Is D&D 4E too "far out" to expand the market easily?

[hexgrid]

Hm? The main characters, and the central focus of the series, are human. Yoda and Chewie are cool and all (as is Admiral "IT'S A TRAP!"), but they're just window dressing (though Yoda does get the coolest lines in the series in Episode 5). The main heroes and the main villains are humans, and they drive the entire saga. Star Wars is very humanocentric, even if Lucas has become enamored of goofy CG aliens recently.

I agree. My point is that of everything mentioned, it most closely resembles what Ruin Explorer was saying might drive a mainstream audience away from 4e. It's an example of "far out" fantasy with quite a bit of mainstream appeal.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Hm? The main characters, and the central focus of the series, are human. Yoda and Chewie are cool and all (as is Admiral "IT'S A TRAP!"), but they're just window dressing (though Yoda does get the coolest lines in the series in Episode 5). The main heroes and the main villains are humans, and they drive the entire saga. Star Wars is very humanocentric, even if Lucas has become enamored of goofy CG aliens recently.

It's also not, actually, the least human-o-centric show mentioned, thinking about it. Farscape, Babylon 5 and Star Trek all devoted a lot more time to the non-human characters than SW, and indeed Farscape had a world where Ben was the only real "human" around 99% of the time, and the Sebeceans, who basically stood in for humans, weren't the most major race nor ever-present.

What 4E feels most like to me, is, and I think others have mentioned this, Farscape + 70s fantasy. That's not a bad deal, really, but I don't think a kid who is 13 now, say, and enjoyed LotR, Harry Potter, PotC and Narnia is going to be keen on D&D, necessarily. I think it's going to seem a bit garish and OTT and kind of OLD to him. I think WotC needs to come up with something new. Something not D&D but party-based fantasy nonetheless. 4E's mechanics are fine, I reckon. It's the style that needs adjusting if this market is to be hit.

Hexgrid - But that's precisely my point - EVEN Star Wars isn't ANYWHERE NEAR as far out as D&D 4E is by default, at least imho. And SW isn't necessarily big with the demographic I'm thinking about.

 

[Eric Tolle]

Not recently. Pirates of the Carribean and LotR both blew the more recent SW movies away at the box-office. I daresay LotR Online has already taken more money than SWG did, too, and LotR console/PC games in general have been pretty successful in a richer gaming market. SW games were successful, but there was less money around.

And if we were to make a "popular races" conclusion from that, then WoTC should be focusing on undead pirates. And elves of course- maybe the dream combination should be undead elven pirates?

I guess what I've come to realize over this thread isn't that WotC is chasing "the wrong" market, or a market that isn't there, but that I think there's a large number of potential FRPG players for whom there is not an attractive, well-advertised FRPG. I think WotC could fix that and pick up some players in the process. I'd think another company should do it, frankly, but the GSL doesn't allow for that, and I'm not sure anyone but WotC could get the books to where they'd need to be to be successful.

Well it's not like we've had any resolution on the content of such a FRPG. Based on that lack of closure, one can say that 4E is the way to go; the proof will be in the actual sales data, not the proclaimations of some people on the intartubes.

I will continue to state that far more than specific content examples, what will be important for getting people involved will be ease of learning and escalating involvement. For that, 4E is doing a pretty good job, better than most games.

 

[ryryguy]

He's talking about Torog, the evil God of the Underdark; it's mentioned in the fluff that he's worshipped by jailers, for example. IMO, he's (again) reaching for something about 4e to dislike, and succeeding admirably. Nobody's easier to please than someone who wants to be displeased...

Just a minor point, but I believe the PHB specifically says that the worshippers of a god do not necessarily share the god's alignment. Saying that jailers commonly worship Torog doesn't really imply anything nice about jailers, true. But those civil-service, just-doing-my-job jailers could certainly be Unaligned and merely worshipping Torog because it's how you get ahead in the jailer's union.

Finally, IMHO it's not hard to imagine that Evil jailers are fairly common. Not all jailers are Evil, and being a jailer doesn't make you Evil, but Evil types perhaps gravitating towards the jailer profession? Not much of a stretch in my book.

 

[Ranes]

All you have to do is explain that an Eladrin is a high elf like Elron from LotR and suddenly they understand.

You mean misunderstand.

Elrond is from LotR.

Elron was Lord of the Hubbardistas, writer of excrecable fiction and purveyor of wahoo that leaves WotC's own not-inconsiderable wahoo in the dust.

I am not OT either. (Geddit?)

4e is too wahoo for me but whether it is too wahoo for the market WotC is after is debatable. I suspect it is, not that we will ever know. I certainly would have preferred the wahoo to be optional (ie not core). When it comes to wahoo, I always do.

PS The reduction of rounser's argument to him not being able to get past a line or two of colour text is disingenuous at best.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And if we were to make a "popular races" conclusion from that, then WoTC should be focusing on undead pirates. And elves of course- maybe the dream combination should be undead elven pirates?

No, more like giving humans bonuses based on their cultural backgrounds, actually.

Whilst you make the usual "my argument has failed so I will insult the very discussion I am part of" ploy, I'll ignore that silly-business and focus on what else you're saying. Particularly sales data. I agree, it will be revealing. If 4E sells MORE than 3E did in the first year, then clearly it's heading in the right direction. If it sells like 2x as much as 3E did in the first year, then clearly I'm outright wrong because that would imply a distinct market-enlarging.

However, do you have any figures for 3E sales? Are we going to get any for 4E? If not it's kind of a worthless fantasy to suggest that such figures will resolve anything.

I think what you fail to see with your "escalating involvement" etc. is that unless 4E has some kind of "gateway", then that's unlikely to significantly increase the number of players, merely maintain them. That's a whole other thread, though, I guess.

As for complaints of "lack of specific content", well, sorry I think I've been pretty clear. This is more about style and NOT having certain elements, I think. Though, tbh, I am shocked WotC doesn't have some kind of Harry Potter-rip-off RPG on the way out. There's SURELY money in that.

 

[haakon1]

I mean, coming from something like WoW, you're going to be fine. D&D's implied setting and level of species diversity is very much "on-par" with WoW. Coming from say, a fantasy lit. reading background, or from watching things like LotRO and Harry Potter, though, I think it's going to be a bit wild and extreme, and coming from outside fantasy entirely, I think the world 4E portrays implicitly is so alien that it would extremely difficult to meaningfully connect with. Maybe that's not a big deal, though, given 4E's focus on just providing a good game.

I agree completely. This is what I mean by "too gamey" or self-reflective. My whole thread about how the relationship of 20 sp to 1 gp in AD&D was based on the actual traditional US coin values and the pricing of items was based on Gary thinking the Yukon Gold Rush economy, whereas in 4e, no reality outside the game itself is important to the design.

The counter criticism is of course that this doesn't matter, because D&D was never a perfect simulator of "X".

You hit the nail on the head that it's not about simulation, it's about having a fantasy world (based on Gary's encyclopedic knowledge of history + traditional fantasy + traditional mythology) v. having a game (based on the history of the game itself + ideas about making the game more "fun" + ideas from other games).

 

[haakon1]

Outside of D&D, I'm blanking on any source of media that uses either gnomes or half-orcs.

Gnomes? Hmmm, it's been almost 24 hours since I saw one. There was a stone one in the garden section of my local department store, next to the watering cans.

Half-orcs? There was one in Tolkien. And at least everyone knows what an orc is.

There are no Hellboys in Tolkien, or any other pre-1980's mythology that I'm aware of.

 

[haakon1]

But Tolkien's half man, half orc creatures, the Uruk-Hai, were far smarter, stronger, and far more ruthless than either orcs or men, and towered over them. Where did half-orcs in D&D even come from?

I believe that in Tolkien, the guy in Bree who was mean to Bill the pony was a half-orc.

In D&D terms, an orog (half-orc, half-ogre) is probably closer to an Uruk-hai.

 

[The Little Raven]

There are no Hellboys in Tolkien, or any other pre-1980's mythology that I'm aware of.

Well, I guess you should look into the Malleus Maleficarum, written in 1486, which discussed the cambion, a half-human offspring of a succubus or incubus. Caliban, from the Tempest, is a cambion, for example.

So, I think they kinda pre-date Tolkein by a few centuries.