NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="timbannock" data-source="post: 8222620" data-attributes="member: 17913">You're absolutely right. I think my ideal requires a complete overhaul of the gameline itself is produced, which is why I bring up the player box side of things.As it stands now, a DM who wants to have "all the stuff" (not literally all books and gewgaws, but a healthy minimum for not-theater-of-the-mind play) is picking up 3 expensive core books plus an expensive hardcover, and maybe finding cheap tokens and printing out battle maps cheaply as needed. What I'd propose is to repackage the game entirely such that a single adventure box is all you need as the DM to run that adventure as the DM. You'd get a pared down core rules (like the Starter and Essentials kits, but with none of the character creation-specific things, and in their place the DM-specific things), monsters and magic items are all on cards so you don't need a book of those, and tokens/pawns and battle maps. So an $80-100 box with no need for a DMG, MM, PHB, and the gewgaws is now a deal.On the player's side, you've got boxes that give you all you need to play any class/race/whatever in those books. Yes, it would probably make the most sense to separate such a box into multiples in order to pare down on how many spell cards you get; maybe the first "core" box is 5-6 classes, the second is another 5-6, etc. But you can pick and choose, and frankly, the folks that buy EVERYTHING are gonna buy everything anyway, so this allows for a little choice in a way that is hopefully either roughly as expensive or even less, if you're choosy.Choosy Tim's choose this setup ;-P I don't know why I said that.EDIT: And I think this setup makes it relatively easy to leave releases like the Starter and Essentials box alone (they sell a bunch and seem to work, so why not?). I do wonder how much WOTC considers theater of the mind the default, now, though, in the same way they consider Milestone leveling the default, even though that's technically an optional rule. If they really want to go down that road and move away from battle maps, pawns/tokens, and all that stuff, then my setup doesn't really make sense. That said, none of it invalidates the Core 3 books, and maybe by separating out some elements makes it so a single volume Rulebook is thing theater of the mind folks pick up, and get digital or POD versions of the adventures without all the gewgaws. ...?</blockquote>

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