D&D 5E "Labels" and D&D Gaming

[Marandahir]

When I was a kid, you could get comics in the grocery store checkout aisle, in airport terminals, and in drug stores. Mom would frequently throw one in with the groceries. By the time I started college, the only places you could buy them were specialty stores...so nobody bought them except hobbyists.

Odd. I CHOOSE to go to a specialty store to support them, but I don't know a single Barnes & Nobles without a comics/manga section. Granted, there it's the trade paperbacks and hardcovers only, not the staple-bound single issues, but the books of my favourite comics fit better together on a shelf then a stack of flimsy issues. I still get the issues once in a while, but usually willing to wait for the compilation months later.

 

[MoonSong]

Odd. I CHOOSE to go to a specialty store to support them, but I don't know a single Barnes & Nobles without a comics/manga section. Granted, there it's the trade paperbacks and hardcovers only, not the staple-bound single issues, but the books of my favourite comics fit better together on a shelf then a stack of flimsy issues. I still get the issues once in a while, but usually willing to wait for the compilation months later.

I haven't bought new issues in over ten years. Last time I was at an specialty store, I bought back issues of a mid nineties short-run local comic for a pittiance. Last time I bought a trade paperback it was Gwenpool two years ago but from Amazon. I was waiting for a gift card we get every year to buy White Knight.

I still buy manga though, every month I get one or two from a local bookstore. They also sell floppies, but nothing has ever picked my interest. At this point these cost too much for what they are and I'm very lost as to what they are. However, last year I got a couple mystery packs (random unsold floppies in a blind bag) from Walmart.

 

[MoonSong]

When I was a kid, you could get comics in the grocery store checkout aisle, in airport terminals, and in drug stores. Mom would frequently throw one in with the groceries. By the time I started college, the only places you could buy them were specialty stores...so nobody bought them except hobbyists.

At least from where I'm standing, comic book shops used to be more common and widespread. I could find lots of them in nearly every other subway station or close to one. In the past decade they have been steadily disappearing, and only a handful of them remain. However, manga stores are now a plenty.

Anyway this is also a point, comic stores are rarer and rarer every time. There is only one Diamond-approved chain in the whole country. I haven't been out to see what is happening with it now that Diamond is closed.

 

[Lanefan]

But, that's my point @Lanefan. Other than personal anecdote, do you have any actual evidence that points to the prevalence of lengthy campaigns and older gamers? Because, frankly, if we're playing dueling anecdotes, mine are pretty different than yours.

Unfortunately, the opportunity for untainted research on this question ended on the release of 3e. That WotC survey, had they used all the data they gathered, would have been the best we'd ever get.

Now the best you can do is research today; and if after 20 years of the hobby being told overtly or covertly that short campaigns are good you find any significant number of long campaigns remaining or emerging, that alone should say something to their prevalence in 1998.

That said, were such research done I'd be more interested in intended campaign length rather than actual, in order to winnow out those who started with good intentions only to see it collapse three sessions in. (this would also winnow out those who started intending to go short but ended up with something lasting for ages, it happens )

 

[prabe]

Now the best you can do is research today; and if after 20 years of the hobby being told overtly or covertly that short campaigns are good you find any significant number of long campaigns remaining or emerging, that alone should say something to their prevalence in 1998.

That said, were such research done I'd be more interested in intended campaign length rather than actual, in order to winnow out those who started with good intentions only to see it collapse three sessions in. (this would also winnow out those who started intending to go short but ended up with something lasting for ages, it happens )

In this pipe-dream survey, I'd like to see both intended and actual campaign length queried, with some breakdown of why the length turned out to be different than expected in those cases where it did. I just think it'd be enlightening, especially in those cases where things last longer than anticipated.

 

[Lanefan]

Marketing isn't just advertising; it's also product design. Outside of a handful of very, very boring products such as rice, drinking water, and toilet paper, there aren't a whole lot of things that have universal appeal. Changing your product to appeal to one group can and often does mean it becomes less appealing to some other group.

However, overly focusing your product on the people who spend the most money is a very late-90s thing to do. This was conventional B-school wisdom at the time, but most people have moved on. If you focus on the people who spend the most, you're focusing on established customers who already spend a lot of money and not doing anything to attract new ones.

Good analysis.

The comic book industry basically destroyed itself by doing that. What we saw in RPGs and comics in this era is that by becoming hyper-focused on hobby shop enthusiasts, they failed to attract kids and thus create new fans. The reason 4e got made to begin with, and made the way it did, is 3rd edition was failing to attract new customers, and the splat machine ran out of its ability to print money startlingly quickly. WotC knew they had to get new players or die...and from what I read, 4e was quite successful at that. Problem is, it drove off a lot of old players, too!

There's another factor to consider as well.

When 3e came out WotC was still its own company, being run in significant part by gamers for gamers, but with more business sense than TSR ever had.

By the time 4e came out Hasbro was in charge, and looking for a cash cow. 3e wasn't failing to attract new customers - the popularity and staying power of Pathfinder tells us that - it just wasn't attracting them fast enough to suit the suits.

For many well-documented reasons 4e had an initial spurt after which it kinda crashed and burned, and so along came 5e - and here Hasbro/WotC a) did some things right (massive playtest, big-tent approach) and b) got rather lucky in hitting the zeitgeist of the time, resulting in the D&D boom we're still in right now.

And a relevant side note: one of the problems with promoting short campaigns at the system level is that once that campaign is done some groups will move on to other things - including other games or systems. 3e's problem wasn't in attracting new customers, it was in holding on to them for the long term. PF's approach with longer APs and story-based content helped it greatly in this regard, a fact not lost on WotC who have gone a similar route with (most of) the 5e adventure books they've done.

 

[Hussar]

Hang on, the longer AP approach wasn't a Pathfinder thing. It was a 3.5 thing. The first Dungeon AP, Shackled City, came out in March 2003. But, let's not forget, the AP's are meant to be played in a year. Although, for me, that generally meant about a year and a half.

 

[Lanefan]

Hang on, the longer AP approach wasn't a Pathfinder thing. It was a 3.5 thing. The first Dungeon AP, Shackled City, came out in March 2003. But, let's not forget, the AP's are meant to be played in a year. Although, for me, that generally meant about a year and a half.

One could argue the AP approach started all the way back with Dragonlance in 1e; but Pathfinder was the first edition* to really focus on it (and even name itself after the concept!).

* - for these purposes, it's close enough to being a D&D edition as makes no difference.

 

[fearsomepirate]

3e's problems were

a) New players (meaning kids) weren't coming into the market. Older players were just buying more stuff...and getting older. Aging markets die by attrition. Extracting more money out of a declining number of increasingly enthusiastic customers makes you look like a genius for the first couple years, but eventually, the increased revenue per person can't keep up with the declining number of people.

b) Splat churn was initially a cash cow for Hasbro, but was unsustainable over the long term. The fact is, at some point, you've got enough rules. Those first few splats sell like hotcakes, then each one sells less than the previous. 3e originally started with a sustainable business model, but then Hasbro took over and unleashed the splat flood with 3.5.

Odd. I CHOOSE to go to a specialty store to support them, but I don't know a single Barnes & Nobles without a comics/manga section. Granted, there it's the trade paperbacks and hardcovers only, not the staple-bound single issues, but the books of my favourite comics fit better together on a shelf then a stack of flimsy issues. I still get the issues once in a while, but usually willing to wait for the compilation months later.

Eight-year-olds don't choose to go anywhere, a $30-or-more book isn't as much an impulse buy for a parent as a $2.00 newsprint book where Superman punches a skyscraper-sized robot in twain. And that's the problem. The comics industry is now in a death spiral because nobody's come up with a viable plan to get 8-year-olds reading about whether it's going to be a robot or an alien this time.

 

[Hussar]

One could argue the AP approach started all the way back with Dragonlance in 1e; but Pathfinder was the first edition* to really focus on it (and even name itself after the concept!).

* - for these purposes, it's close enough to being a D&D edition as makes no difference.

Well, sure, Paizo traded on its AP's for gaining an audience. But, again, those AP's are meant to be played in a year.

So, again, where is the market for these multi-year campaigns? If there is this huge, untapped segment of the gaming market, why is no one catering to them?