D&D General Kobold Press Going Down a Dark Road

[Maxperson]

If you get people playing for 20+ years, then you pretty much have them. WotC aims at the younger demographic because that's historically where thebsales drive is (same as literally every other game company that I'm aware if, this is jot udiosyncratic), but anyone thst Cadre who still plays in their 30's is bought in.

Sure, but if you focus on the young people with no money to the exclusion of the older ones with money, you go out of business. A good mix skewed towards those with money is what you need.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Finally! A claim of backwards compatibility that I can't argue against!

Indeed.

I don't think it really matters. There are far too many variables with 4 specific classes and subclasses to account for balance, let alone all the classes and subclasses.

No, there aren't. Classes are not that diverse, not are subclasses. People like to believe that D&D is some utterly unpredictable, beyond-constraint creative wonderland where even the tiniest claims will never be useful. That belief has always been balderdash.

There are, even in 5e where balance has been treated with extremely cavalier attitudes, clear and consistent patterns. Moreover, there's plenty of math you can do which helps tell you the general shape of the data. The whole point of statistics, as a formal science, is to take things that seem like they must have too many variables...and then reveal that actually it can all be reasonably accounted for with just a little bit of effort.

The only way these claims hold is if you demand absolute perfect uniformity. No one demands that. Hence, it is a straw man argument: you are setting up an easily-defeated argument that no one actually defends.

Party make-up, feat choices, spell choices, stat choices, etc. will all affect how capable a party is.

But all of these things are actually quite constrained, especially in 5e where the numbers are smaller. It is quite possible to do useful statistics that can produce actual predictions. They won't apply to 100% of tables. But if they apply to >95%, who cares if they're wrong <5% of the time?

You can't make a monster that accounts for anywhere near all of that in order to challenge them near equally.

Absolutely correct, because you are applying a far, far too stringent standard: "near equally." That is a demand for things being effectively perfect. Nothing statistical is that good. But it is quite easy to do statistics that give you a 95% confidence interval for how challenging a creature should be, given the spread of options. That interval won't remain perfectly constant, as the game grows, but there are steps you can take to avoid it becoming totally useless.

This "just give up, there's no hope" attitude sets the perfect as the enemy of the good, and then uses that to declare that we should never bother in the first place. You'll never be da Vinci, so don't bother picking up the sketchbook. It's an absolutely infuriating self fulfilling prophecy: don't try because it won't work, oh look they didn't try and it didn't work!

 

[Weiley31]

I low key want to try 4E out.

 

[mamba]

Um, that graphic showed 40% being 24 or younger.

you are right, my mistake, addition is hard

But they aren't really much of a buyer at all. The $120(and I'm taking the upper end of a teenagers disposable income) is being split

they don’t have to, as you wrote

It's their older parents who buy the bulk of their stuff.

I don't really believe in grognard, which is why I made the young nard, medium nard and grog nard joke earlier.

ok, then how do you distinguish between who WotC targets vs who they do not?

If all you are saying is they should not target 12-24 year olds only, then I agree, but unless you have anything that distinguishes what they are looking for that is meaningless

 

[Bolares]

I low key want to try 4E out.

It’s a great game

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Though this is counting all the OSR stuff as 1st ed.

It seems to me that is exactly what you shouldn't do. Because the OSR pattern shows that sometimes, what fans want from something drifts from what it originally was to what they made of it.

And I think that is why 5e gets compared to both 3e and 2e, the whole "AD&D3" thing. It has bellyfeel like 2e, and reduces the doublethink required to play 3.Xe the way people wanted (that is, the feeling of openness and discovery, of "others are beholden to the whims of system balance but I can break it over my knee") rather than what it actually ended up being much of the time ("you must perfectly plot out your character's growth over 20 levels and if you make any mistakes you will have invested six months of your life for no payoff.") Hence why one of the bigger criticisms from genuine 5e fans is that some of them want it to expand options a lot more (like, say, about double the options we have), and the next near-equal criticism is from folks wbo are vehemently opposed to that and would actually like to see almost all the existing options removed. The former want to bring back the openness and "I can break it" feel, while the latter want to hard avert any possibility of returning to the "do your taxes to build a character" feeling.

5e works, in part, by making both sides feel they're the "winner." That's an inherently unstable equilibrium, and very likely to result in an OSR-style splintering down the line, where some folks go in the PF1e/A5E direction of "moar, MOAR" and others go in the direction of "less is more, so almost nothing is nearly everything" that many OSR games have.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I low key want to try 4E out.

Should you be open to an online game (since I sincerely doubt you are anywhere near me), I would be quite happy to join. It's been forever since I got a chance to play.

 

[Parmandur]

Sure, but if you focus on the young people with no money to the exclusion of the older ones with money, you go out of business. A good mix skewed towards those with money is what you need.

WotC does release a pretty wide variety of products, and has been established the main game product, occasional hardcover books thr go for $30 on Amazon, is pretty affordable for American teens.

 

[Maxperson]

you are right, my mistake, addition is hard

No worries! We've all done that.

they don’t have to, as you wrote

Yes, that's true. However, what's left still far outstrips $120 a month.

ok, then how do you distinguish between who WotC targets vs who they do not?

If all you are saying is they should not target 12-24 year olds only, then I agree, but unless you have anything that distinguishes what they are looking for that is meaningless

They should target the largest concentration of disposable income. That's where WotC/Hasbro get their profits. I put it at 25+. I don't remember if it was you or @Ruin Explorer who put it at 30-35+. Wherever that bulk of disposable income is coming from, though, is the target audience. And since opinions will vary a bit, some compromise has to happen among the demographics with that income.

 

[Maxperson]

WotC does release a pretty wide variety of products, and has been established the main game product, occasional hardcover books thr go for $30 on Amazon, is pretty affordable for American teens.

Assuming those teens wouldn't rather go out to Denny's for a late dinner with friends, or a movie, or buy new earbuds, or... There are a lot of things teens want and even with the high end of $120 a month to use, they aren't going to be able to get anywhere near everything they want. Think back to when you were a kid and how many different things you wanted on a daily basis, shifting with each new thing you found out about. Then understand that there are about 10,000(slight exaggeration) times more things to attract current teens than there were when we were teens.