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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8795198" data-attributes="member: 6790260">That was a lot of words to make a mostly circular argument."The DMG isn't supposed to teach people to play because the DMG isn't supposed to teach people to play."You've made the assertion. The only even moderately meaningful argument you've made that it is true is that D&D is special because it's big, and being big means it doesn't have to teach people anything, it can rely on others to do that for it. This is a rather poor argument, and there's a lovely demonstration of exactly why this is a flawed approach in a parallel medium: MMORPGs.See, for a long time, there wasn't a single biggest MMO. Many contenders lay claim to the title of "first MMO," including Neverwinter Nights, Ultima Online, EverQuest, and even Meridian 59 (a game most folks have never heard of today.) But in those wild and wooly early years, each game was catering to some subset of interested gamers. EverQuest and Ultima Online could exist simultaneously because they offered qualitatively different experiences without strictly stepping on one another's toes. This left a metastable environment where new options could arise and try to corner a new niche in the space.Then everything changed when the World of Warcraft Nation attacked.WoW took the MMO community and the wider gaming landscape by storm. A big game from a respected company, with big money. It conquered the MMO space. To succeed as an MMO, you had to either beat WoW at its own game (make a "WoW killer"), or you had to reinvent the wheel...and investors were leery of risky experiments on something as expensive as an MMO. Everything became WoW clones, and WoW reigned supreme.Compared to the games of its day, WoW made some steps to ease onboarding...but has done very little since then. For a while, yes, its sheer weight could overcome this issue. But this forced players to rely on third-party addons, and created a culture of elitism and even snobbery; it is worth noting that the current game director, Ion Hazzikostas, got his start with WoW as the raid leader of a guild...called "Elitist Jerks." It may have been tongue-in-cheek, but the irony has worn off and a rather sad sincerity has replaced it.Creating a DMG that is only and exclusively a "reference" manual, that has and wants no part of actually teaching, is setting yourself up for failure. It is making the exact same presumptions that have led to numerous failures throughout history: it is the presumption that your work is too big to fail.It can work. WoW was king of the hill for over a decade. But it never works forever. It is much, much better--a long-term investment, rather than a short-term convenience--to prioritize the onboarding process and providing help to the new blood. Forcing the new blood to jump through extra hoops and pay extra money for the privilege of getting to actually be taught how to do things is not only a poor growth strategy, it is a poor maintenance strategy even if you want to just idle in place. Financial success is a Red Queen's race: you must run as fast as you can just to keep up; if you want to advance, you must run at least twice as fast as that.</blockquote>

Verification