What WOTC can do to spur interest in the game..

[RolandOfGilead]

Ok folks,
It's late, I'm grandstanding, and I think I have an idea.
The way to make D&D breakthrough to a larger market is to make
it more visual. and make it easy. By that, I mean WOTC should buy a TON of mini molds, and make miniatures out of plastic, and just give them away until everyone's got a housefull. Happy meals, grand openings, just GIVE THE things away. You can make them cheesy really - just has to look good enough to entertain a 10 year old really. While they're at it.. they should give away some dwarven forge - style dungeon construction kits.

To me, D&D is, has been, and always will be, my first and favorite BOARD game. I mean when you were a kid, playing for the first 30 times or so, you didnt care about your characters MOTIVATION!
You wanted to see him in living 3d, cool huh? and you wanted your 1st level basic wizard to get a wand of fireballs so he could waste that carrion crawler that had been terrorizing first level parties throughout the known world.
Make it cheap -- give it away -- and give away ALOT of it. thats my formula. That will sell books for 29.95. and then, the true devotees can buy REAL mini's if they want. I think they almost realized this with the counters they started giving in dungeon.. but it can be done better. BIGGER.

 

[RolandOfGilead]

O come on! This deserves a reply! hehehe.

 

[Kamard]

Remember Heroquest or Warhammer Quest?

I just want a ton of minis of orcs, goblins, gnolls, ogres. etc.

 

[RolandOfGilead]

I mean, so long as it looked better than a quarter or a penny, or some paper token, you'd love it right?

And don't you think KIDS would really like the game better?
I think it needs to be marketed to both audiences for the game to grow

 

[LostSoul]

If they could somehow make it dangerous and sexy, they'd have it made. But I don't know if that's possible - other than tying D&D to cults and such.

 

[Buttercup]

Dunno, Roland. I don't use minis in my games, and have no interest in them. This marketing campaign wouldn't ifnluence me, or my players in the slightest.

The problem is that the audience for 3E is so vast that it isn't as homogenous as it used to be.

 

[Alzrius]

Remember Heroquest

Hero Quest was what got me into D&D. My friend got it for Christmas and wouldn't let me look through the thing (I didn't understand at the time that not everyone was supposed to read the rulebooks since I had never played an RPG before). I saw enough to be hooked though, and a bit of research later, I bought a basic D&D boxed set. It was all downhill from there.

 

[Zappo]

Hey, probably yes. But WotC's intended target for D&D are not kiddies, it's more like late teenagers/early twenties. They know enough about marketing not to miss the target. I don't use minis since I was 15, and even then, I hardly cared about whether they looked any better than a coin, they were mostly for positioning.

 

[Ranger REG]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that Wizards make their own miniatures, but contract a manufacturer to create them.

Having said that, I don't mind seeing plastic-molded "Little Green Army Orcs & Elves" if parent company Hasbro woud allow it.

 

[RSKennan]

Damn straight! I was thinking about starting a thread on how the game(s) could be expanded into new audiences, like WW, Palladium, and others have done. If RolandofGilead doesn't mind, maybe we could come up with a few more ideas like his? I was thinking that actively putting out legal PDFs or giving away cheap prints of a (hypothetical) game's Core rules might develop an audience, at which point a company could sell these people the suppliments at a profit. Any other ideas?