The Gaming Den

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

• The boxed set is specifically designed to look more like a board game than, well, the book shape most boxed sets come in. I recommend dimensions of 10' x 16' x 2'.
• ...
• Has a plastic 'gridifier'. It is a slightly raised plastic lid that is opaque around the edges but has a transparent middle with a grid pattern on it. By placing one of the maps that come with the game (or that you make yourself) underneath it you can instantly have a battlemat that's divided into 1' squares. You can draw on the top with a dry erase marker if you want to; the set will come with a black D&D dry erase marker. This gridifier is about the size of the boxed set.

That's a really tiny grid. You're looking at a 50' x 80' battlefield, minus double the thickness of the border. That works okay for some dungeons, but outdoor stuff would be pretty tough.

Maybe if you hinged it down the middle or something, but even then, you're still looking at 100' x 80'.

Yup. I was trying to get the boards to the sizes of those used for DragonStrike or HeroQuest--by keeping them on glossy sheets you could have quite a variety of dungeons on the cheap. The gridifier is there so that people can mark on the map without feeling bad and also so that they can convert their own hand-drawn maps into something playable on a battlemat.

Outdoor stuff IS a big problem, no doubt, but that kind of thing tends to be beyond the ability of new people to grok anyway. Once people are experienced enough to mentally handle a battlefield 100 x 100 squares they don't need a battlemap anyway.

I suppose you could go all AD&D and come up with indoor and outdoor scales, but then stuff gets all crazy.

To answer a very belated question, if I was an independent no-name company that never published an RPG before and I somehow acquired the D&D license I wouldn't worry about how I'd advertise it, because I would immediately sell it off and work on my own system.

If I was going to produce my own TTRPG from scratch I probably wouldn't do heroic fantasy, even if I was allowed to use D&D. Again, I would try to construct some kind of urban fantasy game.

A question abounds, however.

If you did release a boxed set, a softcover newsprint edition of the core books, and the glossy hardcovers we're used to of the core rules, what would be the optimal ratio in NA? Obviously you want to push as many glossy hardcovers as possible because they have the maximize per-unit profit, but you'll have people ONLY purchasing the boxed set/core rulebooks as impulse buys from Barnes and Nobles. The obvious question is that if you set these three things side-by-side, how much will you reduce purchases of the hardcovers by people already inclined to buy those?

The D&D base in NA seems pretty upmarket. Switching from the Sword & Fist-style softcovers to permanently hardcovers didn't seem to really hurt the sales of the latter in Canada/US.