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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5350520" data-attributes="member: 55271">Possibly, but not necessarily.What is clearly flawed, however, is the methodology of the Starter Set: This product is nothing new. Since 1991 there have been, by my count, a total of 9 different pay-to-preview boxed sets (5 Basic Sets, 2 Basic Games, 2 4E Starter Sets, and 1 AD&D First Quest). The 8 previous pay-to-preview boxed sets have included DM screens, cards, counters, maps, posters, dice, miniatures, dice bags, audio CDs, solo adventures, pregenerated character sheets, map tiles, and more. They have, in short, done absolutely everything the new Starter Set is doing (and more).And none of them have worked. They are, by design, forgettable products. And they have been forgotten.These pay-to-preview boxed sets have also done absolutely everything the old red box set did, while failing to achieve similar rates of success. There are three possibilities:(1) Frank Mentzer's cover was the key to success!(2) Pay-to-preview is the wrong way to go.(3) Marketing issues completely unrelated to the content of the game.#1 seems unlikely, but if it's true then the new Starter Set is destined for greatness. Yay!#3 may be the case. They may even be unresolvable marketing issues (it was a fad and its time is past). If so, the new Starter Set is essentially irrelevant. The real question is whether or not WotC's new marketing campaign will be successful, not whether or not the Essentials product line is less "daunting".But every time another of these pay-to-preview sets fails to do what the boxed sets from 1974 thru 1991 did, I keep pointing back to #2 and thinking, "Maybe you should try doing the one thing you haven't done in 20 years. Just give it a shot. Put a little marketing muscle behind it. See what happens."I'm not, necessarily. Although I have become increasingly convinced that (a) your mainstream product should come in a box and look like other games; and (b) your mainstream product should be the game and not be a pay-to-preview ghetto that people are expected to leave as quickly as possible.I think that making that boxed set affordable probably entails limiting the game to the heroic tier, but (a) I might be wrong about that and (b) you could just as easily make the Paragon and Epic tiers into hardcovers or softcovers or whatever.Common sense.If your goal is to clear up customer confusion over what they should  be buying in order to play D&D, then you simply cannot achieve that  goal by tripling the number of entry points into the game.Further: The term "core rulebook" used to give a clear indication of "you should buy this to play". It was kind of esoteric and it wouldn't be immediately understandable to a neophyte looking at a wall o' books, but once you learned that "core rulebook" meant "this is what you need", you were in good shape.By labeling every book they published as "core", WotC destroyed the usefulness of this term.So along comes Essentials: The essential products you need to play D&D.But if that was the purpose of the label, then they've degraded it straight out of the starting gate by applying it to 11 different products costing $240+.Bill Slavicsek has a history of saying "I want to do X" and then doing something that achieves the exact opposite of that. The Essentials product line appears to be more of the same. It may be a huge success despite that; but it's certainly not going to clear up any consumer confusion.</blockquote>

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