D&D

We are cancelling Friday's D&D game again, simply because Sydney cannot get here to run the game. She should be back next week and Wednesday and Friday D&D sessions will get back to normal.

Online D&D

We will be running two online sessions of D&D this week, one from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. CT on Wednesday and again on Friday. We are making the seats available first to players that attend the seated game session, then will offer remaining seats. We will only have a total of 7 seats available at each session and will use Roll 20 as the platform. If other DMs would like to run during that session, send us a link to your game and we will be glad to post it.

The $1200 Players Handbook

Every once in awhile (OK, more than once in awhile) I have to look at pricing on Amazon and eBay for various games and wonder “What are they thinking?”  Happened to be poking around on Amazon gauging prices of some out of print books and found a copy of the D&D Player’s Handbook listed for $1,249.50 plus $3.99 shipping. I would happily sell anyone who wants them all they want at that price and will throw in shipping AND insurance AND a set of dice for free.  I can only assume it comes from a seller that does not actually set their prices but has some form of dynamic pricing engaged and something caused a hiccup in it. I noticed something similar with WizKids X-Men  Mutant Revolution boardgame . A collection we received last year had a copy in it and while pricing out the collection, we found someone had it listed on Amazon at over $1000. Needless to say, we priced ours substantially less.

They're Number 3

This week's Rolling for Initiative column looks at the suprising jump of the D&D Player's Handbook to #3 on Amazon's best seller list and revisits MAP

The Allure of Ruins

Ever wonder why so many D&D (and other fantasy adventures) are set among ruins? The abandoned tunnels beneath an old castle is such a trope that we refer to it as a "dungeon crawl". If you remember the Lord of the Rings, Middle Earth was festooned with ruins, relics of an earlier, grander, age. In my own campaigns, if I add in a lone statue as a descriptive note or put a ruined house on a ridge overlooking the valley through which the characters travel, I can almost guarantee that one of more of the players will want to go explore it. Why our fascination with ruins? This column from the BBC says ruins and lost civilizations have fascinated humans since at least the 6th Century BCE

$18,000 D&D Module

The Jade Hare, a D&D module from 1992, sold for over $18,000 on eBay on January 3. Before you go frantically searching through your closets looking for similar items:

1. This was mint in the original shinkwrapping
2. The starting bid was $19.99 so no one expected it to go for that much
3. This was a limited edition promotional module given out with purchases by the TSR Mail Order Hobby Shop.
4. Unlike most other TSR books and modules,  there was only one print run of the original adventure.
5. If you really want a copy, you can pick up one for $1.49 in PDF format.

RPG of the Week

Since we stock a whole lot of role playing games (RPGs) and sell very few of them (we sell 5 times as much D&D 5th edition per month as we do all other RPGs combines) we decided to start talking about one of them once a week in the hope of calling your (yes you) attention to some of the fine ones out there. We will also be doing this with some of the less popular boardgames we stock as well.

This week, we feature Castles & Crusades. This RPG dates back to the 3.0 D&D boom when dozens of companies brought out all sorts of RPG supplements for D&D under the OGL. Castles & Crusades is one of the very few companies (Paizo's Pathfinder RPG is another) to still survive from that era, the tagline being "Third edition rules, 1st edition feel." Troll Lord Games has always focused on recreating the style of adventures from the early days of D&D and AD&D, before there was a heavy emphasis on plot and campaign and adventures stood on their own, rather than linking together.

While characters have skills, character class is a major focus of C&C, much as it was in early AD&D and your character class defines what your character can do. If you like D&D 3.0 (or 3.5) or the play of Pathfinder, but Pathfinder has gotten too complex and materials for D&D 3.0 and 3.5 too hard to find (it is out of print after all), take a look at Castles and Crusades.

Tomb of Annihilation Miniatures

the D&D Miniatures Tomb of Annihilation set arrived yesterday and we have plenty of boxes and single figures.

Bring the heroes, villains, and monsters from the jungle of Chult, as well as the Tomb of the Nine Gods to life in this latest series of fantasy miniatures!

Collect all 44 figures from Tomb of Annihilation, the newest set of randomly sorted monsters and heroes in our exciting line of D&D miniatures, Icons of the Realms.

Adventurers have been sent to the jungle peninsula of Chult, where they must face all manner of dangers in order to find the lost city. Adventurers will need all the help they can get to get through the Tomb and the Dungeon’s evil architect – The Lich Acererak.

Adventurer's League and the Regional Co-ordinator

According to Foulis, WOTC started recruiting Regional Co-ordinators for the Adventurer’s League program during the Summer of 2014. The Regional co-ordinators were tasked by WOTC with helping “DM’s, players, and store/convention organizers participate in the D&D Adventures League on a local level. RCs help promote D&D Adventurers League play by facilitating the organization of public events and by representing the D&D Adventurers league with an enthusiastic, positive presence in a respectful and approachable manner. These individuals will help out the community manager by maintaining event groups on Facebook and Google+ that participants can interact with for information and discussion on events within certain defined regions.” The Regional Co-ordinators were expected to spend at least 2 (later increased to 10) hours a week promoting Adventurer’s League play and events through social media (primarily Facebook and Google+), help stores and convention organizers obtain and sanction Adventurer’s League events, provide a point of contact for and feedback to Adventurer’s League Administrators (who were employees of WOTC), and assist in organizing playtest groups for Adventurer’s League content. The Adventurer’s League program was designed, in general, to promote the D&D Encounters program in stores and convention D&D play.

The Co-ordinators, both Regional and Local, were all volunteers. In return for their service, the Regional Co-ordiantors would receive the opportunity to help determine the future of the Adventurer’s League, (possibly) receive D&D product when attending a convention with a Wizards’ presence and receive Adventurer’s League “swag”

In the Fall of 2015, after the release of Out of the Abyss and Season 3 of the D&D Encounters program, WOTC  “pulled the plug” so to speak, on the Encounters’ program, pulling the name from the DCI Reporter and opening Adventurer’s League play to in-home as well as convention and store play. WOTC notified the co-ordiantors that it would take their duties in-house, assigning them to customer service reps and WPN staff.

Wrong Target Market for WOTC And D&D

This week's ICV2 column looks at the advantages brick and mortar stores have regarding events and why WOTC is targeting the wrong market with its D&D Releases.

7 Questions for Publishers at the Alliance Open House

With the annual Alliance Open House coming up this weekend in beautiful Ft. Wayne, I came up with a list of questions I would like to ask a number of the attending publishers:

1.        WOTC--The focus on Magic and Dungeons & Dragons is great and I know that is where your bread is buttered, so to speak but what about your catalog of boardgame titles? TableTop gave a nice boost to sales of Betrayal at House on the Hill but are there any plans to promote other backlist titles such as RoboRally, Guillotine, Great Dalmuti, Risk 2144 or Diplomacy? All still sell slowly but I would sure like to see what they could do with the sort of promotional push Magic and D&D get.

2.       Fantasy Flight Games—Congratulations on getting the X-Wing Core Set included as part of Force Friday. I haven’t seen a copy of the game yet so could you tell me if there was anything included in it that sent purchasers to the LGS to buy additional ships for the game, those ships that Target doesn’t carry?

3.       And while we’re at it, Fantasy Flight Games, Days of Wonder, Z Man Games—You have track records of running out of your best selling titles during the holiday shopping season. Have you made any plans to build up inventory this year in order to avoid a repeat?

4.       WizKids—You have really started pushing Organized Play registration this year, so any plans to create OP software that we can download to the computer to make uploading results easier? It can be a bit of a pain to handle reporting when the internet is running slow. Also, you finally announce that stores with remaining boosters of War of Light could start selling them without violating our agreement with you. When will you post a date allowing us to sell off old Organized Play products from Star Trek Attack Wing and D&D Attack Wing? OP for both games has died off here and we have months old OP materials sitting in backstock that we would like to liquidate.

5.       Plaid Hat Games—Will Dead of Winter return to stock in time for the holiday selling season and will you have enough product to supply sales through the season? Do you have any plans for expansions and if so, when?

6.       Steve Jackson Games—Any more releases planned for Evil Stevie’s Toys? The ducks didn’t do that well but I can always sell more Cthulhu plushies. Do you have any research showing demand for the guest artist versions of Munchkin?  I can understand guest artists on new versions of Munchkin (Munchkin Kitchen, anyone?) but do you have anything indicating that Munchkin has a strong enough fan base that a player will want another copy of Space Munchkin that only differs due to the art?

7.       Green Ronin—Fantasy Age? Titansgrave? Will we get these while there is still a buzz from the first season of the web series? Any chance for us to get a limited edition signed by the Titansgrave group?

D&D Is THE Role Playing Game

Dungeons & Dragons is, in the eyes of most people outside of the hobby game industry, THE role playing game. They haven’t seen Pathfinder, Castles & Crusades, FATE, 13^th Age, Numenera or Dark Heresy played on Community or The Big Bang Theory.  Despite the fact that D&D did not rank in the top 5 sellers according to ICV2’s spring sales chart, (though lack of new D&D product certainly had something to do with that), viewers  saw Dungeons & Dragons played and in the viewers’ minds, there are no others.

Casual customers will come in looking for the new D&D books, as they have heard of them through popular media and we will hopefully sell them a copy of the $20 Starter Set. While I expect to sell quite a few Advanced Class Guides and fewer copies of the Iron Gods campaign, I do not expect to have any casual customers coming in looking for either of those books.

Dungeons & Dragons Is Back, Baby

If you are a WOTC Premier Store (I think that is what the company calls us these days), the D&D 5^th Edition Players Handbook hit the shelves this past Friday (Mass merchants, non-Premier stores and Amazon get them on the 15^th). So did the Space Wolves Codex for Warhammer 40,000, as well as the incredibly short printed Space Wolves Data Cards (Why Games Workshop makes the Data Card sets for the various armies a short run item is beyond my ken. They are cards, for pity’s sake. Print more.)

 As a point of comparison indicating the interest in the two products, we ordered 8 copies of the Codex and had 3 left as of close on Saturday. The D&D Player’s Handbook? We ordered 13, which we figured would last for a week and had sold out by Saturday afternoon, with customers calling from over 60 miles away to make certain we would hold a copy for them so they would not make the trip in vain. As is typical, few bothered to put in pre-orders for the book with us, despite our asking for them. Of those that did, exactly 1 put in a pre-order far enough in advance to allow us to adjust our orders to accommodate them.  Everyone else called in a pre-order  two or three days before our street date, far too late for us to adjust our orders upwards to take advantage of the level of interest that increased from a very low level to off the charts.

From what I have heard from other retailers, they experienced similar sales of the book with almost all underestimating demand and scrambling to put in re-orders to arrive next week. 

We haven’t seen such excitement over a non-TCG release since, well, 4^th Edition D&D and I could make a valid argument that interest in D&D 5^th edition rivals that of 3^rd, given the levels of disappointment players have expressed in 4^th over the past year and the anticipation with which they have awaited 5^th. It shows, that, while more of our customers play and buy Pathfinder on a day to day basis, Dungeons & Dragons is still the stronger brand by far, ruling top of mind both in the hobby game market as well as the casual customer. According to one of my distributors, Pazio plans to ship the Advanced Class Guide and, possibly, the Iron Gods campaign book to arrive this Wednesday, just before GenCon. Needless to say, though we have a strong Pathfinder Society community locally, no-one has put in a pre-order for a copy of either.

Dungeons & Dragons is, in the eyes of most people outside of the hobby game industry, THE role playing game. They haven’t seen Pathfinder, Castles & Crusades, FATE, 13^th Age, Numenera or Dark Heresy played on Community or The Big Bang Theory.  Despite the fact that D&D did not rank in the top 5 sellers according to ICV2’s spring sales chart, (though lack of new D&D product certainly had something to do with that), viewers  saw Dungeons & Dragons played and in the viewers’ minds, there are no others. Casual customers will come in looking for the new D&D books, as they have heard of them through popular media and we will hopefully sell them a copy of the $20 Starter Set. While I expect to sell quite a few Advanced Class Guides and fewer copies of the Iron Gods campaign, I do not expect to have any casual customers coming in looking for either of those books.

D&D Movie Lawsuit Proceeding

According to The Escapist, there will be no further attempts to reach an out of court settlement and the lawsuit over who has the rights to make a movie based on Dungeons & Dragons will proceed to trial September 16. Hasbro has sued Sweetpea Entertainment, the company that made the original D&D movie, stating that the rights to the D&D property reverted to Hasbro when Sweetpea failed to make additional movies within the time stipulated by the contract.

Of course, Sweetpea disagrees with this and countersued Hasbro, meaning we likely won't see an official Dungeons & Dragons movie before 2016, at the very earliest.

D&D Encounters Change

As near as I can tell, according to this, stores will only be able to run the next session of D&D Encounters using the D&D Next rules, which contradicts what Greg Leeds said earlier this year regarding The Sundering and how players could use either 3.5, 4th Edition or D&D Next when playing.

This isn't a good idea since D&D Next rules are not available for sale yet and the whole idea of Encounters is to give players an opportunity to play D&D each week, not to playtest the next edition of the rules.

Of Dice and Men

Of Dice and Men could be subtitled "A Personal History of Dungeons and Dragons".  I have not read a copy yet but will pick one up the next time I am in a bookstore.  One interesting point the author makes is that today's video game industry has its roots in the hours and hours developers spent playing Dungeons and Dragons in their younger years.