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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5356921" data-attributes="member: 55271">Except it's not WotC's term to do with as they please. They weren't even, AFAICT, the first company to use the term to refer to their core rulebook(s). (Nor was TSR.)Coca-Cola might want to change the term "juice" to include soda pop because it means people will drink Coke at breakfast and they'll sell more cans of their product. But if all they do is start printing the label "juice" on products that the average consumer has never considered juice before, the only thing that's going to happen is consumer confusion.The exact type of consumer confusion that WotC's representatives have admitted that they created and which they say they're specifically trying to correct with the Essentials product line.Anyway, bottom line:(1) It was incredibly unlikely that WotC would be able to take a term of art that (a) wasn't created by them and (b) is used by the entire industry and change it to arbitrarily mean something different. And they did, in fact, fail to accomplish that. So all they accomplished by taking a term which means "these are the rulebooks you need to play the game, everything else is optional" and slapping it on every book they released was to (falsely) claim that you needed to buy EVERYTHING in order to play D&D.Two years later they realized this was a mistake and have taken steps to correct it. (Although, ultimately, these steps appear to be flawed since they've to decided to repeat the exact same mistake with the "Essentials" label that they had made with the "Core" label.)(2) Even if they HAD succeeded in redefining what the term "core rulebook" meant, you would STILL have a need for a term which means "these are the rulebooks you need to play the game, everything else is optional". (That is, after all, why the term "core" was created in the first place.) So even if you managed to redefine the common understanding of the term "core", you'd still be faced with the exact same dilemma and the exact same customer confusion.This is why it was, indisputably, a stupid idea: Even if the idea had worked, it would have still failed.Finally, the entire scheme you're hypothesizing relies on the assumption that your customers are idiots of the grossest variety. You have to assume that the people running "core-only" games aren't doing so because they want to minimize the number of rulebooks (due to balance, budget, taste, or whatever reason they might have), but because they have instead invested the word "core' with some kind of irrational mystical significance. And/or you have to believe that they're stupid enough to think Player's Handbook 3 isn't optional because you've slapped the word "Core" on the cover.</blockquote>

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