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Message: <blockquote data-quote="buzz" data-source="post: 1757661" data-attributes="member: 6777">20-30 pages of rules with "the rest" filled out with monsters, spells, magic items, and setting info (all the but the last one being "rules", too), and you've got a game that is already *way* beyond something that appeals to the "Monopoly and Clue" crowd.No. What keeps people away in droves is that RPGs, even as a general concept, only appeal to a certain number of people. The whole idea that RPGs would be really popular if only there was a rules-lite system aimed at the masses is a fallacy. There have been plenty of rules-lite RPGs, by both big publishers and small, and none of them ever brought in Joe Average in droves. Citing games from the '80s boom that didn't sell a fraction of what D&D did doesn't disprove this in the least.Joe Average can walk into almost any major bookstore and find RPGs, generally including comparatively "lite" systems like Vampire. Joe Average doesn't buy them becasue Joe Average is not interested.Many people enjoy RPGs on a regular basis, and there are plenty of RPGs that are not complex behemoths. There are also many games with RPG-like aspects (Clix, D&D/SW mins, Dungeoneer, TCGs) that have a cheap buy-in and fast start-up time.It isn't, necessarily. But chasing Joe Average is a fool's errand; you end up dumbing down your game so that it doesn't appeal to gamers, yet it's still too alien from the get-go for Joe Average to care. The point is to simply get exposure so that you find those poeple who are gamers but maybe just don't know it yet.I think TSR's decline started long before 1994, and I think it really didn't have anything to do with whether they had boxed intro games or not. TSR's business mistakes are legion. IIRC, BD&D never sold in the numbers that AD&D did. But it's possibly irrelevant, because TSR made so many blunders that it's hard to point to, say, Star Frontiers being cancelled after a few yers and say "See, *that's* when everything went wrong."This is not the case, to the best of my knowledge, and you're confusing a lot of factors. The 2e campaign settings had problems mainly due to the fact that TSR was cranking them out at a ridiculous pace, splintering their own market. OTOH, the high-profile bookstores near me didn't seem to have an easy time selling the D&D Basic Set and Star Wars intro set; they sat on the shelves forever.Why is D&D flawed, then, if it's just a game that you don't like? Is it "too complex" or is it just more complex than you prefer?I'd reccomend that you either take a look around at games other than D&D, or else consider that you simply like those old games better than the stuff you see today.I dunno. WotC know how to run a business. If producing boxed, staple-bound RPGs was really profitable and brought in a lot of new blood, I thnk they'd be doing it.</blockquote>

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