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="dougmander" data-source="post: 2555913" data-attributes="member: 14375">Here's how one might  go about giving D&D mass appeal:About four years ago, I watched Yu-Gi-Oh devour the attention of the middle school, and then, through the process I call the juvenilization of cool, it trickled down to their little sibs in elementary school and devoured us all. (I'm a teacher). It was a cartoon, a card game, a computer game, a manga, and there was a time and place where and when each one of those media was optimal, whether on the bus, at school, or at home. No Yu-Gi-Oh fan was ever more than their back pocket away from living the experience of the brand. Before that, it was Dragonball Z. Before that, Pokemon. (One Piece is going to be the next one).By contrast, WotC is sitting on a brand with incredibly wide recognition and history behind it, and yet can't seem to present it across various media in anything like a coherent fashion. It reminds me of Marvel, who were sitting for decades on incredible brands like Spider-Man and lent them out to half-hearted, cheesy live action and cartoon series. They clung to the idea that the comics were the core of the brand, when they should have been seeing comics as only one of many media to carry the brand experience to the public. Finally, they have started making great movies, they have HeroClix, they have collectibles, they have computer games, and the actual comics, even though just a shade of their old selves in terms of sales, are not in danger of going away, because they promote the other media, play to the most ardent, longstanding fans, and serve as an incubator for future properties that could translate into more lucrative media.Here's my plan for WotC: get a new D&D cartoon on the air, aimed at 6th graders. Call it D&D: Eberron, and make it as in-your-face, action-packed as you can, focusing on three or four teen characters with kewl powers, including, let's say, a warforged, a cute elf, a smartass human, and a short-tempered dwarf. Create manga-format comics that detail the further adventures of the cartoon characters. Have a Mage Knight-style minis game at the ready, a computer game, and a CCG. And, oh, by the way, there's this D&D game that older kids play, but, you wouldn't be interested in that, would you?If you think I'm being facetious, consider this: in the after-school D&D group I run, most students had seen the D&D movie, played Baldur's Gate, but had never even known that the traditional RPG existed before they heard about it from me or from older students who already played. Now they think they're the cool because they play D&D "old-school". Having experienced D&D in other media, they know the brand before they try the game, and that helps carry them through those first sessions. One player actually wrote down quotes from the characters in Baldur's Gate and brought them to the first few games, until he felt comfortable improvising!Or else, you could just introduce new people to D&D by inviting them to your game group, or running D&D classes at your local continuing ed center or retirement community. In that scenario, D&D is destined to join the two other great "brain games" of the 20th century (crossword puzzles and bridge) as pastimes for a tiny but devoted audience of graying fans. I'm happy either way.</blockquote>

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