Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5488918" data-attributes="member: 42582">I guess that Encounters is meant to be an element of this - but of course Encounters relies upon a potential D&D-er going to the gameshop and taking part.Maybe the thought is that Magic players will be lured into crossing over - I don't know. Maybe the hope was that the Red Box in toy stores would help, although that strikes me personally as a bit unrealistic. I see the Red Box mostly as a nostalgia sell to those who played back in the day - although maybe on the margins it will prompt some to get their kids playing who otherwise wouldn't.Again, with all this speculation it makes a big difference how wide these margins are - how many MtG players are crossing over, how many retired grognards got their kids involved via the Red Box who wouldn't otherwise have googled D&D, etc, etc. Given WotC's apparent difficulty in forming a stable business strategy, it seems they don't have an especially good handle on it either.I'd be surprised if D&D tanks, but you never know. Pathfinder shows there's some sort of mass market (in the RPG sense of mass market) for a fairly traditional, rules heavy but highly playable fantasy RPG - but from WotC's point of view I have to assume it's just not enough of a market to sustain the sort of operation they're interested in, and/or depends upon delivering a product - popular adventures - that WotC seems unable to produce.When 4e came out, I really thought that WotC must know something that I didn't, and that Ron Edwards had only speculated about, concerning the popular viability of a (at least somewhat) non-traditional game with metagame mechanics built in at ground level (eg Come and Get It) and mechanically structured but non-simulationist conflict resolution mechanics (eg skill challenges, and even healing surges and warlord healing).But between their modules, and Encounters (or at least my impression of it - I've never played in it), and my sense of what comes out in Dragon and Dungeon (again, I'm not a DDI subscriber) they seem to be approaching the marketing and support of the game from precisely the tactical skirmish angle that has caused so much derision of the system.And they produce thematically rich sourcebooks, with example story arcs that give a sense of what a willing group could do with the cosmology given its integration into the game at all levels of PC build, monster design and hence overall scenario design - I'm thinking Plane Above, Underdark, Demonicon - and then do nothing to produce modules or GM advice to help make any of this a reality in play.I've just recently converted the Demon of the Red Grove scenario from the original HeroWars Narrators Book to 4e. Obviusly 4e is a different game from HeroWars/Quest, and the conversion is not exact - I'm setting the scenario in the Feywild, and using a glabrezu remodelled as a level 14 or 15 solo as my demon. And the sequence of skill challenges and then combat that I envisage will be a little different from the original. Nevetheless the conversion is surprisingly straightforward - things like the skill challenge mechanics, for example, make it much easier to see how to realise the pacing of the scenario, then would be the case with a strongly simulationist system like Rolemaster.Why is WotC not producing adventures like this, that really show off what the system can do to deliver a fantasy RPG experience that you can't get so easily with AD&D or 3E - instead of producing hack dungeon crawls or combat fests that are in many ways pale imitations of what 1st ed AD&D in particular was capable of offering?I'm not entirely sure what the point of this rant is, other than that WotC seems to have some sort of dissonance between the game it has actually designed, and the way in which it is trying to grow and market it. If 4e - and hence, perhaps, branded D&D, tanks, will that be because no one liked the game? Or because they didn't present it as they might have? Or just because PF has dominated the field for mainstream fantasy RPGing?Careful - I might hold you to that!</blockquote>

Verification