artwork). Nobody was ever bothered by me because of fan material on their site.” In 1997, Wizards of the Coast bought TSR. “They had a much more benign and open idea of how to handle this sort of thing.“

The new owners of D&D would completely rethink the status of fan creations. D&D team head Ryan Dancey led this change of direction. He credits open source software for inspiring the change. In open source, programmers contribute free code that enhances the utility of software like Linux, the operating system that now powers the Internet. Through open source, the Internet community proved the value of their freely-distributed creations.

Dancey saw fan contributions as an enhancement to the D&D community that strengthened the game’s place in the market. Support from fans and other companies for D&D leads more people to play D&D. Dancey writes, “This is a feedback cycle—the more effective the support is, the more people play D&D. The more people play D&D, the more effective the support is.” Besides, the numbers showed that the D&D business made money selling core books. Why not let fans and other companies bear some weight of supporting the game with low-profit adventures, settings, and other add-ons?

Dancey’s thinking led to the introduction of the Open Gaming License and the d20 License. Using these licenses gamers and gaming companies could create and distribute products compatible with the D&D rules, and not just on the internet, but in stores.

At a glance, this new spirit of sharing seems like a complete reversal, but TSR’s disclaimer that allowed sharing on MPGnet hints at the modern licenses. Like the OGL license, the old disclaimer set a legal basis for sharing content. Unlike the disclaimer though, the OGL is irrevocable. If you place content under that license, it is perpetually under it. This leaves little room for a hidden agenda. In an echo of MPGNet, gamers can offer creations that use D&D’s brand, unique monsters, and worlds on a specific site, the Dungeon Masters Guild. This time though, gamers can sell their products. And presumably the DMs guild has an Internet link even faster than 1.5Mbps.

Related:
The Threat that Nearly Killed Dungeons & Dragons—Twice
The Media Furor that Introduced the “Bizarre Intellectual Game” of Dungeons & Dragons to America

The Grand Campaign, Dungeon Master Gear, Fourth Edition D&D, and Other Reactions From the Comment Section

I’m ready for another trip into the comment section.

The Grand Campaign

My post on the grand campaign prompted a couple of commenters to tell of their long-running grand campaigns. Michael “Chgowiz” Shorten’s game has run more than 10 years. Rick Stump’s Seaward campaign has run 38 years and currently hosts 24 player characters and many more henchmen and hirelings. “With every player running multiple PCs and multiple adventures going on concurrently yes—strict time keeping is essential!” Rick has blogged about Seaward since 2013. Michael and Rick’s message: Passionate game masters still run grand campaigns. You can too.

Gary Gygax made the days characters needed to naturally heal seem like a key reason for a campaign calendar. Characters would spend days between adventures slowly recuperating. But Dan makes an good point, “Every game I’ve played in or run, there has been at least one PC with access to healing magic, so in between adventures he or she would just memorize as many healing spells as possible and rapidly bring the whole party to full or nearly-full hit points.

I’ve never seen a character sidelined for days of natural healing either. I suspect natural healing played a bigger part in Greyhawk for three reasons:

  • Few players chose to play clerics.
  • With no extra spells for high wisdom, and no spells until second level, the original clerics gained less healing magic.
  • Characters who adventured together also competed as rivals for the best treasure. In early D&D, characters raided dungeons for loot and players kept score in gold pieces. Outside of the dungeon, clerics might not heal rivals, and they certainly would not heal anyone who didn’t first make a generous donation to the church.

To gain the pace of a grand campaign where real time passes in pace with campaign time and an adventurer’s career can span years, Simon N. runs fifth edition with a house rule where a long rest takes a week.

Dungeon Master Tools

Chris asks, “Have you looked at ArcKnight for their spell effects? My only complaint there is they don’t have a way to pop them out so you have to cut them.

ArcKnight sells flat-plastic, spell effect templates. When I first saw these templates, the cones didn’t match the proportions set by fifth-edition rules. Now the templates fit the spell descriptions. I especially like the templates for ongoing effects like Cloudkill and Ice Storm, because their art adds scenery to the battle map. The templates come in exhaustive—but pricey—sets for clerics, wizards, and druids. I feel no need for line templates, or separate templates for, say, every 20-foot-radius effect. I would buy a less-expensive generic set with the common circles, cones, and squares.

ArcKnight sells 1-inch grids marked on transparent sheets. (Sorry, Sly Flourish.) This product overlays a grid on an unmarked map.

In Some New Favorite Dungeon Masters’ Tools, I wrote about my attempt to shape conical spell templates from wire. My templates proved usable, but too flexible. Matthew Lynn offered some advice for shaping templates that I’m ready to try. From a hobby shop, he purchased a brass rod about as thick as a coat hanger. Then he shaped it with bending plyers and connected the ends with heat shrink tubing.

The Joy of Figuring Things Out

In a post on figuring things out, I suggested that fourth edition’s designers emphasized character skill over player skill. Tom challenged my statement. “I’m confused about what, exactly, in the core 4E books (a mechanic or piece of advice) emphasizes character skill over player skill that isn’t already present in third edition or earlier.

To be fair, nothing in 4E blocks a style focused on player skill. As Tom noted, the section on puzzles in the fourth edition Dungeon Master’s Guide explained how to challenge players. Still, the edition’s emphasis on skill challenges and set-piece combats leans on character skill. We know the designers wanted this emphasis because their author guidelines for Dungeon told authors to favor tests of character skill and to avoid challenges aimed toward players.

In response to the same post, The Grymlorde™ offered a good perspective on puzzles. “I like to think of puzzles more like doorways to secret levels, side-quests, and Easter eggs. You can get through the adventure without having to solve the puzzles but you miss out on the best treasure, the best experience, the “truth” and so on. The worst puzzles are the ones where the adventure fails if you fail to solve the puzzle. Which means that the mandatory puzzle must be fairly easy to solve so that everyone has a good chance of finishing the adventure because some people are really good at solving puzzles (e.g. my wife) and others are terrible at it (me).” One question: If you’re married to The Grymlorde™, what do you call him at breakfast?

Linear Adventures

Even as I defended linear adventures, I praised The Howling Void by Teos Abadia for fitting many choices into the constraints of a convention time slot. In a comment, Teos gave more insight into his design. “The theme of my adventure was elemental air, and that element is all about chaos. I set to capture that swirling chaos through a multitude of options combined with foes that moved.

The downside is that there are some really fun encounters the party will never see. And, when they are having a great time, the players know they missed out on some fun. DMs certainly commented that they had to prep more rooms than they will actually run. One upside is that the DM can run this several times and still feel like every run is fresh and different.

Was it worth it? I think so. I won’t use this approach every time, but I think some adventures should work this way to keep players on their toes, to have a strong feeling of player action and choice mattering, and to break away from a linear style. Programs like AL are stronger when they include different approaches from time to time.

Lately, all the Adventurers League scenarios that I’ve played have flaunted an obvious lack of choices. Most still ranked as good-to-excellent adventures, but I have missed Teos’s flair for succeeding with different approaches.

Encouraging Role Playing

My post on encouraging players to role play, led several readers to contribute advice, so I suggest visiting that post’s comment section.

A few posters wanted to emphasize that role playing doesn’t require voice acting. A silly voice can distract from a serious character. Sometimes a character’s actions, decisions, and even silence can reveal role playing. That said, subtle depictions of character tend to get lost at the game table.

Someone with the handle 1958fury, who may also answer to Christine, commented on my tips for encouraging role playing. “I especially like this bit:

“‘Beyond this sound but conventional advice, many DMs suggested ways to pressure uncomfortable or uninterested players to role play. Don’t do that.’

“Thank you for that. I see that suggestion given a lot, and it drives me nuts. I’m shy, and I usually have to play with the same group for a while before I break out of my shell. Being put on the spot too much early on is a sure way to keep me from returning to your table.

Fourth Edition

When I wrote the story behind fourth edition, commenters like Marty from Raging Owlbear challenged my take on the business conditions at Hasbro leading to the edition. These comments made a fair request for more information.

Ryan Dancey led the D&D team through the third-edition boom and Wizards of the Coast’s first years as a Hasbro subsidiary. He wrote about Hasbro brand strategy and how it could apply to D&D. “Sometime around 2005ish, Hasbro made an internal decision to divide its businesses into two categories. Core brands, which had more than $50 million in annual sales, and had a growth path towards $100 million annual sales, and Non-Core brands, which didn’t.

Core brands would have included Magic the Gathering, while D&D ranked as non-core.

Core Brands would get the financing they requested for development of their businesses (within reason). Non-Core brands would not. They would be allowed to rise and fall with the overall toy market on their own merits without a lot of marketing or development support. In fact, many Non-Core brands would simply be mothballed—allowed to go dormant for some number of years until the company was ready to take them down off the shelf and try to revive them for a new generation of kids.

It would have been very easy for [Hasbro head of boy’s toys Brian] Goldner et al to tell Wizards, ‘You’re done with D&D, put it on a shelf and we’ll bring it back 10 years from now as a multi-media property managed from Rhode Island.’ There’s no way that the D&D business circa 2006 could have supported the kind of staff and overhead that it was used to. Best case would have been a very small staff dedicated to just managing the brand and maybe handling some freelance pool doing minimal adventure content. So this was an existential issue (like ‘do we exist or not’) for the part of Wizards that was connected to D&D.

To players who love and understand D&D, the perspective of a corporate, D&D-outsider can seem out of touch. Such executives might only know D&D as the game that lost players in the steam tunnels under Michigan State. Perhaps some wondered if players needed to dress up to play.

Dancey‘s best-case strategy parallels the one that kicked off fifth edition, with freelancers supplementing a tiny team of staff designers, and with as many staff working on branding and licensing as on the tabletop game.

Michael Benensky wrote, “You are not coming off as a 4E hater. Generally it irks me when people tear down 4E since I think it was the best edition.

I wrote a series about the business decisions that fed fourth edition’s design and why the design failed to pay off. Then I posted it on the Internet—a place not known for measured reactions. Folks who loved 4E and those who rejected it both liked the posts’ evenhanded stance. I count that as a win.

How the end of lonely fun leads to today’s trickle of D&D books

Role-playing gaming must rate as the cheapest entertainment around. Even if a game master buys an adventure to run, five other people get hours of fun from the purchase. And those hours come from a slim packet of pages. A hardcover adventure will sustain a campaign for a year. A few bucks spent on dice and maybe on a core book can sustain a player for years. Compare that to the price of comic books or collectable card games or, heaven forbid, golf.

The low cost of role playing makes selling RPGs a tough business. Players can only spend so much time at the game table, and a few purchases will fill all those hours.

Back in the 80s and into the 90s, role-playing games seemed like a better business. Every major RPG line produced a new book or box every month, and TSR produced several. Sure TSR suffered setbacks, but their problem came from wild spending on things like company cars and needlepoint companies. The RPG products sold.

Moonsea_settingMost of the folks buying those books and box sets probably used a tiny fraction in play. Who had the time? Even if real life never interfered with your gaming, you didn’t have four friends who shared your passion and freedom.

During all the hours you wanted to play games like Dungeons & Dragons but couldn’t, you settled for exploring the game world by reading its source books. So the Complete Guide to the Tribes of the Southeast Highlands of S’norr sold to be read rather than played.

In those days, gaming used to be what D&D boss Mike Mearls called “a hobby of not playing the game you wanted to play.” Fate designer Fred Hicks calls time spent creating characters or reading game books “lonely fun.”

Electronic games took away the appeal of lonely fun. Now wherever you have a laptop or phone, you can game. “People are just playing games now,” Mearls says.

By the 90s, too few gamers bought game books to fill time between games. Nonetheless, TSR kept publishing until the cost of unsold books brought the company near bankruptcy. TSR sold itself to Wizards of the Coast. The sale spared D&D from becoming a mere brand, a once-proud name like Atari, now used by a winning bidder to sell video games.

When Wizards’ executive Ryan Dancey took charge of reviving D&D, he wondered how to build a business on a cheap pastime. Only D&D’s core books made much money. Dancey saw profit in selling the Player’s Handbook and character options to players, but D&D needed adventures and settings to attract dungeon masters. Dancey plotted a strategy around opening the game: Companies could support D&D with low-margin settings and adventures based on the d20 license, while Wizards reaped the real money selling the core.

Under this new plan, Wizards launched D&D’s third edition. For a year, core books and player-option books dominated the game’s releases. But the new game succeeded beyond expectations. Its sales boom lured the company back to printing settings and setting books. Once again, DMs faced more books than they could use.

When the boom ended, the D&D team began suffering annual layoffs.

By D&D’s fourth edition, everyone knew too few players bought campaign-setting books to make much money, and that few DMs bought more books than they could use in play. So fourth edition limited each campaign setting to two books: one for DMs and one with player options.

The 4E team refocused on selling books for players. The D&D team hoped every player would spend hours tinkering with character options, making a hobby of not playing the game that they wanted to play. Every month, hardcovers filled with new options reached stores.

But the strategy fizzled. Too few players wanted to devote time to lonely fun sitting around making characters.

Now, streaming and video offers a new way to watch people play D&D—and a new way to enjoy D&D while not playing D&D and not buying D&D books.

World of Warcraft and Acquisitions Incorporated may not replace all the joy of rolling dice with live people. However, for most folks, such substitutes make a better alternative to the D&D table than either pouring over Martial Power 2 for character options or reading The Great Glacier to explore a game world.

The D&D brand extends beyond the game table to things like novels and electronic games. Today, tabletop gamers add to D&D’s profit margin by buying core books. Wizards publishes other D&D game books to support sales of the core.

Mike Mearls and his D&D team see little market for game materials that won’t reach play. This shows in their focus on the adventures required by DMs and destined for the game table. The team produces just enough adventures to sustain weekly sessions. More adventures would tempt DMs to buy just the one they’ll play. Such choices stretch the profit of one sale over the cost of publishing more adventures.

In the years since the fifth edition’s release, only the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide caters to folks who want to read about D&D worlds or spend time tinkering with character builds.

For those of us who crave more monsters and classes, fifth edition’s few releases leave us hungry for more, but the Wizards team thinks they have a D&D strategy that can last.