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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CarlZog" data-source="post: 1078636" data-attributes="member: 11716">I grew up hooked on Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tolkien. When D&D came around it was a natural.I'm not in the industry, but marketing RPGs to little kids seems precarious business to me. Not because of the old satan worship crap, but because you risk alienating your adult audience. When younger kids started swarming to D&D in the early '80s, TSR responded with a flood of products aimed at the younger market: Action figures, Saturday morning cartoons, dumbed down rulebooks and kiddy boardgames. For a little while, you couldn't turn around without seeing that logo or theme plastered on some new, stupid piece of marketing-driven junk.For those of us in our late teens and early 20s at the time, it was a huge turnoff. Nobody at that age wants to be associated with "kiddy stuff." At the time, I was really mad at TSR for "selling out." I quit buying TSR stuff.Maybe times are different now, and certainly TSR wasn't the brightest bunch of businessmen ever assembled; But it still seems to me that it's difficult to take a brand or a franchise and create parallel lines of products for different age groups without turning off one group or the other.I do agree that kids introduced to gaming (and to fantasy and sci-fi) at an early age will carry those traits to adulthood, and it's certainly in the industry's best interest to cultivate new generations of customers.To the extent that there were any kids (say, under the age of 15) at GenCon this year, they were all playing CCGs and Clix games. It seems to me that the key to creating a new generation of RPG players is to create a means for the YuGiOh kids to come to D&D. Instead however, a lot of companies I saw in Indy seemed to be racing against each other to create more sophisticated adult-themed card and clix games so they could hang on to their kids into adulthood.That leaves it up to players of RPGs to foster the next generation. No doubt everyone here is teaching their own kids (if you've got 'em), but share the joy: Organize games at your kid's schools, church groups, summer camps, community centers etc. It's great way for kids and parents to get an introduction to the game in a comfortable environment.CZ</blockquote>

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