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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BryonD" data-source="post: 5352028" data-attributes="member: 957">There has been a lot of playing up of this point.  The two lines of reasoning seem to be that the nostalgia of the old red box will have a huge effect and that there are throngs of people oblivious to D&D will discover the game and flock to it.I think both those lines of reasoning will end up having negligible impact.  The marketplace of the 1970s was almost completely unlike the marketplace of today.  Both in general with the comparison of a handful of tv channels and XYZ retail outlets compared to on-demand and the internet, and specific to gaming with D&D being a "new thing" that a lot of people had never heard of compared to online fantasy roleplaying saturating the market and direct references to tabletop D&D being a mainstream media shorthand for snickering at geeks.The numbers of people oblivious to D&D are negligible and the people who somehow still are oblivious to it are not going to be high yield for new players.In the 1970s there was only a certain fraction of society that was truly a potential gamer.  The majority of the population was never going to be interested, and no box color could change that.  The same thing is true today.  But also, of those 1970s players, a not insignificant portion would have dropped D&D in a second if some of the alternatives present today had been present then.  The same thing is true today, except those alternatives ARE present.  The fraction of society playing tabletop D&D will never be what it was in the 1970s to 1980s.What is important is marketing.  There still within these groups remain a very large number of people happy to play D&D OR to do something else.  And marketing will nudge that fraction into D&D.  And lack of marketing will permit steady flow away from D&D.  This is very good marketing and that helps at every level.  But it isn't due to nostalgia or new discovery.Without simplistically equating or isolating, 3.5 and Essentials clearly have both distinctions and points of strong commonality.  One point of commonality is that they provide a second round of spit polish "new shiny" on an established product.  And confusing the impact of that alone for any other bigger significance, and particularly long term significance, is a mistake.</blockquote>

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