To which I'm sure you replied, "No, of course not, you need to worry about your character sheet. I do the heavy lifting as a DM and even I don't need to read all of this." Or I guess not, since..
And thus Christmas was ruined. Because reading is hard.
Yes, of course I told them it wasn't necessary. The point still stands: they were able to play, and to enjoy the game, because I was there and was able to provide the rules interface for them.
But in the absence of an experienced player to get them started, 3e requires that:
someone needs to buy three rulebooks ($60 at release, rising to $90 with the third printing);
someone needs to read those rulebooks, then either that person needs to explain the rules to the other players, or they too need to read the PHB;
everyone needs to create a character, a process that is likely to take a newbie at least half an hour; the DM needs to prepare an adventure (or use a premade one, meaning yet more expense and reading).
And then they get to
start having fun.
Faced with that, it's no wonder that most potential players choose WoW instead. Frankly, it's a bloody miracle we're talking about 5e at all.
The barrier to entry for this game is really quite significant - near $100 and 1,000 pages of reading. And that for something you
might enjoy. Glib dismissals about reading being hard might be marginally amusing, but they're not even remotely helpful.
(And, yes, the answer to most of those problems is a really good starter set, coupled with a decent migration strategy from there to the 'real' game. We're yet to see one from WotC, despite several attempts.)
And not for nothing but if WotC doesn't sell a hardcover book (resorting to sell only PDFs or some other god awful electronic media format only) then I won't buy their books. I have learned over a series of years that electronics at the table are death. I don't want to FORCE it in order to run a simple game. Give me a physical book please, or I simply will not buy it.
As I said in my previous post, we're still in the transition phase. WotC shouldn't yet be considering abandoning print entirely. And, in particular, there are some products that will essentially always need to be done physically - the aforementioned starter set being being one of them.
But the days of building a strategy around "sell books" are probably done. And I think both WotC and Paizo know it.
(With regard to Paizo: the important distinction there is between selling
books and selling
subscriptions to book lines. That's the crucial distinction, and what allows them to do what they do. Because they know they have X-thousands of subscribers for their lines, they already know that they can safely print Y-thousands of copies of the "Advanced Class Handbook", safe in the knowledge that they
will make a profit. That allows them to plan a strategy years in advance, it allows them to take some risks, and basically gives them a lot of freedom to move. But if every Paizo subscriber were to cancel their subs tomorrow, even if they then bought exactly the same books from their FLGS, the result would be disastrous for Paizo - not because of the loss of the money, but because of the loss of the
guaranteed income, and the freedom that that gives them.)
