D&D “Essentials” as a product line = making it less daunting to get into the game?

[Beginning of the End]

BOTE - I believe you're missing the point of those pre-packaged encounters.

You've misunderstood me. I'm not talking about adventure modules. The pre-packaging I'm talking is fundamental to the design principles of 4th Edition: Perfectly balanced encounters which have been preciously set into carefully sculpted encounter maps. This pre-packaging can certainly come from an adventure module. But the DM is also expected to be doing it. It's part-and-parcel of 4E encounter design.

While this can certainly be ignored, in doing so you are ignoring the style of play the system was specifically designed for (according to the designers, the DMG, and every example of 4E adventure design WotC has provided to date).

In other words, it's trying to minimize the impact of individual DM's.

Which is basically my point: Trying to turn the DM into a computer program is an incredibly bad idea because the computer game is always going to be better at being a computer program than the human DM is.

A living, breathing, flexible DM is literally the only advantage tabletop RPGs have over video games. Trying to eliminate their impact on the game is insanity.

 

[AllisterH]

You've misunderstood me. I'm not talking about adventure modules. The pre-packaging I'm talking is fundamental to the design principles of 4th Edition: Perfectly balanced encounters which have been preciously set into carefully sculpted encounter maps. This pre-packaging can certainly come from an adventure module. But the DM is also expected to be doing it. It's part-and-parcel of 4E encounter design.

While this can certainly be ignored, in doing so you are ignoring the style of play the system was specifically designed for (according to the designers, the DMG, and every example of 4E adventure design WotC has provided to date).



.

Pg. 57 of the 4E DMG

"It's a good idea to vary the difficulty of your encounters over the course of an adventure, just as you vary other elements of encounters to keep things interesting"

This is basically the same thing as what the 3e DMG says...

I;ve seen this argument with regard to 3e as well, but both DMGs for 3e/4e recommend mixing up encounter levels...The only difference is that it is MUCH easier in both 3e and 4e to figure out what is a easy, moderate, difficult encounter than in AD&D.

Indeed, when talking about dungeon encounters...pg. 135 of the black cover 2e DMG

"Generally, when adventuring in a dungeon, characters should meet random encounters that are equal to or no more than 2 levels higher or lower than their own"

Wilderness encounters are the ones that can be supposedly anything but even here, the 2e DMG says

pg. 136
"This does not mean that wilderness adventurers should be impossible for low level characters. It shouldn't be so deadly that they can't walk three stes before a flight of red dragons appears and turns them to ash"

The REAL difference between 3e/4e and AD&D with regard to encounters is that the former does a lot more of the "paperwork" than the latter.

In the latter, the big difference is that the encounter tables generally have to be made from scratch. For a newbie DM, I'll take the 3e/4e method everytime frankly.

 

[DEFCON 1]

There has been a lot of playing up of this point. The two lines of reasoning seem to be that the nostalgia of the old red box will have a huge effect and that there are throngs of people oblivious to D&D will discover the game and flock to it.

I think both those lines of reasoning will end up having negligible impact.

Oh I agree with you that putting the Red Box into Target / Walmart etc. won't have a huge impact on sales necessarily... but my referencing that point was not in relation to the possibilities of Red Box success... but was a proof to Windjammer to his question of how will people be able to tell the difference between this product and all the other D&D products out there.

And in that regard, my point still stands. Someone in Target or Walmart will be able to tell that the Red Box is the product they should be buying to get them started on D&D for the simple fact that there aren't any other D&D products next to it that might cause confusion. So in that regard, the design of the Red Box is a success. It's getting back into stores that D&D hasn't been in for a while.

Now whether this actually works is a completely different issue, and I don't even deign to speculate on that.

 

[Windjammer]

And in that regard, my point still stands. Someone in Target or Walmart will be able to tell that the Red Box is the product they should be buying to get them started on D&D for the simple fact that there aren't any other D&D products next to it that might cause confusion. So in that regard, the design of the Red Box is a success. It's getting back into stores that D&D hasn't been in for a while.

For a while? As in... since the last 9 months, when the above picture of the previous Starter Box at Toys'R'Us was taken?

Seriously, what are you on about?
2009: Buy Starter Box at Toys'R'Us. Want more? Get the 3 core books.
2010: Buy Red Box at Walmart. Want more? Get 10 products.

You call that progress?

 

[Lord_Blacksteel]

Umm, what?

The Mentzer Basic set covered levels 1-3. To go any higher, to get any rules related to anything not in the dungeon, you had to buy something else - the Expert rules in this case. Then, if TSR had their way, you'd "graduate" to AD&D and have to buy non-compatible rules.

The Essentials starter set covers levels 1-3. To go any higher, you have to buy extra rules. And, you can go to the "advanced" game and still use your "basic" stuff with no compatiblity issues.

What did they do back then that they are not doing now?

The new red box covers only levels 1-2, does not include rules for generating a character in the manner of other 4E books, does not give players a real list of equipment or magic items, contains 1 level's worth of dungeon (83 box had Keep on the Borderlands - an actual adventure module), and has compatibility issues with the Fallen Lands classes. It's a flawed product and a terrible disappointment.

I think having A red box basic set in stores is a great idea to draw in new players.

I think THIS red box is terrible.

I think a box with pregen characters, mini's, and "Keep on the Shadowfell" in it would have been better - let people play the actual game and see how it works. Leave chargen to the full product and I think it would be better than the new red box out now.

 

[Maggan]

2009: Buy Starter Box at Toys'R'Us. Want more? Get the 3 core books.
2010: Buy Red Box at Walmart. Want more? Get 10 products.

I think you are overestimating the enormousness of the essential line, and oversimplifying the previous core offering.

For essentials, out of the 10 products we find the starter set itself, a set of dice and three sets of tiles. More dice is never a bad thing and probably something that a player would buy anyways, and several tile sets are/were available for the "3 core books" as well.

I didn't get the D&D starter set, but I did get Keep on the Shadowfell. On the back of that product the core is defined as:

PH
DMG
MM
D&D Miniatures (of which there are several sets)
D&D Dungeon Tiles (of which there are several sets)

Add in dice and the Keep on the Shadowfell starter itself (as above for essentials) and we're up to 7 products being needed for play (and the minis and tiles come in different sets, so we might as well round that up to 10 as well).

Add to that the other books labeled as "core" that was released later and the number goes up.

For me it seems as if the essentials line is cutting down on product proliferation, or at least staying level with it, if compared to the whole library of published books for D&D4, or the early definition of "core".

/M

 

[Umbran]

According to WotC’ remarks surrounding the introduction of the “Essentials” product line (both in Ampersand and on GenCon presentations), one rationale for the new product line is to lessen the confusion created by a myriad of products on someone completely new to the hobby.

...

As a PS, there's an image that, while polemical, does (I think) raise a legitimate worry:
http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/9396/basic.jpg

Here's a thing about marketing and advertising: in general, one piece of advertising won't convey all the reasons the product exists, nor all the reasons they think you have for buying it.

So, they can reasonably say that the new line was designed to make entry easier, and then design an ad targeting the competionists and collectors, for whom the stack of books is actually a draw, rather than a hindrance.

 

[Windjammer]

Maggan,


You’re of course correct to point out that some of the Essentials products sold separately, namely tiles and dice, would have to be bought by a Core customer too when starting out. Essentials is better in one regard, for including tokens straight away in all of the boxes. (It may help to remember, though, that the 2008 Starter Box contained: dice, tokens, and dungeon tiles. New Red Box doesn’t contain tiles but a fold out dungeon mat. There’s suggestions on how to use the mat to customize it, but in essence you’d have to cut it in 4 bits which I’m sure a lot of people would be hesitant.)
However, I’m a bit skeptical about the way Essentials divides up content beyond Starters.


1.

For one, material on classes that was previously in one book (PHB 1) is split in two. Of course, the second of the two “Heroes” books contains some racial write ups not in PHB 1 (like drow), but on the whole, it’s really that PHB 1 gave you 8 classes with 2 builds each, whereas in Essentials you now need to buy two separate books, and not even then would you get 2 builds per class purchased (I think there’s only 1 rogue build in the first Heroes book).
That’s just bean counting. What it boils down to – has it made it easier for new players to have the classes in one neat spot? No, of course not. You trade that for having a cheaper entrance point, not for having the same material collected conveniently.



2.
My second point regards the distribution of rules themselves. To be honest, I never liked the way both D&D 3.5 and 4.0 divided up rules on combat between the PHB and the DMG. Combat is pretty essential to these games, so why separate them into separate products? Made no sense. Enter Essentials. I have far from a complete picture of the new rules distribution, but the following seems to be the case. First, rules for char-gen have been split off from the other rules. In PHB 1 you had both, in Essentials you got to buy two books. Is that handy? Further, instead of WotC saying, yep, here’s two separate Rules references, one for char gen and one for everything else, they didn’t even do that! They again went for subdividing the remainder of the rules between the DM Book in the DM Kit, and the Rules Compendium.



So, to cut a long story short, we now have three books – Heroes of FL, Rules Compendium, DM Kit – which between them contain quite a bit replication (each contains “How to Read a Power”, the latter two overlap more substantially), and then do not even contain everything. Monster Rules? Check Monster Vault. Equipment? Not there yet. Rituals? Not there yet either.


Sorry, what’s that? I had hoped for the days being gone when I’d have to lump the PHB 1, the DMG 1, and Adventurer’s Vault 1 to the table to get – what I take to be the Essential ingredients to D&D 4E – everything I need at my finger tips. Essentials promised to simplify that situation, and in particular, promised to give us “all the rules we ever need” into one handy Compendium. That did not happen.

 

[Harlekin]

Yes, and I think it's quite a stretch of language to say that the 2010 starter box contains rules for character generation in the sense that the old Red Box did.

1983: Wanna generate abilities? Here's how you roll the dice for that!
2010: You are a human fighter. Your strength is 18.

1983: Here's a list of equipment. Pick anything you want - and can afford!
2010: You can either have a greatsword or a greataxe. Yeah, that's it.

Is it obvious that allowing the fighter to pick equipment and attributes provides more replay value than allowing the fighter to pick feats, skills and powers? I would think that two old redbox fighters will be more similar to each other than two new redbox fighters. The same is true for Thiefs and Clerics.

Moreover new redbox characters can combine races and classes which allows for even more variation.

 

[AllisterH]

I think this is pretty much indisputable.

For players who enjoyed D&D primarily because it offered them tactical combat, there's really no question that computer games offer the superior experience: Better graphics. Integrated soundtrack. Calculations done for you. Faster gameplay. You can play solo; you can play with your friends in the same room (LAN party); you can play with friends across town or across country; and you can even casually and quickly start playing with complete strangers.

.

That't not actually true....

1. Tactical RPGs are pretty much restricted to japanese producers. Gone are the days of Fallout Tactics and Jagged Alliance. Indeed, if you were a fan of such RPGs but hated animesque RPGs, you'd be pretty screwed in finding one produced in the last 5-10 years (the only tactical RPGs I know still being produced outside of japan are some Eastern European ones which are pretty much PC-exclusives).

2. Good tactical RPGs are actually much harder to code than action RPGs Indeed, most of the japanese RPGs have pretty POOR tactics since many of the tactics require several look ahead steps in terms of coding. What I mean is, in Disgaea for example, there usually is some type of board element that can be manipulated to one side's advantage. The computer will seem to NEVER take into the account these elemtns.

(Ironically, this is the same reason why the developers of M:TG: Duels of the planeswalkers considered M:TG very hard to code for as unlike a lot of action videogames, you have to actually code branching trees for each card play. They actually only coded it 3-4 steps deep as after that, the code simply was too arduous.)