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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 8611662" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Regarding kids -- TSR recognized fairly early on that dedicated wargamers were not going the be the primary audience for the game. They then proceeded to spend a decade or more systematically not adapting to that fact. B, BX, and then BECMI came out to try to make the game rules clearer (succeeding, especially compared to the oD&D printed game rules), but never changed the fundamental game rules to match in any way. BX and BECMI certainly explained what to do better (BX being better about clear rules, BECMI having a 'choose your own adventure'-style intro which made the parts if covered very clear), but the early game was still effectively the same system created with the assumption that people would have henchmen, not be overly attached to characters, could see combat as the fail-state, and wanted to play a 'see how much I can accrue before I die or have to get out'-kind of experience (we might now call 'roguelike'). Glomming onto it as kids who wanted to play fantasy heroes, my friends and I made it work-- mostly by changing or ignoring up to half of it. What's worse, plenty of people didn't stick around. I gamed with dozens of other kids between the ages of 8 and 18. Of them, maybe a handful stuck with it. WotC finally learned from this lesson and is making a game that is friendly to power fantasy, doesn't default to roguelike dungeon-crawl, and yes defaults to easy mode (which regularly gets ridiculed for some reason, despite optional rules and discussions on how best to change it to get the results one wants being placed right in the DMG).Regarding at whom everything is aimed -- there certainly are nods to longtime fans. They literally could have made a new game world from scratch (they did for 4e) and populated it with tropes and traits pursuant to newer gamers. Instead they are taking the old settings and trying to find places to shoehorn feywild and artificers and tieflings into Ravenloft and Forgotten Realms (yes, at times not to any individual's tastes, but they didn't have to try in the first place is my point). This leads me to think that notions that they are only working at pleasing 12 year olds, or millennials (yes, now 30-40), or just 'the reddit crowd' or whatever... are just plain overblown.</blockquote>

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