Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="nothing to see here" data-source="post: 2848225" data-attributes="member: 16432">We agree on more than it may first appear, Graf...I chalk it up to us having different degrees of faith on how accurately the preferences of gamers can be measured.I agree -- trying to design a targeted gamer cold-call survey would be tricky...though with certain magazine subscription lists out there...it would certainly be possible.Ironically enough, I believe that specific 'rules' are vastly overrated as a selling point of a new edition.  Bad rules can certianly sink a game...but I doubt that a new edition would sink into 'bad rules'.  May not be much of an impromvement...but certainly not bad (the way the tail end of 2e was bad).What do we know about the psychographics of gamer culture...not much publicly, unfortunately, though there is information on the psychographics of 'geek' culture (though I find the term somewhat derrisive of the wide variety of people who check these boards).  'Geek culture' has as a defining characteristic -- a "completionist" tendency -- the need to master an entire body of subject matter as a demonstration of worth to one's peers.  Think about how many threads on these boards devolve into different people disagreeing with each other solely to demonstrate their superior knowledge of a subject...be it of a game, a book, a movie...or whatever else.It's the "Worst Movie...EVAR" effect.  Geeks are completionists -- and therefore, barring a royal screw-up, will buy new edititions -- even though they may bitch to the high heavens along the way.  There's a lot of people out there are absolutely venomous about Star Wars Episodes I-III yet, for some reason, still happen to own all three.  As for non-geek casual gamers (the holy grail for marketers), more general research will suffice.  This is a massive overgeneralization but, in general, among consumers who are non-identifiers with a brand...a re-release of that brand will attract more consumers than extending a current brand line.  i.e.  'causal' gamers can reasonably be predicted to buy more copies of a new edition PHB than they would to purchasing the "Races of..."  "Heroes off..." lines etc.  Hence the line that has been dogma ever since the release of third edition...that it is PHB sales that drive the line.Somewhere in the balance of this casual vs 'geek' culture gamer mix -- there is an ideal way and manner to release a new game.  The only real rules discussion would be, improve where ever possible, but most importantly "don't screw this up".  (which is why I believe a 4th edition will be much less experiemental with new rules than many on these boards think)</blockquote>

Verification