Is it WotC’s responsibility to bring people to the hobby?

[Console Cowboy]

I think you underestimate how small RPGs are in the market. Let's start with this essay by Ryan Dancey. Regardless of whether or not I agree with all of his conclusions, he brings some relevant data to the conversation. WotC has spent years trying to find marketing that works and that is market efficient. One thing Dancey highlights, which should be obvious, is that D&D has a much tougher market to work with; expecting D&D to expand it's audience as easily and dramatically now as it did in the 1970s and early 1980s simply isn't realistic in a world with so many choices, when I can play an RPG on my phone or run a WoW raid with 60 other people. Further, the market has radically changed: fewer distributors, fewer stores and now online vendors who offer deeper discounts but with no network externalities that Dancey mentions.

D&D remains the flagship product of the RPG industry. Pathfinder is currently beating it in sales from quarter-to-quarter, but I believe that it's never enjoyed positions on the NYT bestseller lists, while 4E has. The problem here is not advertising for brand awareness. D&D HAS that. Here's a demonstration for you. If I go to Toys 'R' Us, with 1500 stores globally and more than 14 Billion US dollars in revenue and enter the following terms:

Dungeons and Dragons
Pathfinder
Cthulhu

TL;DR version: D&D has several hits, Pathfinder has non-RPG hits for some baby equipment and Cthulhu has two hits, one for a cell-phone holder and another for Cthulhu Munchkin. You may notice that for D&D, THE ACTUAL RPG IS NOT LISTED THERE. Instead they list Ravenloft, an anthology of the old 'Gold Box' games and the D&D-themed Heroscape supplement. Again, because the D&D brand is stronger than the actual game. Cthulhu has more recognition by this metric, which honesty isn't a great one, but it's illustrative for our purposes here.

Here's another point for you: what happens when we enter Role-Playing Game? We find where all those potential players have gone, perhaps. Who do you think has a bigger advertising budget in the Seattle-Tacoma game area? WotC or Nintendo? [quick hint: the one of them was bought in the last decade by a large toy company has the smaller one] The problem here is that D&D has competition from a lot of other venues for gamers and is no longer winning that fight.

WotC has spent advertising on their products before: to little benefit in terms of sales. Conventional advertising doesn't push sales in many cases, because most of the potential customers KNOW about D&D. They simply don't choose to play it based on the advertising. I've seen ads in comic books, gaming magazines and even on television. None of these generated an ROI that was worth the tiny margins that D&D operates under. From what some WotC employees have posted here on ENW, it's clear that M:tG has always been the big cash cow for the company...and traditional advertising had only marginal games for that. The problem is not reaching their intended audience, perhaps, but convincing that audience that D&D is a game they should spend time and money on in favor of other, often more convenient choices.

Understand I think that WotC NEEDS to grow the hobby, for reasons Hobo already explained up-thread. The market leader benefits the most...and getting more D&D players helps the hobby. Most gamers I know started with D&D and moved outwards to smaller games...or were brought into the hobby by those who had. But I have no great ideas how WotC can do that, short of releasing a good game and promoting it through a variety of specialized channels. I'd wager that the Pax Prime Penny-Arcade gaming podcast sessions probably did more to sell D&D 4E than the sum total of their print advertising, though I have no way to gauge that.

The long and short of it is that D&D and Pathfinder together don't sell huge numbers in the grand scheme of things. They have dedicated customers, but they are a niche market like comic books. Take a look at some of these numbers from Acaeum. D&D, at its height, was never clearing huge numbers of books and certainly aren't doing so now.

I think a large misunderstanding from many fans is overestimating the size of the RPG market and WotC's budget to increase it.

When you hit this situation it is time to redraw or redefine your market – and, subsequently, your marketing budget focus. It is not merely a semantics thing. It is sea change. It is about vision. It is about the kind of leadership D&D has not seen since the mid-80s.

It was a death-stroke level mistake for WotC to try to compete with video games. When they did that they disowned the strongest unique selling proposition (USP) of tabletop games that Gygax-era TSR had developed. Gygax knew it.
And he was outspoken about it.

I will take one ailing and aging Gygax over the whole bunch of young MBAs at WotC any day.

Consequently, this vision leads to WotC’s marketing calculation that the market is mature and the comparison to the declining model train market is concluded. There once were three blind men who stood touching an elephant along three different parts of its body, and it became an often quoted parable. What it means is: what you perceive can lockstep you into a very different vision than possible reality.

How far back does this perception go? Two words: Lorraine Williams.*see my comment below* (This speaks to Acaeum’s numbers and timeline you provide because nothing results in a vacuum.) This well predates Ryan Dancey and will have shaped his views and the understandings of his colleagues. His words serve to echo the foreshadowing TSR’s bankrupt had on the industry.

Psychological Operations in PR, my field, does this stuff all the time and is often called perception management. But what we can do for the benefit of the company can also negatively affect it.

I do not buy-in to the paradigm that the disappearance of so many traditional distributors is the death knell. I do see WotC’s contribution here through its stranglehold policies and practices euthanizing marketing partners.But WotC is into toys not publishing like TSR was back in the day. This is the very elephant in the room I am talking about, is it not? A company that does not understand the RPGs hobby and subsumes, in that lack of understanding, the hobby exists to serve the industry.

Whose responsibility is it indeed!

D&D does continue to enjoy great brand recognition, and that is the whole equity in the product. D&D Next is attempting to own the news cycle for the next year in preparation for a big launch, but that alone will not turn around the brand’s misfortune. I have seen things first hand in Europe, when I was pitching PR for the brand, and watched the relationship between Hasbro Be and the franchise D&D holder in amazed horror.

That is the tip of the iceberg and informs me why talent does not stay. But correct me if I am wrong, Monte.

This post is going long past my bedtime here but I had to speak out because my passion for both my hobby and my profession has me neck deep in this quagmire.

I agree with Rogue Agent’s observation about advertising R.O.I.. at this stage of the game and the fact that any reasonable media buying is not going to be profitable. I am not stuck to an advertising paradigm for communications, however. WotC would better serve itself by hiring a senior PR person for $75,000 with the sole specific objective to grow the hobby and steer well clear of gamers. WotC should also redefine its market.

In my own efforts to attracted new-to-the-hobby players, I have successfully accumulated English-speaking, first time D&D players who are expatriates in a non-English speaking country. But this has been accomplished outside of all the industry fairs and trade shows; far, far away from gaming magazines; and solely by selling the experience of the USP through the appropriate channels.

I am not the only person to notice the missed opportunities here. Again, I throw the ball at Monte Cook for commentary on his Kickstarter.

But what I have yet to see is WotC acknowledge, let alone imagine, a bright future for its product. I only see a marketing culture of fear, of circling the wagons and of new iterations that resemble a fish flailing for breath on the beach.

 

[technoextreme]

I think you underestimate how small RPGs are in the market. Let's start with this essay by Ryan Dancey. Regardless of whether or not I agree with all of his conclusions, he brings some relevant data to the conversation. WotC has spent years trying to find marketing that works and that is market efficient. One thing Dancey highlights, which should be obvious, is that D&D has a much tougher market to work with; expecting D&D to expand it's audience as easily and dramatically now as it did in the 1970s and early 1980s simply isn't realistic in a world with so many choices, when I can play an RPG on my phone or run a WoW raid with 60 other people. Further, the market has radically changed: fewer distributors, fewer stores and now online vendors who offer deeper discounts but with no network externalities that Dancey mentions.

Dancy is a bit out of the loop is he. I've seen tougher markets gain far more traction and popularity than D&D in the 1980s present day. Markets that have an initial investment of 100s to 1000s of dollars ,have little to no retail stores, and due to the nature of the hobby no distributors. And I have no clue how the hell it happened because common sense would dictate that the electronics/DIY market should not have blown up as much as it did.

I will take one ailing and aging Gygax over the whole bunch of young MBAs at WotC any day.

Gygax worked to make the hobby as inaccessible as one could possibly do for something as simple as a game. I have seen information that is college level material written in a manner easier to understand than some of the stuff attributed to his name.

 

[Console Cowboy]

Gygax worked to make the hobby as inaccessible as one could possibly do for something as simple as a game. I have seen information that is college level material written in a manner easier to understand than some of the stuff attributed to his name.

Probably because you are reading a rulebook whereas Gygax wrote a Guide book. There is a different reading approach between the two types of writing contained within. One has a bunch of 0s & 1s and the other has florid rhetoric, using complex sentences. One tells you what to do with its system and the other offers tools for the reader to build his own system. When you read college material, especially for an exam, you are reading a rule book. And the better of those allows you to skim.

"Core" (rule) books are easier properties to manage. The "DRM" is planted and propagated into the mindset of its reader.

Also, as a member of the industry that shoots for news to be released at a grade 4 reading level we call dumbing down, I apologize to you.

PS.
I am also going to edit this [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0Kkd4DKbdc"]link[/ame] into my above post as reference to Lorraine Williams' TSR but, otherwise not change my post. (Frank, if you're around here, PoG does need to be remembered as a counterweight to the reason Gary is remembered.) Remember the old Jimmy Cliff hit?
I can see clearly now, Lorraine is gone,
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It's gonna be a bright (bright), bright (bright)
Sun-Shiny day

 

[S'mon]

I think the main thing for the hobby would be to have a decent D&D-brand box set similar to 1983 Red Box Basic or the Pathfinder Beginner Box on sale as an evergreen product in the same places where Monopoly and other board games are sold. I was going to say 'in toy stores', but frankly I'm not sure my local toy store even sells board games; it seems to be all plastic figurines and videogames -so that may be an issue, if even family board games as a whole are a declining market, what chance for RPGs?

Still, IME from what I've seen in my FLGSes, even when newbies come in the door looking for this strange thing called D&D, they can leave empty handed and bewildered. A good starter set that's always available is vital. Paizo do it, and kudos to them, but Pathfinder does not have the D&D brand recognition outside the hobby, and it can sound a bit off telling people "Yes, this thing called the Pathfinder Beginner Box is the D&D you're looking for!".

 

[Neonchameleon]

Does that sound bitter? Sure. But hear me out.

1. 4e certainly was the turning point for my opinion, but I had been wary of WotC for sometime before that. See, under TSR, D&D had core rules, but at the beginning of every rule book there was a caveat that said that most of the rules were guidelines, play and adjust the rules to taste. With 3e, this changed to "here's you must play the game." It was a subtle change. I didn't notice it for sometime until I realized how bloated the rules were or when I tried to change something. 4e is even worse in this regard.

How many ways is this false?

1: Rule Zero is in 3.X just as much as it is in any other edition. Although there is a slight difference. The difference is that the rules supplements in 3.X are marketed towards players rather than DMs. This is further disguised by the apparent ease of tinkering, especially with 4e. The AD&D rules out of the box need fiddling with (does anyone ever use the weapon vs armour type table?) whereas 3e and especially 4e can be run straight out of the box.

2: Calling D&D 4e bloated is strictly false. The engine running 4e is smoother, smaller, and cleaner than the one running 2e. Compare the skill system for one - 2e NWPs and Rogue Skills vs 4e skills. This is concealed by the power structure - only the powers people choose impact the game, but the 4e presentation of them is intimidating. And 4e very definitely does have option bloat but this is a different issue from rules bloat.

4e geared all of its powers and abilities around combat, combat, combat.

This is again strictly not true. The 4e power structure is AEDU - with the utility powers often but not always being used for combat; you might as well say that NWPs are about combat because they include blind fighting and fletching. Even if you have no non-combat utilities, a 4e character has more competence outside combat and more relationship to the rules than either a 3.X or AD&D character (a rogue with NWPs might come close in 2e). 3.X has one emergent significant problem outside combat - the nature of the skill point system makes you effectively incompetent. But other than for the rogue, AD&D is almost all combat and spell.

4e actually has non-rogues who can have specialties that others can't match outside combat without casting spells.

2. Before, the rules supplemented your imagination. Now the rules supersede your imagination in order for games everywhere to be standardized--like a video game.

This is not only not true, it's also actively insulting.

Yes, I know that's a trite criticism to 4e, but at least earlier editions encouraged people to read the books that inspired the game (long live Appendix N!).

Ironically if you want to replicate Appendix N, the game that works best is 4e. The Grey Mouser simply doesn't work in AD&D (he started out as a mage but doesn't cast spells) and the Gygaxo-Vancian casting on a daily cycle doesn't even work anything like Jack Vance - whereas the 4e AEDU fits quite a lot of fiction.

You see this in the evolution (de-evolution?) of the character sheet. Back in the day an entire character could be written easily on an index card. Over the decades the sheet became more complicated, but in 2e actually had a layered system to ease players into the game. Don't want to use Non-Weapon Proficiencies?--fine, use that extra-space for notes.

4e character sheets resemble a strange mathematical flow chart to me.

In which case you are not comparing like with like. You don't get to write a 2e caster on an index card. You get to write a 2e caster on an index card plus all the books actually containing the spells that you have to lug to the table. 4e pre-essentials makes everyone about as complex as a third level caster, then the "flow chart" nature is equivalent to having the spells all printed out for you so you don't actually have to lug the PHB, the Spell Compendium, and whatever else around with you. Post essentials I can and have written fighters out on an index card. (And if a character can be written out on an index card IME it works better to do that than go with the unnecessarily bloated sheet).

The problem isn't the character sheets - it's that they are badly presented, take up a vast amount of unnecessary space, and that you don't know how to read them.

I hope some of the above helps correct a few misconceptions.

Isn't Pathfinder outselling D&D? I think they're in neck-and-neck competition.

Yes. Mostly because WotC have brought out three books so far this year (unless Mezzobarranan's out - and that's fluff only). Paizo have routinely brought out three books in a month.

aizo tried to make a better game than D&D4e,

No they didn't. They tried to keep 3.5 in print. Now it's possible that they considered 3.5 to be a better game than 4e but Paizo were explicitely motivated by the GSL and keeping a version close to WotC's old game in print. 3.5 was, of course made by WotC and the differences with Pathfinder are only some very minor house rules.

Second, only release a new edition when there is clear, deep, and widespread dissatisfaction with the current edition (which is then addressed in the new edition). No reboot edition of an RPG has ever succeeded unless there is clear, deep, and widespread dissatisfaction in the existing customer base. (AD&D 1E and D&D 3E both achieved this at the time of their release.)

And there was with 3.5. It had been falling apart for some time. But the release of 4e was botched in oh so many ways including throwing Orcus out, the Gleemax tragedy, the marketers who should be ashamed of themselves (especially Gamer Zero).

Also Justin Alexander is a regular edition warrior - he writes interesting things on the way he plays, but outside that should probably be ignored - especially on the subject of 4e.

And in his series on game structures he discusses how the industry's movement away from clear game structures have made it more difficult for new players to pick up and play the games.

This is a place where 4e blows anything D&D has produced since Lorraine Williams took over out of the water. It has combat scene structures, non-combat scene structures (the skill challenge, and yes the guidance could use work), and quest structures (as for an Adventure Path) complete with guidance on how much treasure to give and the sort of quests to write. (Gygaxian D&D had the dungeon of course). Yes, the dungeon structure is a tight one and the quest is a loose one - but it's there. And dealt with in great detail in the 4e DMGs.

 

[technoextreme]

Probably because you are reading a rulebook whereas Gygax wrote a Guide book. There is a different reading approach between the two types of writing contained within. One has a bunch of 0s & 1s and the other has florid rhetoric, using complex sentences. One tells you what to do with its system and the other offers tools for the reader to build his own system. When you read college material, especially for an exam, you are reading a rule book. And the better of those allows you to skim.

No. All of my engineering textbooks are guide books because I wouldn't be a good engineer if all I did was regurgitate facts. On top of that using pretentious language results in poor communication like you so amply provided me. I seriously doubt you actually wanted to call Gygax's writing crappy but through your choice of words you actually did.

Also, as a member of the industry that shoots for news to be released at a grade 4 reading level we call dumbing down, I apologize to you.

Ironically, I'm a member of an industry that makes fun of people who uses florid rhetoric and complex sentence structure because of its ability to mystify, obscure, and misdirect. Its one of the two reasons why Gygaxian prose makes me want to twitch.

 

[Desdichado]

I don't think Gygax's writing really qualifies as rhetoric, but it's awfully hard to not call it florid.

 

[technoextreme]

I don't think Gygax's writing really qualifies as rhetoric, but it's awfully hard to not call it florid.

Yeah but generally florid has negative connotations because it generally means overly ornate.

 

[ShadowDenizen]

I’ll try not to veer into Edition Wars in this thread. (Not hard, since I’m actively playing in a PF/4E and 5E Playtest game currently!!)

And I still stand by my thought from some time ago that it’s a collaborative responsibility of both the Publishing Companies AND the player base to bring new people into the RPG fold.

But there were some interesting points brought up I wanted to reply to.

This is further disguised by the apparent ease of tinkering, especially with 4e. The AD&D rules out of the box need fiddling with (does anyone ever use the weapon vs armour type table?) whereas 3e and especially 4e can be run straight out of the box.

The difference being that it’s considerably easier to “tinker” with AD+D. Taking out the “weapon vs. Armour” rules wholesale doesn’t substansially change anything, while taking something out of 4E inevitably leads to conflicts since everything it largely “linked together” by the rules. (Though not nearly as bad as 3.5, I will concede.)

This is again strictly not true. The 4e power structure is AEDU - with the utility powers often but not always being used for combat; you might as well say that NWPs are about combat because they include blind fighting and fletching.

Strictly speaking? No. But practically speaking? The ratio of Combat Powers to Non-Combat powers is staggering. Indeed, by couching “Utility Powers” within the context of a primarily combat-based component of the games causes more confusion than anything else. (“When can I use this power?” kinda questions abound, in my experience.)

This is a place where 4e blows anything D&D has produced since Lorraine Williams took over out of the water. It has combat scene structures, non-combat scene structures (the skill challenge, and yes the guidance could use work), and quest structures (as for an Adventure Path) complete with guidance on how much treasure to give and the sort of quests to write.

But it’s all “by the numbers”. I think, to grow the player base, we need to emphasize the DIFFERENCES that make D+D (and other RPG’s) stand out over board-games, computer games, etc.

And that primary difference is imagination! By putting forth rulebooks that number HUNDREDS of pages, it’s quite alienating to a large majoirity of the potential new players. (Yes, I’m generalzing, and I’m sure there’s siazable exceptions), but what pre-teen/teen wants to read the Pathfinder book cover-to-cover?

The hobby also needs a good entry point. The Pathfinder Beginner box was a GREAT product, but Pathfinder (while large and growing larger still) doesn’t command the “respect/authority” that D+D does. IMO, while [as I said] growing the player base is a communal goal, it WOULD behoove the hobby to have a quality D+D Starter set/jump-on point. Is it WotC’s responsibility? No. But it certainly does seem to make sense to my [admittedly non-business person] mind.

 

[technoextreme]

The difference being that it’s considerably easier to “tinker” with AD+D. Taking out the “weapon vs. Armour” rules wholesale doesn’t substansially change anything, while taking something out of 4E inevitably leads to conflicts since everything it largely “linked together” by the rules. (Though not nearly as bad as 3.5, I will concede.)

No. Its worst in AD&D because the rules are obscured through flowery ornate language that shouldn't be there in the first place. In order to first be able to tinker with something one really must have a clear understanding of the rules which of course the way Gygax wrote wasn't entirely clear at all.