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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mouseferatu" data-source="post: 1756313" data-attributes="member: 1288">Okay, I'm just guessing here, but I think I've got a pretty good idea as to why WotC hasn't marketed a complete Basic D&D game.It goes back to the same logic that says "Don't have too many campaign settings active at any given time." Essentially, if WotC publishes an alternate version of D&D that allows people to play a complete game, they're competing with themselves.Sure, the sales on the core book/boxed set/whatever might be good. (I have no data to support whether they'd be good or not.) But even if they are, what then? Suddenly you've carved off a segment of your own market that won't be buying the D&D supplements you put out, because they aren't playing D&D; they're playing Basic D&D, which is a different game (regardless of similarities). Even if those products are easily converted, many people won't buy them--and let's be honest, they won't be easily converted. After all, most new products are based on new options, new rules, PrCs, feats, etc. And that's exactly what you have to tone down or get rid of to create a basic rules set in the first place.Market BD&D supplements? Sure, but odds are, the BD&D market won't be big enough to support them. And even if it is... The laws of economics dictate that selling X number of a single product is more profitable than selling 1/2-X of two seperate products, due to production and distribution costs.The only way for BD&D to be a success for WotC is for it to bring in enough new players to make up for any schism it causes in the existing market. And the odds of it doing so, I would imagine, are not good.Hence, WotC doing what it's doing--making Basic D&D a gateway product into "real" D&D, something that beginners can easily get into (or so it's intended), yet guides them into eventually using the core books.Now, don't get me wrong. As I said, I desperately want to see Basic D&D as a complete game. (I also desperately want to be one of the designers on it, but let's leave that aside as an unrelated issue.) I'd be happy to do it/see it done by a major third-party publisher, but I'd rather see it done by WotC. I simply don't believe they would find it worth their while on an economic level, however. At least not without a major marketing campaign to make Basic D&D the next big thing, with ads and tie-in products and a new Saturday morning cartoon, etc. And I don't see that happening either, because Hasbro knows that the real money simply isn't in RPGs, and it's a more profitable use of their resources to mine the existing cash cows--CCGs and the like--than to risk funds on an attempt to create a new one. (Or recreate an old one, as the case may be.)I wish it weren't so <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />, and I could be wrong, but that's my take on where things stand.Of course, third-party publishers don't have to worry about splitting the market base. Frankly, not a one of them is big enough to do it, and even if they do, well, it's not going to harm them directly. So a Basic D&D--under a different name, of course--is entirely feasible coming from one of them. It won't reach nearly as many people, nor will it become exceptionally popular, but it's a viable product. (Hence, Troll Lord's upcoming C&C, which isn't Basic D&D--or at least not Basic D20--at all, but still looks like it'll be a really cool game.)</blockquote>

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