D&D 5E How badly did Sword Coast Legends damage the brand?

[Cristian Andreu]

Star Wars has survived far worse. We're fine.

 

[Jessica]

I'm pretty sure the actual people who play D&D damage the brand 1000x worse than SCL ever could.

 

[gyor]

I'm pretty sure the actual people who play D&D damage the brand 1000x worse than SCL ever could.

How so?

 

[Jessica]

How so?

This may come as a surprise, but even among people who consider themselves nerdy D&D players are stereotyped as socially awkward basement dwelling turbovirgins. Heck, I have a friend who is a furry and SHE makes fun of ME for being a D&D player.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

This may come as a surprise, but even among people who consider themselves nerdy D&D players are stereotyped as socially awkward basement dwelling turbovirgins. Heck, I have a friend who is a furry and SHE makes fun of ME for being a D&D player.

You realize that you kind of just made fun of your friend for being a furry, don't you?

But yes, there are people that try to section off various different fandoms that are all stereotyped as "nerdy" by the general populace into which ones are "nerdy, even for a nerd." That will keep happening until it becomes common that a person actually be able to like what they like without comparing to other people's likes, which is really rare right now (I'm the only person I know in real life that can actually like one thing without expressing it via crapping on other things, but my group of close friends are working together on making fun of ourselves every time one of us slips up and says something like "Oh, you like that?" in a derisive tone).

 

[Gnashtooth]

So the reason I asked, was looking at their entire brand strategy, it appears that any attempts to market the brand outside the TTRPG and the novels that specifically involve Drizzt have concluded in utter failure. In SCL's case, it's actual "epic fail".

To be fair, I don't have data on the non-Drizzt novels, but the Greenwood novels don't appear to have more than a handful of reviews on Amazon.

 

[cmad1977]

Not at all. Nothing to see here. Move along.

 

[Celtavian]

Star Wars has survived far worse. We're fine.

D&D has survived far worse. D&D will exist in one form or another likely after most of us are dead. Even if Hasbro someday sells the brand (my hope), some rich geek will buy it and keep it going or the community will.

 

[Pauper]

It's not as if they rolled a critical fumble, like Trapdoor did with DungeonScape. Even so, did the DungeonScape failure damage the D&D brand? Not really, WotC just signed up with Smiteworks instead and the world carried on turning.

Not to mention that, if a poorly-developed video game was going to damage a major RP brand, you'd think the very public failure of Pathfinder Online would have already done so for the Pathfinder RPG.

--
Pauper

 

[Gnashtooth]

Not to mention that, if a poorly-developed video game was going to damage a major RP brand, you'd think the very public failure of Pathfinder Online would have already done so for the Pathfinder RPG.

--
Pauper

The difference is that WotC's strategy is banking on the multi-media approach, which has failed miserably. Up to the end of 4th, video games and other content external to the P&P were not central. This time around, it's a much bigger part of the picture.

In Pathfinder's case, the MMO falls under 'nice to have' not 'essential to growing the brand'. Their focus is still the tabletop game, first and foremost.

I hate Pathfinder but Paizo has the right idea.