The whole POINT of 3.5 (that everyone is missing)

[MThibault]

Lilke I said, I'm not discounting other motivations. But I am curious as to how many *experienced* gamers bought a 3.0 PHB last month. Six months ago? In the month immediately prior to the announcement of the revision?

Sure the initial spike in sales will, without a doubt, be due to the large number of existing players upgrading (or just ensuring the completeness of their collection). But next year, that group will be in the minority and new players will be the majority of customers purchasing the core books.

Marketing aside (and what is that to me, really?) the products themselves are probably aimed more at new players than existing players. If they aren't, then that is a bigger blunder than making Bear's Endurance 1 min/level. If they don't make the core rules accessible to (not necessarily easy for) new players then they will have lost a repeat customer. Even without a marketing campaign, a set of core rules that lowers the barrier to entry of the hobby will increase the market over the short and long term.

Now, how much of the motivation was to make clearer, more balanced rules, and how much was to make "value added" (quotation marks used advisedly) to encourage existing players to upgrade, none of us really can say? I'm not convinced that it really matters one way or the other. I'll either use revisions or not depending on what I think is an improvement and what isn't. New players, by and large, have a better set of books from which to learn the game. That counts for something.

Cheers

 

[nute]

Would they have bought 3.0 if 3.5 had never come out? I say yes. It's what would have been there, and I seriously doubt it's the .5 that sold them on the idea to finally pick up D&D. So WotC would have made the same sale, without the expense of producing a new "edition". No, what is relevant, to me, is the marketing of the 3.5 books to those who have the 3.0 books. And I won't rewrite my argument, but I view it as still accurate.

See, I sort of agree. To the casual eye, there's not a lot of difference between the two books, especially if you haven't seen them before. Brown book with a gold thingy on the cover.

However, gaming stores will be displaying it as "NEW!", more than likely - since that sells better. People are more likely to buy something when there's a marketing campaign going on, as there is for 3.5. It's easier to drum up interest in a new product (which 3.5 basically is, even if 'new content' is debatable) than it is to renew interest in an established product.

I think WotC's done a good job of marketing the 3.5 books to the established gamers as well. They've made it a point to say "Your old stuff ISN'T worthless! Here, we'll even give you the updates for FREE!"

 

[Nifft]

Nute, good point! It's a safe bet that most "casual newbies" will prefer an updated version with all the Errata and fixes in it, than buying 3.0 and hearing, "Now, go to this website and mark up your shiny new book with these corrections..."

-- Nifft

 

[francisca]

Re: Re: Re: The whole POINT of 3.5 (that everyone is missing)

Mostly a conversational quirk that two of my techie-oriented roommates share.

"How much was the phone bill again?"
"$BIGNUM."
"And with our $20 credit?"
"Still $BIGNUM."
"Bogus."

Probably a descendant of $MAXINT, no?

 

[Breakdaddy]

I think Emiricol is trolling the troll, hijacking the thread, nerfing the forums, being a chat munchkin and 3.5eing the vernacular.

 

[Nifft]

Re: Re: Re: Re: The whole POINT of 3.5 (that everyone is missing)

$MAXINT

$FOO just means that FOO is a variable in a certain language -- Perl, UNIX shell script, awk, PHP, etc.

-- Nifft, programmer

 

[Emiricol]

I think Emiricol is trolling the troll, hijacking the thread, nerfing the forums, being a chat munchkin and 3.5eing the vernacular.

Other than my original post, everything I've said has been in reply to people talking to me

And yes, I trolled the troll. *Sings, "I'm a trollllll man... dudududu da dududu*