D&D 5E Second guessing WOTC

[Iosue]

Though I agree it's still odd that they recycled the cover art so many times.

It's something of a call back to the TSR box sets, when the art on the covers of the interior books was the same as on the box.

 

[dd.stevenson]

It's something of a call back to the TSR box sets, when the art on the covers of the interior books was the same as on the box.

Yeah, I just don't think new players are going to be impressed by that mode of homage.

 

[doctorhook]

Probably not. This is just my opinion, but WotC don't seem to understand that 'quickplay' or 'essential' rules should be your basic core mechanics that people can use to get familiar with the system before they go and buy the full version. WotC can't seem to stop themselves from also revising rules in a 'quicklplay' set so you end up with a kind of half-way revised version. Look at the 'Essentials' debacle. To this day, I have no idea what Essentials was trying to accomplish.

Essentials was an attempt to do a few things: 1) Give potential players a lower price-point option to buy into D&D; 2) Appeal to lapsed gamers by providing new "old school-style" options for existing classes; 3) Provide an always-in-print standard set of core products that incorporated past revisions to 4E's rules. There are a few good angles to criticize Essentials, but it's tough to say whether its failure was more a reflection of the flaws with Essentials or of the broader failure of 4E.

As for your comments about WotC and starter sets: I'm not convinced you're even talking about 5E, because the 5E Starter Set uses precisely the same rules as the rest of 5E.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

The comparison is a bit light on the game system side, IMHO. The "testers" focus very much on the physical product itself and not on what it delivers. I don't own either of these products, so I'm pretty much guessing here, but thinking back to 3.5 all the minutiae of the rules with feats and AoO and all that might be a tad much for absolute beginners.

What I learn from the text is that beginners seem to be more attracted to play by the Pathfinder box, which is a very good and important thing.

 

[Morrus]

I don't have the Pathfinder Beginner Box to compare it with, but, yeah, a more expensive boxed set is going to have more stuff in it; and folks not paying for it themselves are likely to prefer a more expensive product with more stuff in it. The effective $12 price point is quite a killer here, though, I think. For some 11 year old kid spending his allowance, that price point has gotta be an attractive offer.

That's only part of the story, of course. What's more important is what happens once they start playing. Which makes it easier for a DM or GM to jump in and run an adventure? Which does a better job of teaching players the rules while having fun, and making them want more?

 

[Gargoyle]

I'm with the apples and oranges crowd here. The products are very different in scope, and with such a small sample size it's sort of meaningless.

However, as long as you remember it's not a scientific comparison and treat it as an anecdote it's not completely worthless. WotC could have chosen a more expensive and more complete starter set with more wow factor that would appeal to some people that have the money to spend. And it's a sign that Pathfinder is good quality stuff.

That's good. I'm not interested in PF, but I like competition and hope it continues.

But if you point to this as some sort of failure on the part of the D&D starter set, I think that's misleading. All it really means is that it's a good time to be a gamer.

 

[fjw70]

What specifically did they like about the BB? Was it just the map and tokens? Or was it the character creation rules being in it?

 

[Dungeoneer]

From the blog post:

While I thought that the addition of the character generation rules for free as a download was a good move on the part of D&D, I was almost universally disagreed with by the beginners, all of which were much happier to have a book in their hands to flip through and considered the lack of said rules to look through in the box to be a dreadful larceny.

I shall not repeat the exact commentary given, but it was spirited...


While they did do the character generation in the end with a printed out version of the rules, they did say that they would have found it far more tedious to have to do it by screen.

The takeaway here is not that beginners want a more expensive starter box, but that they expect that everything they need to play the game actually be in the box.

And yeah, it's hard to fault them for that.

A second takeaway is that, as the saying goes, "you only get one chance to make a first impression." Sounds like the PF beginner box does a great job of filling its pages with colorful art that gets people excited and inspired. There is a lot to be said for this approach over the more bare-bones one, even if it costs more.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

The Starter Set (apparently) hits what WotC was aiming at; it doesn't hit the target I'd hoped they'd aim at.

It does provide a way to introduce new players to the game quickly, and push them toward the PHB.

I was hoping that, like the original Basic Set, it would provide a complete and self-contained game for low levels. It doesn't do that, even with the free pdf, since the Basic Rules are incomplete. My Adventures in the East Mark Red Box Kickstarter, which arrived the day after the Starter Set, was a more complete and on-target product against my expectations than the Starter Set.

That does allow WotC to offer a "full" Basic Set at some point in the future though that could be more along the lines of the Pathfinder product. It's the difference between having a complete set of rules available at release and a partial set.

 

[Morrus]

From the blog post:


The takeaway here is not that beginners want a more expensive starter box, but that they expect that everything they need to play the game actually be in the box.

And yeah, it's hard to fault them for that.

A second takeaway is that, as the saying goes, "you only get one chance to make a first impression." Sounds like the PF beginner box does a great job of filling its pages with colorful art that gets people excited and inspired. There is a lot to be said for this approach over the more bare-bones one, even if it costs more.

The saying's wrong. WotC gets a couple of hundred thousand chances to make a first impression!