Dungeons & Dragons price hike won't solve their problem

 

Wizards of the Coast recently announced a price increase for physical books while saying the existing books and digital books will not increase in price.

Before I get into the meat of this I really need to point out how disingenuous their concept of digital books are. Some who don't know better might assume they're talking about digital book copies like pdfs from drivethrurpg. This is not what they're talking about as the current edition is not sold in this manner. The digital books are the versions of the books that you buy on Roll 20, Fantasy Grounds, or D&D Beyond.

Those unaware of why this matters is because for all intents and purposes the books you own as part of those virtual tabletops are not really yours to keep. They can ONLY be utilized through the virtual tabletop itself and they exist for the most part essentially as microtransactions that make it easier for you to implement the official material in your game since you can just drag and drop the info instead of entering it all manually.

As for the price hike itself, this is a result of Wizards feeling that not enough people buy their books and they want to make up the difference they feel they're owed by increasing the price on those who do buy the books. What they fail to realize is that this is a problem of their own making.

There will always be more players then Dungeon Masters and in spite of knowing this, Wizards refuses to put out any books that really appeal to players or give them a reason to own them with 5th edition. Every book they put out about 50-80% of the content in it is only of use to the Dungeon Master. Literally the only book that is entirely player focused is the Player's Handbook.

As a result most players will either hope the DM has the book that has the information they need, or they'll look up the little snippet online. No one is going to buy an entire campaign setting book just because they want to play as a Minotaur and don't even get me started on including player options like backgrounds and subclasses in Adventure Modules. Adventure Modules being something players don't have a use for, but they're something they should be discouraged from buying because if they read it, it will ruin the game if a DM they play with ever runs it.

I can't speak for 3rd or 4th edition. But I remember with 2nd edition they made an honest effort to make books that while the DM might want, mainly benefit the player. The humanoid handbook was just an entire book that was nothing but extra playable races. They had playable race and class focused books such as The Complete Book of Fighters and the Complete Book of Elves that gave extra player options and lore to make using your character potentially more interesting. There was also so much lore back in those, does it even mention anywhere in 5th edition that elves don't actually sleep like the other races do? They enter a meditate state to rest.

There were dozens of books like this back in the day.

Another problem is that even as the Dungeon Master, a lot of Wizards books feel incomplete. Every book they release needs to be a catch all. Every book has to have a smidgen of lore, a couple new playable races, a couple new subclasses, a few new spells, a few new backgrounds, a few new monsters, etc. None of these books are dedicated to a specific purpose. If I want a book of interesting NPCs or just a host of magial items, I have to buy a book from a 3rd party publisher.

Their campaign setting books are lacking compared to previous editions. There are no character profiles let alone stat blocks for important NPCs from any of the settings in these books. They don't even explain who Drizzt is in their Forgotten Realms book.

While I like the core rules for 5th edition because of how well it lends itself to getting people to understand the game and easily be able to get a game going. Their overall "do it yourself" mantra towards a lot of things are hurting themselves. You made this edition out of all of them the easiest one to homebrew our own stuff to fill in the blanks and then you act surprised when we don't just endlessly buy the books?

It becomes very obvious the direction the company has went is a result of corporate meddling. Hasbro didn't really care what happened with D&D before, they bought Wizards just for Magic: The Gathering which is a game where everyone needs to buy cards to be able to play. 5th Edition was designed to mainly be supported by the community coming up with things rather than selling books but after it became popular it got the attention of the higher ups who now want to know where their money is.

Here's an idea geniuses, if you want to make money off D&D, stop doing shit like canceling 4 video games that are in development. People can't easily play those just because a friend bought a copy.