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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6279744" data-attributes="member: 2067">I'd say that all three of these things are inaccurate comparisons for one big reason: D&D rules are not an end product. They are an ingredient.WotC isn't selling a sauce or a soda or a condiment. Or even books. The value that they create is that they make elements that we can use in our D&D games.Which means they're selling to makers. Crafters. The consumer here is not just a passive recipient of the product, but an active participant in creating value for the product. Without a DM, all the rules and all the lore in all the books in all the editions of D&D are abso-lutely worth bupkiss. Every D&D game is an artisinally-crafted hyper-local experience like no other on earth. There isn't one D&D or six D&D's, there is infinite D&D's. So this isn't a mass-market consumer good. This is a wholesale market. This is more akin to the stores where Heinz and Ragu and restaurants go to get their tomatoes and their garlic and their basil. The folks who are selling those people their tomatoes don't tell those customers what they're going to use them for. There isn't necessarily one intent for them -- they're tomatoes, they're versatile, use them how you please. When you buy a tomato from your wholesaler, you use that tomato for whatever end point you want. Without a DM, a bit of lore or a rule from D&D is just a tomato. You can grow these in your own garden and make sauce from them yourselves without that much effort, if you're interested. It's not that special in and of itself. There's a lot of people who can write passable hobbit fanfic.  It is the DM who makes the raw ingredient into something of added value to the end-user (the people involved in any individual game). We make our own sauce. We have home breweries. We add the premium. That's true on a smaller level for all forms of game design. The game is an ingredient, a useful enabler. The play's the thing.</blockquote>

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