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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ipissimus" data-source="post: 4027627" data-attributes="member: 41514">This is hard because I see the marketing people trying to do what I think they should be doing but maybe not going far enough.See, I have a problem with the Wizards Presents books. First up, they're advertizing pure and simple. When my group heard about the book, we were interested in what it has to say but none of us really wanted to pay full price for something that will be essentially useless after July. So we split the cost and are sharing the book. Since we've got it, we've found that we're really not interested in Worlds and Monsters, so we're passing that one over. After all, we don't pay for movie trailers, we pay enough for the movie. And, after July, it'll be useless and probably end up in the trash.But this is hard because I have to recognize that I'm not in their target market. I'll buy the 4E core books as a given, my birthday's around then anyway. I like what I see in the sneak peeks on the site but I'm debating whether or not to subscribe. It's slightly cheaper than Dungeon and Dragon was but the magazines had several benefits. One, I could read them in bed. Two, I could choose not to buy an issue that I didn't like and thus save my money. With a Gleemax account I have to accept all the fluff articles and pages of discorse on the history of DnD every anniversary and the months were the articles aren't really very interesting... yes, I know they can't all be winners, but with an online subscription I can't 'vote with my wallet'. Maybe the MMO players are desensitized to the monthly fees, but they are one of the reasons I don't play MMOs (the major ones are time and I prefer having friends around).As I said, I like the sneak peeks, I just wish they'd let us in behind the whys a bit more, maybe explain their thinking a bit better. Races and Classes did this a little but the 'net articles are a little on the confusing side. Letting us in and explaining why they felt they had to do things this way, I think, would help avoid alot of the kneejerk reactions. For example, the Spellplague. We know the fluff, but where's the dev explaining why he chose to do it that way? Another movie example, people love director's commentaries (thanks to DVDs). What was the basis of that design decision?Contrary to popular belief, audiences do not have the mentality of 8 year olds. We understand the concepts behind games design, we understand that compromises sometimes have to be made. As it is, we're getting fragments of the picture without any explaination of how they fit into the big picture, cast adrift and left to draw our own conclusions. As a result, alot of people's first feelings seem to be "AAARGH! They're destroying the game!" And they might well be, we don't have enough information to say that they're not definitively.I can understand the doubters, it's only natural. I'm trying to maintain a healthy skepticism and detachment but it's hard. It seems strange to me when i think about it, but playing DnD defines part of my identity as much as my choice of music or reading material. It's my chosen form of entertainment, heck I grew up playing DnD, so it helped define major parts of my life. So how can I, or any of you who have similar experiences, detach myself?To take the Spellplague as an example, even a paragraph saying something along the lines of: "Yes, we know this is jarring. We know that alot of you have emotional attachment to the setting as it has evolved over 20 years, after all we've worked hard developing that emotional attachment that you feel. But we felt we needed the Spellplague for these reasons:" might have gone down better. An acknowledgement of the audence rather than a faceless corporate fiat.They don't have to give us crunch or examples necessarily. Just confide in us a little bit on the whys. People will complain for sure, but it's not our job to make 4E. In the end, we don't know all the facts, we don't really know what it's like working inside WOTC (well, alot of us), the pressures. I have an inkling because of my work, but my work's a separate field.-sigh- I hope I'm making sense.</blockquote>

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