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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5493856" data-attributes="member: 55271">Laying aside the attempted comparison of discounted prices to full cover price, I would make a few points:(1) I don't think new players actually respond well to the "there are a bunch of rules in some other book that you'll need to buy later" approach.(2) To a large extent, the "problem" you're trying to fix is that WotC doesn't agree with you.What does the back cover of Heroes of the Fallen Lands tell you to buy as a player? Heroes of the Fallen Lands, Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms, Starter Set, Dice Set, and Rules Compendium.What does the first page of Heroes of the Fallen Lands tell you to do? Go buy the Starter Set first. Also Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdom is a "companion" to Heroes of the Fallen Lands. (Does that mean I need to buy both Heroes volumes? Possibly.)What does the second page of Heroes of the Fallen Lands tell you? "The Rules Compendium contains the complete rules. You'll need to refer to that book for all the details on how the game works." (emphasis added)On page 13 they tell you that you "need a few things to play" (emphasis added): Starter Set, Rules Compendium, and D&D Game Dice (one set for each player).The next page tells you that both Heroes volumes are "essential elements of the game" for the player.Page 20 tells you, once again, to go buy the Rules Compendium.Page 31 has my favorite part: Having told you at the beginning of the book that you should get the Starter Set first, page 31 repeats that suggestion but then immediately tells you to start over from scratch.Flipping through this book in the bookstore there's absolutely no way for a new player to know that "this is all I need".Meanwhile, the Rules Compendium itself tells you on the back cover that it's the "complete rules of the game". If I'm looking for the one-and-only book that will tell me everything I need to play, that's the book I'm going to buy (and be disappointed when I get to page 11 and it tells me to buy the Starter Set, Rules Compendium, a dice set, and both Heroes volumes).If you're coming from the Starter Set, the ad sheet they included explicitly tells you that you need both Heroes volumes, the Rules Compendium, and a dice set to have "everything you need".WotC took the term "core rulebook" -- a generic term that meant "these are the books you need to buy to play the game" -- and spent two years degrading its usefulness by labeling everything they published as "core". So then they tried to create the term "essentials" to repair that damage... and just made it much, much worse.I wish they hadn't done that. But now that they have, I don't think there's really a solution beyond scrapping the entire line in 2 years and trying it again.</blockquote>

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