D&D General D&D: Literally Don't Understand This

[Gradine]

Taylor Swift has an enormous fanbase, largely of Millennials. She's not my thing, but it seems reasonably plausible to me that there could be a good overlap in fanbase between folks who like her and folks who might like Radiant Citadel.

I mean, hell, if it worked for the NFL of all things it can work for D&D

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

As someone who has played since the 70's, just because D&D looked like it was meant for the back of a custom van (which were cool) doesn't mean it's going to stay that way, actually odd if it did, because it would lose its reference point.

Dungeon Crawl Classics has explicitly leaned into that aesthetic, but I suspect its audience skews older, even if there are younger players in the mix.

 

[dragoner]

I mean, hell, if it worked for the NFL of all things it can work for D&D

The untapped market of swifties. lol

 

[TiQuinn]

I mean, you've been on Twitter, or at least seen social media-savvy companies capitalize on it and making pop culture references, right?

Taylor Swift has an enormous fanbase, largely of Millennials. She's not my thing, but it seems reasonably plausible to me that there could be a good overlap in fanbase between folks who like her and folks who might like Radiant Citadel.

Going alllllll the way back to the original few posts that started this, I question the value of any brand trying to capitalize on the name of Taylor Swift’s new album in such an oblique way. Maybe they have some sort of metrics that show the value of doing that or maybe they just fired that off as a one and done, and really who cares if it works or not?

But I think we’ve long since abandoned that as the overall driver of the thread, unfortunately.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The untapped market of swifties. lol

We're up to 40% of D&D players being women, per WotC, based on a quick Google search. (I didn't find the original source for that.)

In the relatively recent past, we had luminaries at TSR, most especially Gygax, saying that women would never be D&D players in big numbers.

It's completely logical for WotC, which wants to expand D&D's customer base, not keep it level or let it shrink, to pursue women.

 

[Umbran]

I may have missed something, but I don't think anyone here is saying, "embrace tradition; reject modernity."

Nobody has used that explicit phrase within this thread, no. But I didn't make it up. It is in other social media a lot the past few days, though it has been around for quite a while now.

As for what is happening here, at least one person in this thread is insisting that this is about more than shoes - it is about a perceived list of modern elements. And there have been threads upon threads about how modern art direction with tacos in Hero's Feast isn't acceptable. Or about how a modern approach with non-evil orcs isn't acceptable. How the overall modern game design away from lethality is unacceptable....

It adds up. Give folks some credit for seeing a pattern, even if you didn't.

Maybe it isn't just about shoes after all. Maybe shoes are a symbolic of something bigger.

Strangely, there's a growing "swath of vocal folks" who seem to think that's what's happening here...

EN World is demonstrably not an island, separated from the rest of the gaming world, or the rest of the real world. You cannot expect that folks will leave the rest of their experiences at the door when they come here. And when what is said here echoes what it said out there, folks will make the connection.

You'll have some hard work to do to prove there is no connection, despite the evidence folks see.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Perhaps you should underline the point or write it in a sentence or two.

A setting based on the lived history and experiences of an ethnic group that did not exist in the Middle Ages will not be medieval. And by allowing D&D to not be medieval we are allowing a broader variety of people to use their background as inspiration in the game.

I also encourage you and others to read the adventures and their setting gazetteers before coming to the conclusion that they’re not suitably “D&D” in some way.

 

[Jaeger]

Taylor Swift has an enormous fanbase, largely of Millennials. She's not my thing, but it seems reasonably plausible to me that there could be a good overlap in fanbase between folks who like her and folks who might like Radiant Citadel.

Taylor Swift + Referencing one of the worst selling books that WOTC has made to date...

 

[Umbran]

Going alllllll the way back to the original few posts that started this, I question the value of any brand trying to capitalize on the name of Taylor Swift’s new album in such an oblique way.

Oblique? It seemed very direct.

Maybe they have some sort of metrics that show the value of doing that

I believe this was noted early in the thread - from a marketing perspective, it is a search optimization and algorithmic manipulation thing. Find an excuse to reference big Taylor Swift news, and you can get a boost in views, even on unrelated social media posts.

 

[Mannahnin]

Going alllllll the way back to the original few posts that started this, I question the value of any brand trying to capitalize on the name of Taylor Swift’s new album in such an oblique way. Maybe they have some sort of metrics that show the value of doing that or maybe they just fired that off as a one and done, and really who cares if it works or not?

But I think we’ve long since abandoned that as the overall driver of the thread, unfortunately.

Yeah, sure. We may have made a much bigger deal out of it than the tweet itself really merits, and gone off on all sorts of tangents in the process (in a 20+ page thread?! NO!).

As Whizbang observed this may have just been their social media peeps getting on a trend that other social media brand people were all jumping on, and we're making a bigger deal out of it than is really justified.

The fact that they happened to have a piece of adventure art which they could connect to it does seem to say something about the wider range of aesthetics D&D currently embraces. The fact that it's from a product whose mission was to explore and try out some new and different and more inclusive settings and cultural backgrounds and aesthetics may speak to the value of trying out different stuff. I think it does support the premise that it at least better enables some new crossover fan appeals.