Essentials: which new players?

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Don't have time to respond in detail, but taking one example you mentioned....

You don't think the D&D magic schools are clunky and unintuitive? Ye gods, those have always been working at cross-purposes to building anything that matches the typical flavors in the vast bulk of fantasy literature, film, etc.

 

[fuzzlewump]

Don't have time to respond in detail, but taking one example you mentioned....

You don't think the D&D magic schools are clunky and unintuitive? Ye gods, those have always been working at cross-purposes to building anything that matches the typical flavors in the vast bulk of fantasy literature, film, etc.

D&d school are vaguely like Harry potter "subjects" .. Transfigurations are polymorph type spells.. Curses are.. Necromancy sometimes

Children can no doubt relate to thAt with a some mind jiggering.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Don't have time to respond in detail, but taking one example you mentioned....

You don't think the D&D magic schools are clunky and unintuitive? Ye gods, those have always been working at cross-purposes to building anything that matches the typical flavors in the vast bulk of fantasy literature, film, etc.

As implemented in D&D thus far, but part of the 4e philosophy is that taking something does not have a negative.
So I would imagine that there no forbidden schools in the new magic school system. So in this iteration it would add some flavor and effects but it would not stop you taking things outside the theme. Of course you will probably have to swap out the school stuff and that may or may not be optimal. Time will tell.

 

[Garthanos]

4e was already pretty well set to apeal to new players. I've actually seen the phenomenon, if you can get a kid who, at most, has maybe played a few on-line games to try 4e, they get it right away. If you get a jaded old gamer to try it, they're like "Oh, this isn't really D&D."

Since 3.0, the PH as been a point of entry. You couldn't really play D&D with a 1e or 2e PH, you could play with just a 3.0 PH (but really not much past 1st level), with the 4e PH, you can play the game and you can build any character up to and including 30th level with no trouble. The DM needs a MM or a module, but that's about it. All the vital rules are in the PH. In 4e, you also had an introductory set. The Essentials introductory set is retro. Being retro makes it more likely to apeal to lapsed fans - who, afterall, are in their 40s, a prime time to waste money on something you used to love when you were a kid. Mid-life crisis nerds are squarely in the marketing crosshairs of the Red Box. Thier kids and any other 'new new' players might get hit if they're standing too close.

Agreed entirely. I really dont get how anyone thinks this is a direct market to actual kids. I seem to Hate retro ... so its a put off for me.(meaning I wont be buying it for the 2 sets of kids I do have targeted for D&D intro material this xmas).

The mechanics feeling retro even makes it feel non kid oriented... the kids will like yup that touch of mmo and other things you mentioned earlier.

 

[TarionzCousin]

New generation can't handle it or what?

I heard they were marketing Essentials toward deaf, dumb, and blind kids.

Ones that can't play pinball?

Not quite sure if this statement was meant as dismissively as it sounded, or if I'm misreading it completely, but...

...look, I've got gamers in my group for whom the approach of Essentials would be fantastic for. These aren't kids, and they aren't deaf, dumb or blind, but they can easily get caught up in the pile of options and choices involved in both building and playing a character, not to mention subtle mechanical differences between things like immediates and opportunity attacks and the like.

See Zieche's post above yours, quoted above.

 

[Infiniti2000]

Anyone else noting an Essentials Streisand Effect? I didn't care too much about Essentials but with TerraDave as the brand marketing manager, I'm finding myself more and more inundated with Essentials threads.

 

[mach1.9pants]

As already said by WotC it is as much about using presentation as rules-lightness to attract new players. Plonk the three core books down in front of someone with no PnP RPG experience and I guarantee most would be lost and/or not bothered to figure the whole thing out and quit. The red box, as a real starter with making your PC whilst adventuring, is squarely aimed at new-to-PnP-RPG players.

As to the rest of the essential line, it is in between the red box and normal 4E, in presentation (and cost). This is offering 3 levels of entry into 4E: RedBox (then move onto essentials if you want to go further and deeper), Brown covered Essentials paperbacks (cheaper than std, and I guess with more explanations etc in it) and std, expensive hard-cover 4E. As you can use them all together with absolutely no 'rules-fudging' (once the std 4E gets errata'd to stop the worst possible CharOp type abuses) it looks like a good idea to me.

 

[JohnSnow]

I think boxed sets are a great thing for getting into the RPG world, I know it is where I started.

This might actually be an interesting point on which to conduct a survey.

How many of US started on a boxed set? Just on anecdotal evidence, I bet the answer is "most." That's telling.

The TRS guys seemed to feel like they were kinda getting a DM in a box. I know that the old Boxed Sets carried a similar feel. And wasn't there a quote around the time they released 3e something to the effect of "if we could somehow throw Jonathan Tweet in a box with the Core Rules, 3e would be a smash hit?"

And I think that's the problem. There was such a steep learning curve with 3e that it just about DEPENDED on existing players introducing new ones to the game. It just took more instruction than you could put in a box. However, like the old game, I think it's possible to understand 4e without any more guidance than they can actually PUT in a box.

And as good as 4e is on that basis as a ruleset, up until now, it hasn't had anything that held a candle, presentation-wise, to the Mentzer Red Box (or even the less user-friendly Moldvay/Cook set). Instead, 4e so far has been more on the order of the original 1st-Edition rules, but with the better organization than even 2nd Edition. Granted, 4e is better presented (and much prettier) than those 1e books, but any game with 3 dense hardcover books is pretty intimidating...

And so far, the attempts at introducing people to 4e have been incomplete or woefully inadequate and entirely lacking in character creation rules - similar to the one the 3e Starter Set. Which, by Red Box standards, flopped horribly.

 

[JohnSnow]

You don't think the D&D magic schools are clunky and unintuitive? Ye gods, those have always been working at cross-purposes to building anything that matches the typical flavors in the vast bulk of fantasy literature, film, etc.

Depends on the schools. All 8 of the old ones? Yeah, they drew some pretty fine and stupid lines. Schools are cool flavor-wise, but when you have to balance the choice so that all the school specialists are "equal," things get pretty silly awfully fast.

However, I think "Evocation" as the "flashy offensive and defensive combat spells," "Enchantment" as "mind-altering," and "Illusion" as "things that fool your senses" are all pretty straight-forward. Similarly, a school of "Transformation" or "Summoning" would also be fine as long as they kept the lines hard and fast. So far, that's all understandable on what I like to call the "Harry Potter" level.

Where they created confusion in the old days was when they started trying to draw fine lines between what degree of altering the nature of something counted as a transmutation and what was just an enchantment. Or those "conjurations" that were the same as evocations. Of course, most of the egregious offenders were all about skirting the rules of opposition schools. So if you get rid of those, there shouldn't be any silliness.

Just my take.

 

[The Little Raven]

You don't think the D&D magic schools are clunky and unintuitive?

If done right, like the 4e ones we've seen so far? No way. As JohnSnow points out, they are clearly different. The problem is when you have Evocation as your blow-crap-up-school and you start putting blow-crap-up spells in Conjuration with the justification that it is conjuring fire from somewhere.