WotC WotC needs an Elon Musk

[FrozenNorth]

Nearly every business case study ever shows this to be objectively, provably wrong on every level.

If you are running a business, your most profitable customers---and the ones most likely to expand their purchasing with you---are existing customers.

Except casuals ARE existing customers.

I’ll go even further, lots of those “casuals” buy every book from D&D as well, they just started in 4e and 5e and therefore value different game elements than the “hardcore” posters on this site.

But why stop there? Many of the “hardcore” fans on this site DON’T even buy that many WotC products. Specifically @Lanefan doesn’t own any 5e products, and some hardcore posters play 5e with only the core 3 books because they have their own setting.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Equating fictional races to real-life ones is the latest fad if you haven't noticed...

Undead people isn’t a race.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Undead people isn’t a race.

That is true, but if anyone were to find any part of that scenario objectionable it would probably be the raising of people like cattle, as in sustenance for the undead.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Oh, I don't recall them being wrong before. I'll try and use Wizard's own words next time.

I mean, they did start a whole hate campaign against Alyssa Wong based on a fake tweet, along with those TSR headlines which are not really wrong as trying to title things as positively as possible for a known hatemonger.

From Perkins' blog post:


Sounds like an awful amount of time, money, and energy to be spending...

I dunno, what's the cost of reprinting a bunch of stuff to edit out the potentially-racist stereotypes that you didn't realize you were playing into? Seems like a "measure twice, cut once" sort of situation where you don't get in trouble if you do the work beforehand, rather than having to change everything afterwards.

For me, offensiveness is an unfortunate side-affect of interesting, so more than a little weary of these policies.

Yeah, I rarely see things that are registered as "offensive" as being "interesting". Generally speaking I see them as "nostalgic" or "traditional" or to be less favorable, "simplistic". Most of the time the sort of stuff that gets called out is low-effort stuff that didn't take the time to actually feed into interesting concepts and thus play to old stereotypes.

For instance, Paizo just released a book about an entire nation that uses Undead for slave labor and raises humans like cattle for food. Just one example of a really cool concept that would no longer be allowed in D&D.

This example really falls on its face given that Paizo came out and said that they wouldn't be doing any sort of slavery-related stuff in the future and yet still extensively covered Geb's undead plantations. It's almost like they are more comfortable covering something with undead that they aren't with, you know, actual living people because it's harder to separate them. I'm reminded of the long-running controversy about being able to buy a slave in Pathfinder Society which was part of what lead them to pull back on those aspects of their world.

 

[DarkCrisis]

The only thing I seriously think WotC needs to do differently is make honest to goodness sourcebooks.

Yeah yeah if someone wants to play on Krynn or Faerun etc they have the internet to find out info, but there is something nice about an actual book.

But I know WotC doesn’t do that anymore. Which is sad because the only thing that say new Dragonlance players are going to know about Krynn are the few pages in an adventure book dedicated to basic lore.

As far as they are concerned what makes Krynn different is Solomnic Knights, Towers of High Sorcery, and Kender. Yet there is so much more.

 

[humble minion]

The only thing I seriously think WotC needs to do differently is make honest to goodness sourcebooks.

Yeah yeah if someone wants to play on Krynn or Faerun etc they have the internet to find out info, but there is something nice about an actual book.

But I know WotC doesn’t do that anymore. Which is sad because the only thing that say new Dragonlance players are going to know about Krynn are the few pages in an adventure book dedicated to basic lore.

I wonder if they're keeping their options open depending on how the SotDQ sells and is received. After all, that's what they did with Ravenloft. Release the adventure first - Curse of Strahd had good reviews and apparently sold very well, and WotC saw this and decided that it was worth expanding out to a full setting book, which came along later. It's far from impossible that they might do the same for Dragonlance, if things go to plan for them.

 

[glass]

I’ll go even further, lots of those “casuals” buy every book from D&D as well, they just started in 4e and 5e and therefore value different game elements than the “hardcore” posters on this site.

I think there might be confusion caused by varying definitions here. I certainly would not call anyone who bought every book "casual".

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I think there might be confusion caused by varying definitions here. I certainly would not call anyone who bought every book "casual".

Hardcore Gamer: Gamers that like the same things that I like.

Casual Gamer: Gamers that like things that are stupid and wrong.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Hardcore Gamer: Gamers that like the same things that I like.

Casual Gamer: Gamers that like things that are stupid and wrong.

I suspect those are the definitions that will generate the most agreement out of us

 

[FrozenNorth]

I think there might be confusion caused by varying definitions here. I certainly would not call anyone who bought every book "casual".

I agree. However, my response was in reference to the OP’s use of the word casual, cited here for convenience:

Part of WotC's problem is they are too focused on casuals, but it's the hardcore fans that create the buzz that draws in the casuals in the first place (this is shown by the Fandom survey/research that basically fandoms in 4 grades from the most hardcore fans to the most casual casuals). Their current approach is to alienate hardcore fans to court casuals, and that is a problem because it's the hardcore fans the build the foundation the gets you the casuals.

So, what does casuals mean in that context? From the OP’s other posts, it is players nostalgic for earlier editions of the game.

They have explicitly referenced “getting rid of the Core” in Ravenloft as a decision that was made to the detriment of hardcore players.

According to that definition of casual, there are very many casuals who purchase all or most of WotC’s output.