Lago's Kickass D&D-Book Marketing Strategy!

[Lago PARANOIA]

While a lot of work has been done in making iconics, one of the areas in which I think that 5E could really help with advertising is coming up with iconic villains. Having good villains will make or break any action-adventure franchise--so why doesn't D&D get onto the bandwagon?

The villain iconics don't really need to have a huge, sappy backstory with lots of motivations. The hope is that they end up like the Rogues' Gallery of Batman or Spider-Man; they can be retrofitted for a wide variety of situations and for heroes to fight. This means that they should have wild and woolly powers and shouldn't have goals tied to overly-specific campaign elements. For example, while it's acceptable for Obitious the Abyssal Warforged to have an obsession with undeath and favor targetting frontier towns, it's not cool for him to hold a special hatred of Amn or Pelor.

The ultimate goal is that some (or even all, if we can wing it) of the iconic villains become popular enough that people will buy books just to see what those jackasses are up to. Unless you have a big name like Drizz't, no one really gives a fuck what the heroic iconics are up to--mostly because people are more interested in playing their own characters. But people are interested in knowing what Skarn the Blackhearted are doing to those poor halflings in Wibbleydale. And once you have a stable of interesting villains, adventures become easier to write and also to hook people on.

So what do you guys say to a round-robin project where we bump our heads together and try to come up with some cool villains?

[Lago PARANOIA]

I guess I'll start.

Kaioh Zan Tyr (Elven Barbarian / Druid): Many ages ago Kaioh was a barbarian hero known for his trickery and determination, emigrating to the civilized nations and becoming a successful adventurer. He gained enough power and reknown that he was able to slay the previous Elf King and usurp his position, now called the Beast King. Not content to simply enjoy the unlimited luxuries of the savage lands, he has made the frontiers vastly more dangerous in his bid to crush the civilized world.

After his coronation, he quickly set out to conquer the other tribes in his worlds; Kaioh's expanded realm contains the majority of the population of wild elves, shifters, hobgoblins and lesser goblinoids. In only 50 years time, he has instituted a brutal racially-based caste system in the aforementioned order which the wild elves are venerated as saints and the leaders of elves as God-Kings. He harnesses the fanaticism of his barbarian nation against the frontier nations both to acquire slaves and loot and also to distract the lower races from their desperate plight. His new nation is extremely brutal and repressive, expecting unquestioning obedience from his subjects and subjugation or death from non-subjects.

Despite being a king, Kaioh is not above adventuring personally with his entourage when he suspects that there may be heroes thwarting his plans or there are artifacts to gain. Despite his appearance and reputation, Kaioh is a fiercely intelligent man who is well-aware of the ways of the world. Though not arrogant, he brooks no disrespect from his underlings or towards elves and punishes these worst of all. Kaioh is a tall, intensely muscular elf with grey skin, smouldering dark-green eyes and a mane of blonde hair. Even though he is a king, he still wears his intimidating berserker outfit from his adventuring days. He is extremely sexist and loathes giving women any power or respect; his favorite method of relieving tribes of powerful women is to put them into his personal guard or harem. Though he prefers physical confrontation and attacks, his skill in druid magic backs him up where swords do not work; he uses his magic mostly to enhance his own physical skills, such as gaining the eyes of a hawk, breath of a dragon, etc.

Example Outstanding Projects:

Kaioh is attempting to forge an alliance with the lizardmen and orc nations; the biggest obstacle is their perceiving of him wanting to make them lesser subjects of his kingdom. Kaioh thus plays the 'civilized' nations against them by instigating tensions and using his magic to secretly corrupt their food supply. His ultimate hope is that they will become weak enough to be crawling to him for protection.

Kaioh is capturing slaves and sacrificing them to the Deity of Harvest at a much greater rate than in the past. The ultimate hope is that the deity will be pleased enough to curse the crops of his enemies and also cause the wilderness to re-encroach back onto the tamed lands, bringing long-extinct back to the doorstep for further mayhem.

[Username17]

Iconic Villains is actually a great idea. Amongst the most popular and memorable entries in the original AD&D hard back Monster Manual were the Demon Lords and Arch Devils. Dudes like Jubilex and Asmodeus had panache and were probably fought more often than Blue Dragons. The named characters from the artifacts & relics section were a huge food for thought. Vecna and Kas got huge amounts of play - becoming the launching point for some of the most influential adventures.

So obviously, you need a Lich. Vecna and Szass Tam are played out, you need a new guy. Also he (or she, it doesn't really matter) needs a schtick as identifiable as Vecna's Hand and Eye deal. But of course, it can't be exactly the same deal. I suggest having a Lich who runs around in a golden mask who gets called "The Worm Queen" because underneath the mask of beauty there are a bunch of crawling bugs.

Furthermore, you need a Vampire. Like Strahd or some other semi-tragic Dracula clone, or a hot chick succubus type. I don't even care. Either way, their big deal super power is mind control and they are built on a Bard chassis.

But it's not all undead and spellcasters. Just like Batman fights Killer Croc, so too must there be a named character Troglodyte swordsman. The point is that he's a Troglodyte, but he has a magical steel falchion and he will fuck you up. He has a plan to lead the stone age Troglodytes into a new era of technology and cruelty where they crush all the Dwarves and Kobolds and force them to make steel for them. His evil sword approves this message.

Similarly, you need a straight mastermind. And what better mastermind than a Kobold Psion? He has schemes and skims off of various criminals and avoids combat. Notes include him teleporting out on the second round of most combats. I can easily imagine him becoming the most hated villain in the entire edition of D&D.

-Username17

[Blasted]

While I do like the big nasty, so to speak, I (and I assume others, because hey - everyone's like me, right?) have always had issues in putting them into lower level adventures.
When your heroes are a long sword advanced over peasants, it's a big stretch to have them saving the world.
The obvious solution is to have the villain in a peripheral role, but then they run the risk of all becoming the 'mastermind' archtype.

I'm not sure how you prevent that.

[RobbyPants]

Are we statting these villains out, or just using their name/description as story fodder? If we stat them out, it's not out of the question to either include several stat blocks for various levels, or (if the system provides fast and easy NPC generation) provide a minimum stat block with a suggested advancement. This would make it easy for the DM to insert Kaioh or the The Worm Queen into their game regardless of PC level.

[Username17]

While I do like the big nasty, so to speak, I (and I assume others, because hey - everyone's like me, right?) have always had issues in putting them into lower level adventures.
When your heroes are a long sword advanced over peasants, it's a big stretch to have them saving the world.
The obvious solution is to have the villain in a peripheral role, but then they run the risk of all becoming the 'mastermind' archtype.

I'm not sure how you prevent that.

The key is that not all the iconic enemies are level 20s. Hell, they aren't even all - or even mostly paragon levels. For proper branding you need more than just a Diablo at the end of Act IV, you also need some signature enemies to fight before that. Like Andariel or Rakinishu.

The point is that you should have a cast of villains for Levels 1-5, a cast of villains for levels 6-10, a cast of villains for levels 11-15, and a cast of villains for levels 16-20. And that doesn't mean you have to write in some 1st level villains, it means you have to do some villains who can be a BBEG at 1st level - so they start in at level 3 or so.

And yeah, it's not all fucking demon lords. You also put in a Bandit Chief who is working to break a series of seals to release a demon lord, and a guy who is murdering halfling women in order to make a golem out of their hands. The point is that you can fight people who really need fighting even at low level, and you should.

-Username17

[Username17]

Are we statting these villains out, or just using their name/description as story fodder? If we stat them out, it's not out of the question to either include several stat blocks for various levels, or (if the system provides fast and easy NPC generation) provide a minimum stat block with a suggested advancement. This would make it easy for the DM to insert Kaioh or the The Worm Queen into their game regardless of PC level.

Having named enemies appear at multiple levels is probably a mistake. At least, within the context of the book they are introduced in.

This goes to the very heart of the level treadmill: when it is good, and when it sucks. In principle, people don't mind climbing slippery castle walls at low level and walls made of angry souls with clawed hands trying to hurl them into the Doom Moat at high level. But the 4e explicit scaling insulted everyone. It was deeply infuriating - because it had one too few levels of abstraction. It opened up the side and showed all the gears moving, so it stopped being magical - or even fun.

People don't want to be told that the DC is N because they are a 16th level character. That's a line in the sand past which I do not want to play. On the other hand, people like to be told that climbing the Soul Wall is a DC of N and that it is an appropriate challenge for a 16th level party. That is fine. More than fine even.

So no, putting the Worm Queen in at three different levels is a bad idea.Because then fighting and defeating the Worm Queen would have no meaning. You'd say "We beat The Worm Queen (Level 12 Version)!" Yeah. Right. Whatever. But back in the day, beating Jubilex or Demogorgon had panache. And beating the Worm Queen could have that too. And so could beating Krellix the Troglodyte.

Now here's what you can do: you can have those iconic villains return for round two in later books at a higher level. During 2nd Edition, Orcus came back in various incarnations at various power levels like 3 or 4 times. And people were OK with that. Because they weren't being told explicitly that this version of Orcus was the one you fought because you were 17th level now. Sure, you might be in the adventure for 17th level characters where Orcus comes back at a power level where he happens to be a challenge - but it is still an objective thing and thus "feels" like an accomplishment.

And that's why you can have a couple of named liches of various different levels. Like the Necromancer Zeltor and The Worm Queen. But you aren't going to want to write a level scaling list for The Worm Queen or Zeltor. At all times the things you do to scale the opposition to the party to keep the players from getting frustrated or bored have to be hidden from the players. Otherwise, ironically, the players will become frustrated and bored.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

This goes to the very heart of the level treadmill: when it is good, and when it sucks. In principle, people don't mind climbing slippery castle walls at low level and walls made of angry souls with clawed hands trying to hurl them into the Doom Moat at high level. But the 4e explicit scaling insulted everyone. It was deeply infuriating - because it had one too few levels of abstraction. It opened up the side and showed all the gears moving, so it stopped being magical - or even fun.

People don't want to be told that the DC is N because they are a 16th level character. That's a line in the sand past which I do not want to play. On the other hand, people like to be told that climbing the Soul Wall is a DC of N and that it is an appropriate challenge for a 16th level party. That is fine. More than fine even.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but damn, that's weird.

It just seems fairly obvious to me that as level goes up, so should DC, so at the very least, you should have a rough idea of what DC to use at level X. Is their exception to this that you can predict the exact DC by level instead of an approximation?

[Username17]

This goes to the very heart of the level treadmill: when it is good, and when it sucks. In principle, people don't mind climbing slippery castle walls at low level and walls made of angry souls with clawed hands trying to hurl them into the Doom Moat at high level. But the 4e explicit scaling insulted everyone. It was deeply infuriating - because it had one too few levels of abstraction. It opened up the side and showed all the gears moving, so it stopped being magical - or even fun.

People don't want to be told that the DC is N because they are a 16th level character. That's a line in the sand past which I do not want to play. On the other hand, people like to be told that climbing the Soul Wall is a DC of N and that it is an appropriate challenge for a 16th level party. That is fine. More than fine even.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but damn, that's weird.

It just seems fairly obvious to me that as level goes up, so should DC, so at the very least, you should have a rough idea of what DC to use at level X. Is their exception to this that you can predict the exact DC by level instead of an approximation?

The game should tell you what DC would be easy or hard at any particular level. The game should give examples of things to do that would constitute fair challenges for any particular level. But ice patches should not become more slippery just because you are more powerful. It breaks immersion for players to not get better at the same tasks when their numbers go up. In a way that it doesn't break immersion for the players to be confronted with different tasks that happen to be the same relative difficulty as the tasks they did before their numbers went up.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

Okay, that makes sense. I wasn't thinking about it in terms of something static like a patch of ice have a magically increasing DC. I supposed having NPCs that can be quickly leveled will feel a lot like said patch of ice.

So, while it makes sense to say a patch of ice is a good obstacle for level 1-3 characters and Grease is good for 4-6, you don't want ice that somehow scales. So it works to say that The Worm Queen is good for levels 11-13 and Kronk is good for levels 6-8.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Here's another villain, or more specifically, a villain group.

The Skull Crusader Corps
(Appropriate as enemies for characters of levels 6 to 10)

As it is sometimes unbecoming or inconvenient for a ruler to rely on mercenaries, especially for dirty work such as assassinations, the Skull Crusaders were created to distance their ruler from such unsavory actions and remain above the fray. A private cloak-and-dagger organization devoted to Bane, they appear to be little more than a run-of-the-mill assassin/thieves' guild, preying on the populace at large and always remaining maddeningly out of grasp. While they do fund their operations through such illegal means to distance themselves from their leader, their main purpose is to serve as the eyes and ears of their employer. Skull Crusaders always put on a front of whatever scapegoat their leader wants them to assign blame to. If there are racial tensions with orcs, they make the orcs and halforcs their most visible members. If the government wants to discredit a high-ranking noble, convenient papers point towards aiding an archduke's family will suddenly be found. As the organization is large and their services vast, they do not take clients lightly. If a potential patron just wants a simple framejob or assassination done, they are told to look elsewhere. If said client wants something more complex, such as serving as a secret police force or wiping out/discrediting all of the other noble provinces in a realm then they may accept such an undertaking.

The secrecy of the Skull Crusader Corps is prized above almost else in order to protect the ideal that they do hold above all else, the secrecy and non-accountability of the priestly service that they are working for. All members are forced to carry both a poisoned tooth and a command-activated magical ring. The latter's command word is changed weekly and furthermore can activated by members with the password. As no Skull Crusader is expected to surrender or survive capture, each contain two kinds of poison in them: a memory-wiping poison and an instant-death one (though the latter usually makes the former moot). If a Skull Crusader falls in battle, their partners are expected to activate the ring for them, even if they are winning the conflict. To further ensure secrecy, the Skull Crusaders follow a strict chain-of-command where messages are relayed in code and delivered via magical means whenever possible.

Skull Crusaders do not recruit. In order to gain new members, they rely on a centuries-old training method in which children, no more than the age of 6 or 7, are kidnapped and are immediately brainwashed into having absolute loyalty to both the Corps and their patron deity Bane. Afterwords, they spend the next several years during brutal training in the arts of stealth, disguise, intimidation, and murder. If by the age of 14 a potential Skull Crusader doesn't complete the training then they are immediately killed and fed to the dogs. If they do, they are immediately inducted into the ranks. At this point they are given training in illusory and enchantment magic to further supplement their abilities. Except for the tooth and the ring, which has no standard design, Skull Crusaders have no distinguishing tells or adornments. In their headquarters they wear voluminous black and grey robes with a skull necklace on the front. Since only around half are on duty, even at peak moments of activity, most of their day is spent training and praying to Bane. Fully-fledged members live in relative luxury, eating the finest of meals, enjoying the best prostitutes available (romantic relationships are forbidden), and having well-furnished rooms. The few leaders live even better lives, enviable by even the richest of merchants if they were aware of such a thing.

Contacting a Skull Crusader for a contract is a simple, if dangerous undertaking; one most fervently pray to Bane for their services. If Bane decides that a person is worthy of the attention of his Crusaders, they will have a dream about how to contact the corps. They especially enjoy offering their services to good or neutral patrons and usually offer their services at a discount in hopes of corrupting them. Terms are then discussed very sharply. Above all, even if they refuse the services or end the contract, they are never to reveal this conversation to anyone on pain of torture and death. Secondly, the Skull Crusaders will continue to serve them as long as they have money. There are more than a couple of patrons who have had intergenerational contracts. Thirdly, the patron must immediately convert to worshiping Bane unless it will cause undue problems for the completion of the task, such as that of a highly-visible priest of Bahamut.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Going back to translations, what if instead of treating the translation projects as a steady income source they were instead treated as a loss-leader designed to test the waters and get people hyped for the game?

For example, you could get someone to translate your books into Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, German, Hindi, and any other big-time language that I am missing off of the top of my head. Not all of them, just your major releases since it's just too expensive to do every single book of yours. When your product generates good buzz in other countries you can ease off of translating a little bit.

I personally think the 'learn English or find some other game' is just typical gamer elitism (see the Battletech discussion in the Shadowrun thread), but if a typical book costs 4,000 dollars to translate you may not end up getting your money's worth. But that's fine.

[Username17]

I agree that it is desperately important that people who speak different languages be given a hand into the hobby. Especially Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and Russian potential gamers. However, you seriously don't have to make Bengali, Hindi, or Tamil versions. Because those languages are coexistent with English in South Asia. And in those countries, people do math and technical work in English, not in Tamil. Hell, a lot of Tamil speakers don't even know how to read Tamil - but do know how to do differential equations in English.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Firstly, our new edition of D&D needs a name! Do you guys think that just straight up calling it Dungeons and Dragons would work, or should it have some sort of fancy rebranding title to it like Super Dungeons and Dragons or Dungeons and Dragons: Resurrection?

Morale checks need to come the fuck back. Not just because I generally approve of the idea of ending combat right after it becomes a foregone conclusion but before it becomes boring, also but because it has 'old skool' written all over it. So call it that.

Okay, there has been a lot of noise on these boards about tiered level progression. I agree with the general thrust of it, but some pandering can be crammed into these.

• Your multiclass should be called your Dual-Class. Because that is a grognard-specific term and gives them woodies.
• All classes get called kits. 4E was pointed in the right direction with their class variants but didn't take it far enough and implemented what they did do in a stupid way. Sure, keep the basic class name of the Rogue the Rogue. The class package you select should automatically come with a name, which will be called your kit. So for 4E, the wizard who selected the Tome of Summoning would be a Summoner. The wizard who picked up the Orb of Deception package would be an Illusionist. The Wand package wizard is now an Evoker. Obviously our hypothetical 5E will use different terms from all this, but that's the idea. People should be able to brag '5E lets me be a Pit-Fighter / Infernal Warlock at first level'.
• Paragon paths, such as they were, are now called Prestige classes. There are no such thing as the Pit-Fighter or Guild Rogue prestige class anymore. Those are the names of kits, or if they're popular enough (like Assassin or Ninja) they should be reserved for actual classes. They will work like paragon paths in that they're mandatory at a certain level, everyone enters them at the same time, and they give abilities at the same rates. But they're called prestige classes.
• And finally, we have epic destinies.

Cursed Magical Items: We won't do how they were done in 2E, where they were overly vindictive, or in 3E where they just ended up being a speedbump. Cursed magical items should be unlockable--if you do enough of a task they turn into a magical item. The task does not necessarily have to be combat related and in fact should be discouraged. Do 100 hp worth of damage is not an appropriate task; kill 20 adult elves is an appropriate task and should be assigned with the expectation that some people will offscreenedly moonlight as a gladiator or massacre a village.

Speaking of magical items, the game should take great pains to implement the most popular magical items from the previous editions. Including (perhaps especially) intelligent items and artifacts. Unfortunately, I can only recall a few memorable 4E items off of the top of my head--mostly due to strict min-maxxing ability--so most of the items will have to be drawn from 1E-3E.

Magical items should go in the Dungeon Master's Guide. Now while they SHOULD go into the Player's Handbook in my opinion, there have been more than a few complaints that putting the items in there encourages a WoW mentality. So to appease these people, they go back in the DMG.

I would love to implement THAC0 back into the game, because it gives grognards stiffies, but there's no way to do so without either adding an unnecessary layer of complication to the game or doing a bait and switch of the term. So let's just keep it as BAB.

The pantheons should be a reconstruction of the most popular deities from all of the other campaign settings we can get our grubby mitts on--there's no reason why the default pantheon should not include Lloth, Mystra, Zeus, Asmodeus, Odin, Anubis, Vecna, and Iblis at the very least. In fact most of the games should derive from mythology; a newcomer to the game should have a reasonable chance of going 'Oh, fuck yeah, Baal. I'm a follower of THAT.'

So. Boxed sets. I think that 5E should have one, following the below criteria:

• It gets released a short but not instant amount of time after the edition gets released. About 2-3 months. Enough time so that you can milk the fanbase out of a second purchase, but not so much time that most people will already own a copy.
• It should have a cool title to differentiate it from the other boxed sets. I'm personally fond of 'Black Box Set', because black is cool and black box is mysterious.
• The box should have thin booklet for the bare essentials of the Dungeon Master's guide, a thin booklet for a monster manual (featuring the easiest/most popular monsters up to level 5), but a full-sized Player's Handbook. The aim is to minimize the amount of reading a new player will have to do but also give them a big Player's Handbook so that if they do get hooked onto the game then they will want to buy additional books, otherwise their character will stay stalled-out at level 5. If you only make the Player's Handbook go to level 5 then people might become satisfied just playing the boxed set.
• By the same token, the boxed set should come with one adventure path that will take people to level 7. Yes, level 7 even though I said the DMG and MM should stop at level 5. The point of this is to make it so that people become aware of the fact that they're missing content, but not to the point where the game becomes overly challenging or unfun.
• The boxed set comes with a code for a free month's subscription to DDI. They still need to go to the website to download the DDI.
• Map of the default campaign setting.
• Randomized colored miniatures. Two should be of player's concept, the third should be a badass monster like a Beholder or a Black Dragon or a Gelatinous Cube It's okay to randomize the miniatures in this case because they're just a promotional item.
• Stainless steel dice. People love metal dice. I do not know why, but they do.
• Fuzzy bookmark.
• A CD that comes complete with a promotional comic just for this set, a recording of one of the play sessions (use the absolute best one you can get; do it like Reno 911 or the Iron Man movie, where the actors are given an outline but it's still improvised), and a Power Card maker.
• Punchable Card stock so that they can print out their favorite powers and also get to paste one of their faces onto it.

Most of the stuff on my list is cheap gewgaw that doesn't even cost 2 dollars, but if you package a LOT of it people will feel like they got their money's worth. But the most important thing is that whatever goes in the box is compatible with past and future purchases. This means that the D&D essentials shit where people are discouraged from buying old books in the line needs to go.



All right. I hate to pander like this, mostly because it's been consistently proven to work, but let's face it. Sexy artwork sells products. We don't have to be infantile about this, just juvenile. Men should go without shirts as often as possible and have a wide range of body types (from meat-mountain to bishounen) as long as they are oiled up and it should go without saying that Breast Plate and Chainmail Bikinis should be the order of the day. The women shouldn't all be the same Standard Porn Clone bodytype, but like the men they should all be dressed provocatively. Just in clothes, however. There's no reason to do silly shit like having magical pantaloons or that. Just the occasional sweating, half-naked dolt about to smash a dragon in the face with his/her sword.

If Dragon Age has taught me anything you can go a long deal towards diffusing tensions towards accusations of being overly sexually pandering by making your fantasy 'dark'. So implement some of that. 4E had the right idea putting scantily-clad folks on the covers of books, only problem is that the artwork just wasn't compelling enough (the women on the covers of the PHB1 and 2 are, frankly, badly drawn) and that they only had skimpily-dressed women. As if bi/homosexual males or bi/heterosexual females are immune to sexy marketing. Would it kill you fucks to occasionally dress the guys like Hidan or Conan or Ulquiorra?

[Crissa]

Also, while covers are nice, they must look good when reduced to inch-sized icons (or less) and the spines must stand out yet look like leather or something. Because no one gets to see the cover on a web-search anymore except as a tiny dot - and in the store you get to see the spine mostly.

I kinda miss full-page artwork, but what I really like is artwork that is explained in the text. 3.0 did it well in the monster manuals, but poorly in the character ones. Really, at the end, just put in blurbs or something, I don't care, just so the big art and artists get their descriptions. That'll make them highly likely to work with you in the future.

-Crissa

[Blasted]

^^ This is made of awesome.
Except the idea of reconsidering THAC0. Begone evil thing!
Really. The best thing they ever did was to remove it.

It seems obvious to me to put one edition of DDI on the CD and then have more than one month online. I don't think one month alone is enough to reel the sucker^H^H^Hcessful player in.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I'm of two minds about putting an edition of DDI onto a CD. On the one hand, doing so will make it more likely that people will use the DDI in the first place since they don't have to do the initial step of going to the website and downloading it.

On the other hand, it does cost (a small amount of) money and if someone boots it off of the CD you might miss a chance to advertise stuff on your website to the people who have to go to it to download it.

Come to think of it, it might be better to put the DDI into the boxed set after all and just require them to go online to activate their one month 75-day subscription. If they don't want to go online then they can still play around with the database and tools the CD come with. Heck, they can even use it to print out their customized character cards.

[Crissa]

As long as I can view the material on an airplane or other connectivity-damned place.

-Crissa

PS, I hate Adobe.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Blasted, I don't actually want to bring back THAC0, I want to be able to use the name without people complaining too much that my implementation is a bastardization of the original system.

I stated earlier in the thread that I think that the next version of D&D, which I will hereby call Super Dungeons and Dragons, should resurrect as many sacred cows as possible as long as it doesn't have too deleterious effect on game balance. So yes to cursed magical items, no for random rolling for hit points a level.

The problem is... I'm having a hard time identifying sacred cows that are big enough to be noticeable but not too ungamebalanced to used even after some retrofitting. Most of the time I keep coming up with amateur-hour stuff like 'make Orcus look like he used to back in 2nd Edition'. If some grognards can offer some suggestions of classic elements that could go back into the game, I'm all ears.

[Blasted]

Was anyone unhappy that they removed THAC0? You give me their names, and I'll go beat some sense into them

I don't think THAC0 is a sacred cow worth dealing with, even in name.

[Lago PARANOIA]

All right, well, what's your opinion on the other stuff?

[Blasted]

I think it's really good.
Really good. I'd buy it and I've moved to PDFs because I've run out of shelf space.

The only thing other than THAC0 I don't really think is the dog's bollocks is the ripped gods, I haven't decided on that. Something needs to be done, but I'm not sure importing new old gods is the way.

[Crissa]

THAC0 just sounds cool. But it sucks, because it's horrible in practice. If only there were a way to make it work, or at least sound cool, without being distracting.

-Crissa

[TheFlatline]

The villain iconics don't really need to have a huge, sappy backstory with lots of motivations. The hope is that they end up like the Rogues' Gallery of Batman or Spider-Man; they can be retrofitted for a wide variety of situations and for heroes to fight. This means that they should have wild and woolly powers and shouldn't have goals tied to overly-specific campaign elements. For example, while it's acceptable for Obitious the Abyssal Warforged to have an obsession with undeath and favor targetting frontier towns, it's not cool for him to hold a special hatred of Amn or Pelor.

It sounds as if you're inferring that we should form some sort of Guild of Calamitous Intent...

Morale checks need to come the fuck back. Not just because I generally approve of the idea of ending combat right after it becomes a foregone conclusion but before it becomes boring, also but because it has 'old skool' written all over it. So call it that.

With Morale handled in a proper way, bards actually stand to be *important* to the group. A D&D first!

It should have a cool title to differentiate it from the other boxed sets. I'm personally fond of 'Black Box Set', because black is cool and black box is mysterious.

Truth in advertising: D&D: Pandora's Box.

4E had the right idea putting scantily-clad folks on the covers of books, only problem is that the artwork just wasn't compelling enough (the women on the covers of the PHB1 and 2 are, frankly, badly drawn) and that they only had skimpily-dressed women. As if bi/homosexual males or bi/heterosexual females are immune to sexy marketing. Would it kill you fucks to occasionally dress the guys like Hidan or Conan or Ulquiorra?

Problem I encounter on occasion: New players always wonder why they're wearing plate & mail while the dude on the cover has a loin cloth and a sword almost as big as he is.

I'll disagree here to an extent. No artwork should break the themes of the game. If you need armor, then don't draw Conan unless he has armor on.

[TheFlatline]

Was anyone unhappy that they removed THAC0? You give me their names, and I'll go beat some sense into them

I don't think THAC0 is a sacred cow worth dealing with, even in name.

Oh screw that. State that unconscious, bound, or otherwise utterly helpless characters have an effective armor class of zero, and instead of calling the attack a coup de grace you call it a THAC0 attack, and put a large winking smiley face in the margin to know that you're committing heresy.