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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnSnow" data-source="post: 5278357" data-attributes="member: 32164">I picked your quote 'cuz I agreed with you and liked the (/BA psych degree talking) line, not because I disagreed with you. Less confused? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I also agree with you and think it's totally true that an experienced DM can guide a new player through the game with the pre-existing 4e books. But, there's two problems with that approach:1) For the player who might find the PHB class structure too complicated, there's no simpler alternative. You certainly have the right to decide you don't want "that sort" in your game, but in my experience, you're keeping out some great players simply because they have a different aesthetic sense of "fun."2) Who guides someone into the game if they don't have a friend who already plays? Who introduces the 14-year old kid? If the only way to play D&D is to be taught to play by someone who already does, it's never going to be more than a niche hobby. And the reason its still around is that, at one point in the '80s, TSR decided it could be learned "out of a box." Did those people learn as well or as quickly as those who were shepherded into it? Of course not, but they DID learn. Many of the game's current players come from that era.Yes, some smaller fraction of people are unintimidated enough to have been able to grok the game out of the 3e and 4e books, just like some were able to pick the game up from the 1e books. But without those old boxed sets, our numbers today would be MUCH smaller than they are.Presentation matters. The three D&D hardcover rulebooks scare off a LOT of people. And the further into an edition you go, the more intimidating it gets. We may know that you only NEED the PHB, MM, and DMG in order to start play. But how is a new player to know that? How is a parent contemplating a game to buy for their kid supposed to know that? And, oh yeah, you need maps and minis and dice and...For maximum accessibility (and that's what we're talking about here), what you want is a complete, playable game in a box. And some guidelines of "what next?" The Red Box supplies ALL of that. And the rest of the Essentials line provides a pretty straight-forward "what next." It also provides varying degrees of complexity in character class - again to improve its accessibility.D&D Essentials is what BECMI D&D should have been: the same game presented in a more user-friendly format. The only flaw back then is that TSR made the mistake of supporting two different, but similar, games (D&D and AD&D), and essentially fighting an edition war with itself.They also fell victim to the belief that every new game had to have its own new system, rather than just being built on the engine that ran D&D. Sticking to the basic engine for Star Frontiers, Boot Hill and Gamma World would have improved the system MUCH faster (and probably cemented TSR's early competitive edge). That would be a separate topic, but the new Gamma World boxed set means that they now see at least one of those properties as bringing value-added as a rules-supplement to D&D. So it speaks to the consistency of their current marketing.</blockquote>

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