5th Editon Monster Manual vs. Space Hulk

Both the 5th edition Monster Manual and Space Hulk released last Friday. Sales of the Monster Manual were brisk, especially on Friday and Saturday, as we through half of our order. Space Hulk sales were much lighter, with only 1 copy sold over the weekend.

I expect to see Monster Manual sales stay brisk but taper off like the Player's Handbook did, though overall, I would expect sales of the MM to run about half those of the Player's Handbook. Space Hulk sales should remain slow but will pick up as Christmas approaches.  The $125 price on the Space Hulk makes it more of a gift item, while the Monster Manual is more of a "me" book, in that I am buying it for myself.

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.

WOTC and the D&D Starter Set

In case you missed it the long awaited D&D Next/5^th edition Starter Set hit WOTC Premier Stores a week ago and everyone else last Friday. WOTC spend the past couple of years promoting the set through playtesting, website updates and social media but not, as far as I can tell, through any form of paid, let alone traditional media, save for native advertising on the company website. The resulting interest in the Starter Set has been, shall we say, spectacular. I have heard stores ordering 60+ copies and selling through them by the end of the day. Despite no pre-orders here, and little interest in the set of the game, we upped our order and brought in 20 of them. Half that shipment went out before the end of the day on Friday and most of the rest left with customers before the end of the weekend. Not too shabby for a game that the customer really cannot fully play, since the starter set comes with pre-made characters with directions on running adventures and raising character levels from 1^st to 5^th but, much like the starter set that came out for 3^rd Edition, a player cannot actually create characters using these rules; they will have to wait for the Player’s Handbook releasing next month.

Happily, WOTC listened to complaints about this and released, concurrently with the D&D Starter Set, a PDF of the basic rules for character creation, so that those who purchase the Starter Set and want to create their own characters can now do so, rather than waiting until August to purchase the full Player’s Handbook. This is a good way to gin up further interest in the Player’s Handbook and, once again, shows that WOTC, when the company puts its mind to it, has no peer when putting together a starter set for its games. Though we have sold a lot of the Pathfinder Beginners Box from Paizo, the quantities sold of it right out of the gate pale in comparison to the quantities of D&D Starter Sets sold. Price is a major factor for this. The Pathfinder Beginners Box runs $34.99, while Green Ronin’s Dragon’s Age or Fantasy Flight Games Star Wars starter sets each run $29.99, hardly the price to convince a customer to pick one up on impulse. It is much easier to overcome that reluctance to purchase with a price point under $20.

The thing is, I do not expect most of the purchasers of the D&D Starter Set to actually play it. Most of the people who have picked it up are long time D&D players. They have heard about D&D 5^th or Next through various online media, since WOTC has put out no print ads of which I am aware, but did not have enough interest in the product to sign up to playtest or download the materials that WOTC has provided over the past year. They came into the store and saw the display or heard it had hit the shelves and wanted to see what the fuss was about. I fully expect that 90% of the customers that purchase it will not play the game using the Starter Set. They bought it to see what changes were made and if the new edition is as bad as they feared. From what I have heard, most people have been pleasantly surprised and I expect to see a lot of Player’s Handbooks. Well played, WOTC.

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.