D&D 4E Hasbro, Greyhawk, and 4E speculation

[Falstaff]

We've never used minis for any 3.5 game.

Really? That's interesting. I'd love to watch your group play a session. What do ya'll do when someone is moving around during combat and attacks of opportunity need to be settled? Do you just wing it?

 

[Turjan]

Simple.
Paizo (and others) are willing to pay real money for licenses (including Greyhawk).
Yet Hasbro/WotC won't agree to it. But then they don't use it themselves.

So they have lost a revenue stream, and gain no perceptible advantage in doing so. Companies are motivated by the bottom line.

This decision is bizarre and inexplicable.

This reasoning doesn't make sense. Others in this thread have already touched on this subject, but let's try again:

Greyhawk is too similar to the Forgotten Realms. This means that the customer base who buy Greyhawk products will most probably show a high degree of overlap with the customer base who buy FR products. The part that doesn't overlap is already catered to at the moment (Living Greyhawk, LGG, Paizo maps, core adventures, etc.).

This overlapping of customer bases means that by producing both setting lines you will have to produce double the amount of product (two complete lines) for maybe 10% more revenue (the few customers who will buy into both lines). In the other example, i.e., licensing Greyhawk out, this means getting licensing fees, but losing nearly half of the FR crowd to a competitor, that means making the own products less profitable.

In both cases it looks like a net loss to me. The revenue per RPG product goes down. The overall revenue might go up, but the ratio of capital expenditure per achieved profit goes down. Looks very reasonable to me not to do that .

 

[rgard]

Rich,

Thanks for the examples and perspectives.

I, too, have been gaming a very long time. I'm 34 now and I started gaming when I was 9 years old. OD&D and Star Frontiers! yay.

Anyway, most of my years of gaming, mainly through Advanced and 2nd edition, I never used minis. I had many players that wanted to use them (since they'd painted so damn many of them), but when I DM'ed (which was almost all of the time) I never used them. I always wanted my players to imagine everything instead of stare at the table.

But, with the 3.5 version of D&D, I really like using the minis.

Oh wait, I just noticed that my post has absolutely nothing to do with this thread's topic. Sorry about that.

Thanks much! Agreed, we have strayed from the original post, but it has been fun being civil on the topic(s).

Thanks,
Rich

 

[MerricB]

Don't make me laugh. I can't speak for all the posters around here, but I'm not this gullible.

There's nothing you can say that'll convience me that D&D v3.5 and all its new terms like 'squares' for movement and other details on terrain and diagonal moves WASN'T included to prod (require?) gamers to buy D&D's new miniatures. I would argue that it is near impossible to run a D&D v.3.5 combat WITHOUT minis.

3e combat should have required miniatures, but the designers made some questionable decisions and tried to create a hybrid system.

There is nothing new in 3.5e that wasn't in 3e. Both systems work a lot better with miniatures.

There are basically two ways of describing a combat system. One uses minis. The other doesn't. The one that uses minis is *much* easier to create a consistent system with, and to write clear, concise rules for. If I move from one DM to another, a system with miniatures will be more consistently run than one that relies primarily on DM judgement. This is important to anyone who participates in organised play. (e.g. conventions and the RPGA).

3.5e cleared up a bunch of questionable design decisions ("facing" for horses, I'm looking at you), and made the rules less dependent on "on the fly" DM decisions (the simplification of cover rules), and made explicit that the system needs minis.

Of course, DMs *can* run the game without minis (I do all the time), but knowing the rules as they apply to minis does help then apply them when not using minis - it's not so simple the other way.

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

Do swift actions force you to buy minis?

Does the Fantastic Locations line force you to buy minis?

As I said above, the influence of D&D miniatures is nothing like people assume it to be. We don't sit around, plotting ways to force people to buy miniatures.

No, but you certainly sit around plotting ways to persuade people to buy minis. They're just too cool!

Fantastic Locations is a hybrid product - Although I expect its primary audience will be the DMM skirmish crowd due to the maps and the upcoming DDM rules changes, it isn't useless to RPG players either. (And given many RPG players use minis, well, I may be quite mistaken about which faction buys more of it).

Cheers!

 

[Aaron L]

Really? That's interesting. I'd love to watch your group play a session. What do ya'll do when someone is moving around during combat and attacks of opportunity need to be settled? Do you just wing it?

The DM has a sheet of graph peper and marks our locations and movement, same as he weve done since 1E. Everyone keeps a visualization of where they are in a fight and generally has a pretty good idea if theyre going to provoke an AoO, and the DM will warn you if youre going to be moving in a reckless fashion and invite a whacking. Easy as pie, honestly, and doesnt make us feel like were playing monopoly, which minis tend to do for us.

 

[rgard]

No, but you certainly sit around plotting ways to persuade people to buy minis. They're just too cool!

Fantastic Locations is a hybrid product - Although I expect its primary audience will be the DMM skirmish crowd due to the maps and the upcoming DDM rules changes, it isn't useless to RPG players either. (And given many RPG players use minis, well, I may be quite mistaken about which faction buys more of it).

Cheers!

I'll keep track of who buys the Fantastic Locations.

 

[Falstaff]

The DM has a sheet of graph peper and marks our locations and movement, same as he weve done since 1E. Everyone keeps a visualization of where they are in a fight and generally has a pretty good idea if theyre going to provoke an AoO, and the DM will warn you if your going to be moving in a reckless fashion and invite a whacking.

Ah, I see. This is exactly how I ran all of my 2nd. ed. campaigns. I guess I could do it for the newer edition, but it would be a lot of work and require me to pay a lot of attention to my graph paper.

Well, I stand (actually I'm sitting) corrected. You CAN play v.3.5 without minis.

 

[Patman21967]

Hell, I use dice more than I use minis.

 

[Dragonblade]

If you want a counter to your points, I would say that I don't see how licensing the videogame rights to D&D for 10 years means D&D is up for sale. It seems likely to me that, if Hasbro wanted to sell D&D, they'd make more money if they owned all the rights and could sell them along with the rest of D&D.

Absolutely, 100% correct. No potential buyer of the D&D brand would buy it without the video game rights intact. The RPG business is nice, but I'm guessing that the amount of money that Hasbro got for giving Infogrames 10 years of video game rights is more than the RPG division makes in 10 years. The D&D brand is solid gold in the video game industry.