Why You Should Pay for Xanathar's Guide to Everything

Which isn’t to say that you must go out and buy it today! This isn’t a review of Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. If you’re curious and want to know if the stuff in the book is good for your campaign, well, the first hit is free.

Those links don’t go to torrent sites or dodgy Russian pirate servers. They go to official WotC D&D pdfs. Specifically, they go to what are called Unearthed Arcana articles. They’ve been cranking these out on their web page for years now and while some are fluffy bits of “here’s what’s happening in our campaigns,” most of it is new not-yet-official material to be trialed by players. The WotC team follows up occasionally with surveys asking what folks think of the content, in addition to reading what folks say on forums or just straight email to them, and stuff that needs and warrants it will get revised and republished in a new form.

This, of course, is a huge boon for D&D. The WotC team keeps in touch with their players, material gets a strong shakedown before “official” publication, and the players who want it have a constant stream of new material to inject into their games.

So what’s this got to do with the Xanathar’s book? Just about all the content in that book has seen the light of day before, either in free pdf format (like the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion) or as Unearthed Arcana articles. Which means, technically, you could cobble together your own copy of Xanathar’s from the various free sources still available from WotC.

So why buy the book? First, you’d have to do a lot of hunting for the stuff you wanted, plus you’d have to make sure what you find is the latest version. Second, there have been some “tweaks” to the material before final publication. (Just how serious those tweaks have been, I can’t say, but what I have seen mostly looks fairly minimal to me.)

But more than that, you’d be supporting the ongoing effort to create the content for the book.

Way back when, Mearls told us that they were tossing the old hardback-a-month game plan in the trash and exploring alternative methods for supporting an RPG line. What they have adopted appears to take full advantage of the diversity of D&D players.

Traditionally, we’ve seen two sorts of D&D players. The first set are the young folks with lots of time and no money. These are your pre-car teens and your college students, who have very flexible schedules, lots of time on their hands, and lots of people in their social circles in the exact same situation. These folks are perfect play-testers for the Unearthed Arcana material. Most play at least once a week minimum. It’s easy for them to keep up with the latest UA articles and pump tens of hours into playtesting what’s new.

Of course, it costs WotC money to do this. Material needs to be written and published. Feedback needs to be solicited and combed through for useful data. Then revisions need to be made and republished, and the cycle begins again.

So WotC collects this tested and improved material, commissions art for it, and publishes it as a book. And the other sorts of players, usually older fans with jobs and families and such, who have lots of money but not much time, can pay for all the UA work by buying the book.

I personally love this system. The lots-of-time-and-no-money folks get lots of free content, though they have to deal with the fact that some of that content isn’t ready for prime time (or is, in fact, kinda bad). The no-time-and-lots-of-money folks get a book full of play-tested material focused on content that players can actually use in their games. WotC is using their customers who have cash but don’t have the time to generate tons of their own content anymore to support the games of players with lots of time to try new ideas, crash those ideas hard, and help cobble together better ones from all the bits. And the gamers with cash get the benefit of these improved ideas to plug right into their game.

It’s too early to tell if this is the sort of virtuous cycle you can build an empire out of, but it’s certainly a better way to support an RPG. It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with next.