Monte Cook IS working on 5th edition...

[talozin]

Would a "Basic" version of D&D tap open a substantial new source of customers? I would say "no", since (in my experience) the combined audience for "simple" tabletop fantasy RPGs (e.g. Microlite D20, Labyrinth Lords, Dragon Age RPG, Castles & Crusades, etc.) is tiny. Why would D&D benefit from investing money in a tiny, overcrowded market like that?

I wonder whether the steady trend of writing the D&D game for a younger and younger audience has had the effect of shrinking that market. I bought -- or was given, memory fails -- my first Basic Set when I was eight years old, and probably could not have afforded or understood the AD&D books that were being sold at the time.

The PHB, DMG, and MM together came to like $50 -- which to an eight-year-old kid in 1981 might as well have been $500 -- and were written for a college-age or older audience -- I'm not saying it was beyond the ability of bright middle-school and high-school students, but it was a game that was written for adults. That left a big gap between the age when kids get interested in swords and sorcery, and the age when the AD&D rules start to become comprehensible (to the degree they ever did).

The modern books are basically written for an audience of bright middle-school kids. There's not much of a gap there, so I'm not sure having a "simplified" D&D rule set would be a big deal.

On the other hand, there probably is room on the high end. I can't help but think that some of the older players are put off by the more kid-friendly D&D.

[hogarth]

That gets into replacement goods (e.g. Coke Classic vs. New Coke)

You do relaize that the underlying problem with New Coke was that some idiot thought that since Pepsi was getting better traction they should change Coke to Pepsi. It would be like WOTC suddenly using the d10 rules of White Wolf instead of a d20 system.

Or like WotC suddenly publishing a pared-down, unpopular system like Microlite d20 or Labyrinth Lord instead of 3E/4E!

Actually, that'd be more like Coke putting out a New New Coke to compete with Moxie and Nehi.

[Josh_Kablack]

That gets into replacement goods (e.g. Coke Classic vs. New Coke) vs. goods that are actually tapping new sources of demand (e.g. Coke vs. Diet Coke). Would a "Basic" version of D&D tap open a substantial new source of customers? I would say "no", since (in my experience) the combined audience for "simple" tabletop fantasy RPGs (e.g. Microlite D20, Labyrinth Lords, Dragon Age RPG, Castles & Crusades, etc.) is tiny. Why would D&D benefit from investing money in a tiny, overcrowded market like that?

The reason given in my high-school economics course for the proliferation of brands of similar products owned by the same company was that it is a bid for market share. And there was a fairly sensible argument given for that.

Here's a hasty example of why putting out multiple brands of the same, or at least very similar products can, in the right circustances, make good business sense:

If there is only Coke, everyone drinks coke, and it's utter madness to waste resources producing New Coke.

But if there is Coke competing against Pepsi competing against Dr Pepper competing against Faygo Cola then some people drink each of them. Some consumers have strong preferences and will only drink their preferred soda. Other consumers have weak preferences and will decide based on price or convenience. And then, some consumers have no preference and will decide which to purchase in a arbitrary way - and if those people are picking from Coke, Pepsi, Dr Pepper and Faygo, then there is only a 1-in-4 shot they'll buy your offering, and an equal chance that they will buy a competitor's product instead. But if instead, such consumers are picking a soda from the set of Coke, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, Faygo and New Coke, there is now a 2-in-5 shot that the arbitrarily-deciding cola buyer will pick up your product and only a 1-in-5 shot that they'll pick up a competitor's product. Thus offering a product that competes with your own product can be worthwhile despite the added production costs and loss of sales of your primary product, because the two lines together can capture a bigger market share (and thus sell more total units) than the primary product alone.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Would a "Basic" version of D&D tap open a substantial new source of customers? I would say "no", since (in my experience) the combined audience for "simple" tabletop fantasy RPGs (e.g. Microlite D20, Labyrinth Lords, Dragon Age RPG, Castles & Crusades, etc.) is tiny. Why would D&D benefit from investing money in a tiny, overcrowded market like that?

1.) Are you sure it's an overcrowded market and not a problem with advertising/shitty product? I mean in the mid-80s people would've said that urban fantasy games were an overcrowded market that wasn't going to go anyway.

2.) D&D-Basic/Lite would appeal to two different markets. The kind of player who would be willing to spend $20 to buy D&D: The Board Game because it's raining and their family is vacationing in San Diego is not the same kind of player who is willing to plop down 80 pounds for a set of brand, spank-my-ass new core rulebooks.

[K]

Having watched a few episodes of Hit It With An Axe, I've decided that there needs to be a more rules-light version of DnD that moderately dim and somewhat petulant sex workers can master and enjoy.

[Lago PARANOIA]

A rules-light D&D should be done for no other reason than the fact that the only way you're going to make headway into the non-English speaking markets is to have something that is cheap and can be translated quickly.

[Juton]

I wonder how big the market for rules light games really is. One of the groups I play in play rules light, the other plays Pathfinder. The rules light crowd has maybe one rulebook and no splats, while there are at least 3 cores and around 10 splats at my Pathfinder game. There might be more rules light players out there than you think, it's just they aren't buying as much as the average Pathfinder player. So the Cook/Mearle idea of having different complexity levels could be a good one, since you can unite multiple types of gamers under one banner.

[Korwin]

A rules-light D&D should be done for no other reason than the fact that the only way you're going to make headway into the non-English speaking markets is to have something that is cheap and can be translated quickly.

Well D&D3.X isnt so hard to read. Its in fact to easier to read (in english) - for this native german speaker, ie: me - than DSA in german.

But faster to translate for those players who wont buy english rulebooks I agree with.
Cheaper I am not so shure about.

[malak]

Well D&D3.X isnt so hard to read. Its in fact to easier to read (in english) - for this native german speaker, ie: me - than DSA in german.

That's not surprising. DSA is an abomination.

[hogarth]

So the Cook/Mearle idea of having different complexity levels could be a good one, since you can unite multiple types of gamers under one banner.

It might be a good idea if you could unite those players under one version of D&D. But I think from TSR's experience that's harder than it sounds. I.e., "lite" players want "lite" books, "advanced" players want "advanced" books, and neither particularly wants something that's neither fish nor fowl.

[OgreBattle]

Couldn't they be within the same books though?

The way I'm seeing it, we discuss "advanced" as "Lite+ more stuff added on"

It's the same as the Advanced book, except you note in a different color where Lite ends and + begins.

[hogarth]

Couldn't they be within the same books though?

I'm talking about supplements, not the core rulebook. As I said before, people didn't like buying Basic D&D modules to use with AD&D and vice versa.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I.e., "lite" players want "lite" books, "advanced" players want "advanced" books, and neither particularly wants something that's neither fish nor fowl.

Again, is this player preference or a reflection of market penetration? If I was in a weekly D&D club with people whose only exposure to the game was the club meeting and a semester ago they weren't even aware that there would multiple editions I would love to own some 'lite' material if no one else had it.

Alternatively, when I was on deployment I developed a newfound love for Chess, Risk, and DragonStrike even though I would have much rather have played D&D. Not to say that I didn't play D&D but if it was the choice between 'go to the ship library and look for a book' and 'DragonStrike' you damn well better believe I would've played DragonStrike. If I had played DragonStrike more than 4 or 5 times I would've paid ten dollars for extra cards or another board or some more DM adventures--had they been available, of course.

I wonder how big the market for rules light games really is.

If you want to grow the pie higher you start with rules-light. People just don't have the attention span and/or riskiness with their money to give something a try. When you get them hooked is when you start pimping out expansions.

The pre-3DS Nintendo company did not become market leader by a country mile again by putting out awesome games that kicked the shit out of all of the competition, although they did do that. They kicked the shit out of the competition by offering a hand to the market that didn't normally play video games and after they had Wii Sports or Nintendogs or whatever then started pimping out Sonic Colors and New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Super Mario Galaxy all that jazz.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I have paid for at least 2 games that advertised themselves as low-complexity D&D clones. I have downloaded 5+.

[Juton]

I wonder how big the market for rules light games really is.

If you want to grow the pie higher you start with rules-light. People just don't have the attention span and/or riskiness with their money to give something a try. When you get them hooked is when you start pimping out expansions.

The pre-3DS Nintendo company did not become market leader by a country mile again by putting out awesome games that kicked the shit out of all of the competition, although they did do that. They kicked the shit out of the competition by offering a hand to the market that didn't normally play video games and after they had Wii Sports or Nintendogs or whatever then started pimping out Sonic Colors and New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Super Mario Galaxy all that jazz.

Your Nintendo analogy is good for something main stream, but RPGs haven't been mainstream for a long while now. RPGs really only appeal to people who play RPGs, the way the hobby spreads now-a-days is friends showing it to other friends. That was the way I was introduced to RPGs, and that was the way everyone else I play with was introduced to RPGs, anecdotal as that is.

Starting with rules-light won't make a difference, people will start with whatever their friends are playing, what matters is how much fun they have playing. The first RPG I ever played was Mechwarrior 3, which was a horrible, dreadful system, a system by any right should have driven me running and screaming from the hobby, It took us forever to even figure out how to resolve an attack, for reference it's a system where each attack requires long division to find out how much damage a character receives. But the table talk was fun and it gave us something to do.

If rules-light caters to a different demographic then, it's not necessarily just new players, more players who don't want to be tied down with minutia. Thinking about it, rules-light probably caters to the artistic types who like to describe every attack they make, and players who just don't have enough free time to wrestle with feat trees and sorting through hundreds of spells.

[tussock]

Just following up to this from p10 due to it still being relevant.

Yeh. The game already has a mechanic for optional complexity. It's called Character Classes.

The current designers just think everyone at the table has to agree to using the same complexity and difficulty settings, and no one could possibly want to play an old-school hard-mode complex strategically-planned Wizard while some other dude plays a Fighter with 2+ for saves and attacks that can just go all day and not care.

Since when are wizards hard mode? Usually you go by the CharOps boards, grab your build, and you're set.

Oldschool. Wizards with 1d4 rolled hit points, no Con mod, one semi-random spell for the day, and more XP than anyone else to level up until around 7th. Skilled players that enjoyed the attention to detail gravitated to them for the break even around 7th and the ultimate power gained around 12th level.

Like Mike Mearls noted a couple months back. The game used to have a fairly easy rules-light system and a massively challenging and complex system running at the same time. The first being "Fighters", and the second "Magic-Users". That's when D&D was crazy popular, when the "rules-light" guys and the "study 100 pages for tiny advantages" guys were playing the same game at the same time, and benefited from each other's presence.

Since then Fighters have become vastly more complex (but less competent), while Wizards have become easier to the point they had to nerf all the magic in the game.

That's where 4e fails the most: by living with the one-true-way of class design, people who prefer lighter rules run to oldschool, and people who prefer heavier rules run to Pathfinder, and none of these people are playing together any more.

Which makes scheduling games harder with each smaller pool, which means less playing, which means less sales, which means less shop presence, and so on.

If people really want to play the complex Fighter and simple Wizard, then build another couple classes for them.


tl;dr: The game already has a mechanic for optional complexity. It's called Character Classes.

[hogarth]

I have paid for at least 2 games that advertised themselves as low-complexity D&D clones. I have downloaded 5+.

How many do you play regularly? How many of those games have your friends bought supplements for? How many players are there for those 7+ games in your local community vs. how many players are there for D&D and Pathfinder in your local community?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Your Nintendo analogy is good for something main stream, but RPGs haven't been mainstream for a long while now.

Your point doesn't make any fucking sense. Are you saying that for something that's not mainstream you need to make it more complex and expensive in order to draw in new customers? You'd think that it'd be the total opposite! Sony can flat-out ask people for $499 for a PS3 without getting laughed out of the room because it has a broad customer base and has a history of delivering quality (snrk) product.

There's a reason why Nintendo opted to go with the inferior hardware of the Nintendo DS and Nintendo Wii. Because it'd be cheaper. Sure, they got laughed at by Microsoft/Sony fans for their strategy but since they were able to reach out to a market with a greater ease-of-use and lower sticker price they were able to completely turn their fortunes around. If they had listened to their stupid, myopic fanboys and tried to retrench they'd still be stuck dead last in the console wars.

Thinking about it, rules-light probably caters to the artistic types who like to describe every attack they make, and players who just don't have enough free time to wrestle with feat trees and sorting through hundreds of spells.

It also appeals to small children who have an allowance of like 20 dollars over two weeks, middle-aged adults who've played WoW a few times and are looking for something to do with their sisters' kids, and yuppies who have seriously only like 15 hours of free time on the weekend and will mentally veto anything that takes more than 1 hour to grok.

I mean, seriously, look at this little nugget of crap you posted:

Starting with rules-light won't make a difference, people will start with whatever their friends are playing, what matters is how much fun they have playing. The first RPG I ever played was Mechwarrior 3, which was a horrible, dreadful system, a system by any right should have driven me running and screaming from the hobby, It took us forever to even figure out how to resolve an attack, for reference it's a system where each attack requires long division to find out how much damage a character receives. But the table talk was fun and it gave us something to do.

Yeah, I'm glad you managed to stick through a terrible RPG to find some fun. So what about all of those other people who got frustrated and gave up on it or stared at the rulebook and ran away screaming?

Getting into TTRPGs as they're currently printed is a pretty big hurdle. I mean, take core D&D. You need to do the following three things before you even have a chance of deciding whether you like the game or not:

1.) You need to be able to plop down the money for the books. God forbid you're a fan of games like Black and White or Neverwinter Nights or The Sims and you actually want to run a game; that's like 90 dollars down the drain.

2.) If you get past that, you also need to devote X amount of time needed to read the rules. If you have someone helping you it'll go by faster. But seriously, have you seen the size of a PHB? That shit is like 250 pages. That's like reading the entirety of Henry V and Henry VI. If you're agnostic or even slightly negative towards the product, how are you going to get past that hurdle? No one likes reading that much

3.) Now you need to find a group. If there's no one around to play D&D then you've just wasted your money and time! People are willing to plop down 20 dollars and an hour worth of reading on a product that they might only get to play a few months from now, fewer are going to do 90 dollars and six hours of reading.

[Lago PARANOIA]

How many do you play regularly? How many of those games have your friends bought supplements for? How many players are there for those 7+ games in your local community vs. how many players are there for D&D and Pathfinder in your local community?

Once again once AGAIN, you're asking the wrong question. Sure, you can point to those sales and go 'ha, see, complex games sell better!' but you're doing the wrong kind of comparison. Even if the sales of those simple games weren't all that large the question you then need to ask is would making it much more complex have reduced sales even further?

No fucking shit it'd be hard as balls to find a game and that people would be skeptical about buying the product even if he raved that it was the best game evar. It's running up against problem #3 in my list. I don't see how exacerbating problems 1 and 2 would have increased sales.

[Gx1080]

@tussock

Dude, character classes as a way to give optional complexity is a really bad idea. I mean, people already know that the high armor, high HP warrior will be more easy to play than the low armor, low-hp wizard, but they don't like when the game system treats them with contempt about it.

Besides, you can't introduce much difference in complexity on that way before ending in a no-win scenario: If the easy to play classes can keep up, the the hard to play classes ask: Why I'm bothering with this shit?. If the hard to play classes end up being more powerful (like the 3.5 wizard), then the easy to play classes just stop bothering, given that they don't make much of sdifference anyways.

I mean, 3.5 can be championed all that you want, but a VAST segment of the TTRPG market will not touch it until that is adressed by the company selling it.

@hogarth

Having low-complexity mode on D&D is good for those who travel, those who want to introduce people new to the game, or those who simply can't be arsed. Putting everything on the same books means that there's no competing market lines inside the same company. And one of the main selling points of D&D is that it can be used for the many shades of medieval fantasy. So, given it's and WotC position as market leaders, they HAVE to beable to attract as many players as possible.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Dude, character classes as a way to give optional complexity is a really bad idea. I mean, people already know that the high armor, high HP warrior will be more easy to play than the low armor, low-hp wizard, but they don't like when the game system treats them with contempt about it.

This is why I support the idea of having 'basic' classes with non-patronizing names like Hero and Magician. Here are the key three points about them:

1.) They're simple to pick up and play. They shouldn't be as simple as 1E/2E fighters. There should be some minor variation between the classes so that if Trevor, Grandma, and the DM's girlfriend are playing with Brian and Sara the former three can still wank over superficial differences. They should like have 3-6 discrete, unchanging options from picking from a pool of about twice that size to use from round-to-round with modest differences to pick from. Almost all of their abilities are skewed towards combat rather than problem solving. They are seriously just along for the ride and need to rely on their buddies to get anything done. Of course if a group is just composed of 'basic' classes the DM will have to make adventures simpler in order to account for the reduced competence of these classes.

2.) They're slightly but noticeably weaker in combat performance than 'advanced' classes. Not enough so that they feel like deadweight, but enough so that experienced people don't have an incentive to pick these classes. Of course basic game theory will almost automatically make them weaker than the more advanced classes but since most 'advanced' players don't grasp basic arithmetic and probability, let alone game theory and tactics, you still need to throw them a bone so they can continue feeling like speshul snowflakes. Personally in a less stupid world I think that they should be generically stronger in combat than the advanced classes but like Gx1080 pointed out people derp out about 'obvious' power and you don't want to breed resentment. I don't like shoving the Dunce Hat on Trevor merely because he's the least likely to notice that he's the LVP, but players are jealous and selfish and by the time Trevor figures out what's going on he can just switch to an 'advanced' class anyway.

3.) They come with 'automatic' roleplaying abilities. While Logistics and Dragons can be a great way to stimulate interest and move product, you seriously don't want Trevor or Grandma to spend 20 minutes fiddling about with the tax rate. If you play a Hero at the level when the paladin is getting a kingdom they get the ability of 'He's a Jolly Good Fellow' and wenches and bards will just plain start following him around. Magicians of high enough level get offices and tenure in the local Mage's Academy. There's no need for either of them to enact a Scooby Doo Civilization IV plan to get them vast piles of gold, they just have it. Players new to TTRPG struggle with the concept of being in-character, let alone integrating gameplay and story. So just give them the story, fuck the gameplay.

[Gx1080]

I don't like it as "separate" classes, it disrupts the attachment that people have to their characters. Rather have it as something that is optional on the main classes.

[MfA]

If the easy to play classes can keep up, the the hard to play classes ask: Why I'm bothering with this shit?

Allow synergy, make a party of a fighter and a wizard actually more powerful than a party of 2 fighters or 2 wizards.

[Juton]

@Lago

Your conjecture is that a good light RPG should be usable by anyone, even those who have not played any type of RPG before. My conjecture is that a light RPG does not benefit from that level of accessibility.

I believe this is so because the case where a group of people who have never played an RPG, going out and buying one to play is so utterly infrequent as to be a statistical outlier. The defacto method of introducing someone to RPGs is to have them join an already established group. All I have to back this up is my own anecdotal experience, unless you have data from a substantially larger sample size it is unlikely you will sway me otherwise.

The one caveat to this is the purported claim that D&D was so popular in the early eighties that you could get a copy at Toys-R-Us or Sears and that groups where allowed to organize and play at high schools. The ubiquity and social acceptance of the activity might prompt some people to try it on their own, without being a part of an already established group. That's not true now, Magic the Gathering and Vampire where banned at my school, even if they weren't there is a huge stigma attached to playing them. There is no such stigma for playing a console, so your analogy to Nintendo's success is invalid.

If you really wanted to create a beach head in the main stream for RPGs, your best route would be a related board game. Since they do not have the same level of stigma and are tangentially related in play mechanics it could serve to ease people into the hobby without any nerd alarms going off.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I believe this is so because the case where a group of people who have never played an RPG, going out and buying one to play is so utterly infrequent as to be a statistical outlier. The defacto method of introducing someone to RPGs is to have them join an already established group.

Notice that that is because the current 'word of mouth' way of getting people to play TTRPGs neatly obviates problems 1, 2, and 3; you have someone to help you through the rules, you have a guaranteed group, and someone can just jolly well lend you the books.

That is a way to grow the pie higher. Unfortunately it's also slow and as 4E D&D has shown us your attempts to slowly build the fanbase by the friend connection can explode in your face and leave you at ground zero again.

There is no such stigma for playing a console, so your analogy to Nintendo's success is invalid.

First of all, are you so sure about that?

Second of all, there's no such stigma for playing a console because games have made headway towards reaching into markets beyond nerds and gamers. The turnaround started to come with the 6th generation with the explosion in first-person shooters and sports games. And it was cemented in the 7th generation by going into markets you'd think would be totally anathema to video games. Like the elderly.

If you really wanted to create a beach head in the main stream for RPGs, your best route would be a related board game.

You mean like a boxed set? One that comes with tokens, QuikStart rules, maps/boards, and some feelies? The kind of thing I've been arguing for for several months?