Consume, Engage, Cherish

[AbdulAlhazred]

The most simple thing would be to produce each of the three possible products, the consume one possibly online.

Well, the implications of digital material on what the role of printed material is is a whole other, but relevant, question. I guess I'd suspect at this point that we're not far enough along that path to have core books that aren't containing all of the core material, and there are still many people who won't touch anything that isn't printed on a dead tree. Even so, it seems like there's a bit less need to make the book entirely encyclopedic when it comes to rules material. DDI is an excellent reference.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I chose combination.

I want the books to be appealing from the outside and from the inside. The art, the fluff and the crunch. One is useless without the other.

 

[I'm A Banana]

For most products, you need to ask yourself "what is this best suited for?"

Physical Core Books = Engage, primarily.

This is what you read to give you ideas, to inspire your mojo, to make your brain think. This is a tome of forbidden knowledge, a secret worth knowing. You use them to make characters, or to design adventures, and you shouldn't need to reference them very much when you're actually playing.

Consume-style products find a more natural home online, where searchable databases and online tools do more for the consuming user than any paper product ever could. It's just a better medium for the idea of quick and useful information.

Cherish-style products are not very interesting to me for D&D products per se. Cherish is what I do after I have been engaged, it is the effect of personal investment in a product. I don't want rarity and exclusivity to determine my game books, what I want is access. Cherish happens when I make a thing my own -- no one else gets MY campaign except the people who I play with. That's what makes it emotional to me. The product itself has little say in that.

 

[Hussar]

/snip
I'd note that the AD&D books were both engaging and laid out in a fairly clean way, though I can't say the rules were all that well structured.

My final comment would be that one of the things I valued the most through the years about the 1e core books is their sheer durability. My 1e books are first printings I bought when they each came out. None of those 3 books has a broken spine, damaged cover, etc. They are FAR from looking new, but they are also STILL after 30+ years holding up and have plenty of life left in them. My 2e books in contrast are a shambles. Every one of them has loose pages and a shot binding, even though I took good care of them. The 4e books sadly are on a par with 2e. They're not BAD, but they won't last 20 years, no way. My PHB1 is already showing signs of getting ready to disintegrate. AV1 started falling apart after 2 months. Its hard to 'cherish' a book that can't hold together. I am glad I have my 2e books still, they're handy, but they don't have the same value to me as the 1e books do at this point. I'd hope 5e might be bound to archival quality on paper that will last. Maybe that's impossible in today's economy, but it would sure be nice.

Oh, yeah, the durability of those old 1e books is fantastic. Unfortunately, with the price of paper and whatnot, you're never going to see that again. Unless you want to spend well over 100 bucks per book. The weight of those pages is astonishing.

OTOH, your first line there, after my snip, are you serious? The AD&D books were phenomenally poorly organized. The layout was terrible. Rules all over the place, piss poor index (a complaint that I level at EVERY RPG book - LEARN TO WRITE A DAMN INDEX PLEASE!), and mixing a very conversational tone with rules meant that I was finding new rules every time I opened the book.

There's a reason so few people actually played AD&D by the book. Nobody could actually parse the darn thing.

 

[Savage Wombat]

The AD&D books were phenomenally poorly organized. The layout was terrible. Rules all over the place, piss poor index (a complaint that I level at EVERY RPG book - LEARN TO WRITE A DAMN INDEX PLEASE!), and mixing a very conversational tone with rules meant that I was finding new rules every time I opened the book.

I have a suspicion that this might be what so many players LOVED about AD&D. It was a tome that challenged you intellectually, in a way that most of your peers weren't up to, and kept revealing new secrets every time you opened it.

 

[avin]

What are the sales numbers for the deluxe editions like compared to the regular versions? I don't buy them. I can't afford to. Focusing that much effort into the cherish side of the equation prices me out of being a customer.

Sure, you are out, but some people don't. But there's always people buying deluxe editions of books, games, blue rays, etc... heck, Wotc was selling deluxe limited editions of miniatures not much time ago.

Cherish always happens on hobbies.

Of course "normal" core books won't be "cherish", this works better on limited material, but the article was asking how *I* would buy, not how would be the smarter move.

 

[Mercutio01]

Sure, you are out, but some people don't. But there's always people buying deluxe editions of books, games, blue rays, etc... heck, Wotc was selling deluxe limited editions of miniatures not much time ago.

Cherish always happens on hobbies.

Of course "normal" core books won't be "cherish", this works better on limited material, but the article was asking how *I* would buy, not how would be the smarter move.

That might be the case, but I'd hazard a guess that going just with the pricing of something like the deluxe limited editions would price out most of the market. Particularly new customers and the younger market.

 

[Klaus]

IMHO, you need Consume to get the person to buy the product. You need Engage to get the person to stay in the hobby. And if the product is used during the game (tables get referenced, books get thumbed through during play, etc), the Cherish part will come naturally, as the product will then be associated with the many happy memories of the game sessions.

 

[Incenjucar]

The irony is that Cherish is bad in the long term - it's one of the major causes of Edition Wars.

 

[Libramarian]

I feel like there is something missing from Consume, Engage, Cherish.

Umm.

The reason I don't want a D&D book that looks like a textbook, is not I can't go 5 minutes without the soothing caress of faux-parchment and florid prose.

It's because textbooks are designed to do a thing: hook the absolutely necessary information into your brain as you skim it the night before the test. But D&D is not a test. It's a creative and social activity. Which means that just the crunch is not enough. You need "fluff" that provides a narrative or image that channels and undergirds this creativity. The rules will never be so tightly designed that creativity and improvisation and interpretation are obsolete, and this is not an ideal to strive for in any case.

The 1e DMG, for all of its faults in haphazard organization and rules design, gives me an image of the Gygaxian Dungeon Master personality. You're not bound to the letter of the rules because the spirit of the rules is palpable. I'm not going to say it's a great work of literature because it is not. But you can feel the "psychic warmth" of literature in places, when you can tell that EGG is speaking directly from extensive live DMing experience. This is useful to me. I don't think it's just fluff.

Pre and post-chapter bullet-point summaries don't have this voice. I don't like D&D books that give you any sort of impression that it's sufficient to just skim the essay portions and get to the crunch.

It's not that I hate the textbook look in itself. It's that I feel it doesn't fit with the kind of thing D&D is.

You might say that you already know how to play D&D and just want some new rules to do the sort of thing you usually do with. But newbies need the whole package. And some of us who already know how to play still like to read the "personality" of a new edition.

tl;dr:
I want to consume, but some of the stuff I want to consume is best expressed in the form that I think you would consider engage. I would disagree that consume is all about practicality and engage is all about entertainment.

What turns me off about the "textbook look" is not so much it in itself, but what I see it as telling me what the game is like--a test. The only "feel" that's important is the confidence of knowing what rules to turn on where. That's not enough. I need an image/narrative thread to follow.