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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Slander" data-source="post: 4302006" data-attributes="member: 1593">Has there been any other confirmation of the last comment from that post? :"WOTC has let us retailers know that the launch of 4E is aimed at veteran gamers.New players will be targeted in a separate marketing campaign in the fall, likely coinciding with the new starter game in November."Having the intro primer come later may not be a bad thing. Assuming the primer doesn't have different rules, only less rules, I think it makes sense to have a strong base of happy veterans players available with whom new players can game. In this day and age, I personally think large majority of new players are going to come to the game through the veterans, whether directly ("Hey, guy, you wanna try out this new game") or vicariously (through reviews and comments). I'd think only a small portion of new players would arrive by browsing the shelves at B&N, seeing the PHB cover and thinking "Hmm, this looks interesting. Let me try this." In this context, positive word-of-mouth buzz is worth far more than any artificial marketing buzz they could pay for.Therefore, the goal of the initial release was to get a respectable, happy veteran player base which could generate that buzz. If the PHB was a stripped down version of its current form, I think a lot more of the "veterans" would have been PO-ed. As it is, there are already complaints from some veterans of DnD being "dumbed down" or what have you. My personal observation has been there is more positive buzz than negative (for whatever that's worth), which may not have been the case with an even more simplified version. In that respect, the release was a success.But, and this is a big but, they have to deliver on a simplified, accessable, and compatible primer (no "one-off" rules in the primer that don't apply to the real game). And Jeff is right, in the past 20 years, there has not been an especially successful primer for new players. And to be honest, I'm not sure they will be successful this time around either. Here's hoping I'm wrong ...</blockquote>

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