Red Box: Some Constructive Criticism

I have not looked at the Red Box so I can't comment completely about certain things, but I will agree and disagree with several points here.

I agree that if the character classes created within the Red Box are not the same as the the first two levels you'll get with HotFL, then that was an unfortunate mistake on the part of WotC to finalize the Red Box's edit and go to print before they finalized the HotFL edit. That kind of discrepency just looks a little unprofessional. (Although truth be told, the kids who will be looking at this game will probably have their heads swimming from so much new information, rules and terminology that they might not even notice it when they pick up HotFL.)

However, I would greatly disagree that the Red Box needed anything more as far as character advancement was concerned. While I can accept your belief that making it a replica of the old Red Box was indeed an attempt to re-woo really lapsed gamers from the 80s... that in no way should impact the content of the box.

It is a starter set meant to be found on the shelves of Target or Walmart that a mother or father will grab and throw into the cart when they need to pick up some game or toy for their child's birthday or Christmas, or some other's child's birthday party their kid is going to. Many of the children who will be receiving this box quite possibly will have not even heard of the name 'Dungeons & Dragons', let alone played it. So for most of them... they will possibly open this box up, maybe play the solo adventure for a couple hours, and then when they're done, they'll throw it into their closet with the rest of the junk they've acquired over the years, never to be looked at again.

Like it or not... that's how probably most of these Red Boxes will be treated. A curiousity for a few hours after some impulse purchase, but never treated seriously by the kids who will play them. So to put anything in that box that raises the price point such that it can't be an impulse birthday purchase (because no parent would want to blow $40 on some random game for some random kid whose birthday party their child got invited to), or makes the game more involved and difficult to understand (thus making it even more unlikely the kid might latch onto the game) is complete folly.

If we're lucky, maybe one out of every ten kids who get this Red Box will consider playing again. And at that point... when the game tells you to pick up these next couple of products to continue the adventure, those kids will WANT to spend the money for it. They WON'T CARE that the starter set wasn't a so-called "complete game". They'll WANT to play it, and thus they'll spend the money TO play it. And while there may be that small, sliver of kids who will want to play it again but not want to actually spend money on it... at the very least the starter set gives a little help in creating their own stuff as needed.

WotC is all about making money. As is every other game company. That's why you give the introductory game cheap or free, and hope to entice them enough to want to pay further. That's why Blizzard offers those "Play WoW for 10 hours free" cards. Get them hooked, so that they'll WANT to spend more money on it later.

I consider a few things when looking at this set:

I really like that it requires nobody to instruct you as to how to play, it takes you through an adventure that you can read by yourself to get oriented to how to play the game and afterwards you have a viable character.

The (low) price of the product probably dictated what could fit into the product, and it was very likely a trade off to keep the price down yet have something that new players would enjoy. It is a starter set after all. My expectation is that whenever I am looking at a starter, it's going to be limited in what it can do, it's a sample of the game, not the full game.

There is an adventure packaged is there not? Does that not count for several hours of fun? How long would it take to play through the adventure? Divide that by the number of participants and figure out the fun for value... I am willing to bet it's a pretty good deal when compared to almost anything else.

It includes everything you need to run that game. Tokens, maps, adventure, character sheets, and dice. If I wasn't playing D&D and spotted this in the store, I would think it was really great that it included everything... otherwise I would return it as a piece of crap that wasn't playable.

Lastly... we ENWorld folks are not really the primary target of this product. In fact, I don't think even our friends and family are the target of this product unless they live far away. Because our friends and family would ask us about D&D if they were interested and we would probably say "Here is what you need... PHB (or rules compendium), Heroes of the fallen lands, etc" instead of saying buy the red box. If you had someone far away where you couldn't be there to show them how to play... which product would you direct them to?

Anyhow, I plan on picking up the red box to check it out, and probably will get some copies as gifts to give out this holiday season to my friends and family who do not play D&D and live far away.

DEFCON 1 said:

WotC is all about making money. As is every other game company. That's why you give the introductory game cheap or free, and hope to entice them enough to want to pay further. That's why Blizzard offers those "Play WoW for 10 hours free" cards. Get them hooked, so that they'll WANT to spend more money on it later.

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Yes, but there's a difference between the "Red Box" and Blizzard's free trial cards for WoW. The Red Box isn't FREE!

"Get them hooked with a super-limited experience" is a fine marketing idea for a free product. It is a terrible, sneaky, underhanded tactic for a product people shell out good money for.

We can debate the value for money that D&D offers until the cows come home. I think it's spectacular. But the point is that to get someone who's never played to truly understand that, you have to convey that D&D offers an unlimited game experience that is infinitely replayable. To properly convey that, you need to offer some level of that repeatability in your introductory product. Without that, it's a piss-poor representation of what D&D is, which is what a Starter Set should tell people.

By offering no (or very limited) character creation rules and super-limited magic items, with one, maybe two adventures, you're inviting the comparison of D&D to a video game. All the Starter Set offers is "a few hours" of gameplay, once, with no graphics. It comes across as less replayable than Monopoly. Does that give a fair representation of what D&D is? Sure, if it were free, it would be fine. But it's not free.

Full character creation rules and enough variability in magic items and monsters that the DM could run an infinite number of 3-level (or even 2-level) campaigns out of the box would convey, very solidly, what D&D offers. The value for money it provides would be made obvious to anyone who was inclined to try it. Not everyone would move on to further products, but far more would than will do so from the super-limited trial the box currently provides. As is, the only people who will move on are the ones who are predisposed to "get" the game. And most of those people are already playing it. New customers will compare it to the latest video game and think: "That's all I get for $20? Meh, no thanks." You can tell people until the cows come home about all the great stuff "the full D&D experience" offers, but unless you show them, they won't GET it.

D&D isn't like most conventional games, because it's an experiential product. Most people don't really "get it" until they play. And the more you play, the more you get it. That's why it becomes an addictive hobby game for most of us who play it. Trust me, by offering a richer experience in the Starter Set, it would mean more people would buy the subsequent products, not less (as long as those products offered options and levels than the Starter Set lacked). It baffles me that WotC doesn't seem to get this.

The new "Red Box" does a great job of explaining the game, and a pretty good job of conveying the gameplay experience, and for that I give it kudos. But if it also did a great job of conveying the game's infinite replayability, it would be perfect.

Color me disappointed

I wasn't pleased at all with the boxed set, and I don't know that I would gift it.

When you copy the marketing of a product on the outside of the box, the contents should be pretty similar or some people might not be pleased.

JohnSnow said:

"Get them hooked with a super-limited experience" is a fine marketing idea for a free product. It is a terrible, sneaky, underhanded tactic for a product people shell out good money for.

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I'd say it would be terrible, sneaky and underhanded if they gave you the box but inside you only found tokens, maps, a set of dice and a sheet of paper directing you to sign up for DDI content in order to play... but wow I don't agree with the words selected. It's an excellent value in my opinion, for the poster map alone I have spent more. It is a starter, my expectation is vastly different than yours I guess.

I don't have access to the box cover to read it, but do they list what you get inside and what the experience will be? Technically speaking, the solo adventure is a character creation method... just not what you were expecting... and far from efficient once you know how to play... but you can craft different characters using it.

Since the box show and describes quite well what is inside, I guess issue can be taken with "This box contains everything you need to start playing" if you believe you need more to start playing.

edit: More issue can be taken with "In this game, anything is possible - the only limit is your imagination!"

I'm not convinced character creation is all that limited compared to the Mentzer red box. So much of what made the Mentzer characters unique had little or no impact on the game. It was still very much archetype based and your class choice mattered way, way more than your ability scores.

The new red box is very similar to that. Stat choices are nearly irrelevant as well. Instead of rolling and seeing what classes fit, you pick a class and get the stats to fit. You use the standard array and the stats go in a way that make your character not suck.

A shopping list with a few weapon stats would be cool. Especially given how the monsters have all sorts of weapons on them.

The limited magic items are kind of crappy. It'd be nice to have more, but I don't think the game is reliant on magic items during levels 1 & 2. It functions just fine in the early levels with no magic items given at all. The game math only falls apart without magic items at levels 4 and up.

I'm also not sure that I buy that the DM can't make his own adventures with what's provided. There's a big list of monsters. And examples of the type of treasure parcels each fight should have. There's suggestions on how to get more millage out of the one poster map, but drawing your own is only a piece of paper, a ruler and a sharpie away.

Without being able to buy things, GPs are basically just your score. And the limited source of magic items doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. I could totally see a group playing their second group of characters and one of them saying "I'm going to get that chainmail +2 this time" and it being part of the fun. Or a player asking "Can this axe be a mace instead this time?" and the DM going "Yes. Yes it can."

I just reread the section on designing adventures and whatnot. And I disagree with your assessment that it's incomplete. It tells you how to design quests, how to place and use monsters, and even how to get more use out of the map as well as a paragraph on making your own (even suggesting drawing them out yourself on large graph paper).

The only thing I wanted out of the red box that it didn't give was a smooth transition to Heroes of the Fallen Lands. I'm disappointed that pretty much every class has something wrong with it compared to the HoFL builds. The fighter uses the wrong stat for bonus damage, the wizard has a double shot magic missile, the rogue has both at-will attack and movement powers and the cleric doesn't smite undead.

Festivus said:

I don't have access to the box cover to read it, but do they list what you get inside and what the experience will be? Technically speaking, the solo adventure is a character creation method... just not what you were expecting... and far from efficient once you know how to play... but you can craft different characters using it.

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The game adheres to the absolute letter of the law concerning what it advertises. I argue that a D&D without substantial replayability.

No equipment list? No ability to pick up the weapons goblins drop? The rogue Weapon Finesse power even mentions a bonus with "light blades, light crossbows and short bows," only per the rules existent in the "Red Box," the rogue has no way to own either of those. Even though the goblins you kill have in the adventure have them, but whatever.

nnms said:

I'm also not sure that I buy that the DM can't make his own adventures with what's provided. There's a big list of monsters. And examples of the type of treasure parcels each fight should have. There's suggestions on how to get more millage out of the one poster map, but drawing your own is only a piece of paper, a ruler and a sharpie away.

Without being able to buy things, GPs are basically just your score. And the limited source of magic items doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. I could totally see a group playing their second group of characters and one of them saying "I'm going to get that chainmail +2 this time" and it being part of the fun. Or a player asking "Can this axe be a mace instead this time?" and the DM going "Yes. Yes it can."

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The idea that the DM can houserule fixes is, IMO, a very poor argument. Of course we know that. Does a new player?

I would feel MUCH better about this set if it included a shopping list, a couple or a few dozen magic items (rather than 7) and a shortcut cheat sheet so that you could create a character without playing through the solo adventure (even if it referred you to the existing steps). That would fill all my requirements (albeit in a somewhat odd way). The changes I'm proposing don't have to be complicated.

I don't know why, but wizards does have a long history of producing pregen characters that are not accurate. It seems that, while maybe not every single character, but every batch of characters for Game Days, Encounters, Starter Sets, Keep on the Shadowfell, and anything else has at least one character with real errors in it. Is it so difficult to create characters that even the "experts" at Wizards can't get it right?

thalmin said:

I don't know why, but wizards does have a long history of producing pregen characters that are not accurate. It seems that, while maybe not every single character, but every batch of characters for Game Days, Encounters, Starter Sets, Keep on the Shadowfell, and anything else has at least one character with real errors in it. Is it so difficult to create characters that even the "experts" at Wizards can't get it right?

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I totally agree. What gets me is the fact that Keep of the Shadowfell seems as a whole to be made with a totally different set of rules. I mean there is a level 6 encounter set in front of level 1 PCs for crying out loud!

I have to wonder how they can let something like this happen. These are supposed to be the pros of the industry.