Why Are Groot and Old Spice at My Table?

So it's finally come to this: Old Spice recently made a class for Pathfinder. This isn't the first time a brand has created a class for D&D and it won't be the last, but it says a lot about gamers -- and the brand -- in how we react to these ads.

[h=3]I Can't Believe I'm Writing About Old Spice[/h]Old Spice's quirky brand has always targeted young men and it's clear the marketers at the company thought they would experiment by using a relatively low-key approach with geek media. They released a class for Pathfinder on Twtter:

Download this new Old Spice Gentleman Class for the greatest role playing game of all time, which we cannot mention for legal reasons, to fulfill that fantasy dream you have always had since reading this post. OS_Gentleman Class_Public.pdf

And yes, it's the same team who brought you the Old Spice commercials:

The group of us who write those commercials, is the same group who made this class, and is the same group that is writing you right now. So thanks!

Reactions were mixed. Some folks were excited that a big brand took notice. Some folks were concerned that a big brand created something for Pathfinder without using the Open Game License but similar trade dress. And some folks just hoped that more gamers would use deodorant.

This isn't the first time a brand tried to make a play to D&D gamers using a class, however. But unlike this largely anonymous effort, it was led by two people with strong connections to D&D.
[h=3]I Am Groot?[/h]Matt Mercer, voice actor, gamer, and DM for the web series Critical Role, created a witch hunter class for Fifth Edition D&D to help promote Fast & Furious actor Vin Diesel's (he's also the voice of Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy) movie, Witch Hunter:

As a Halloween gift to all the Critters, D&D players, and generally awesome people out there, I release into the wild my custom Dungeon & Dragons 5th Edition class, the Witch Hunter! This was inspired by both my love of the The Witcher series of books and games, and the custom character I made for Vin Diesel in preparation for our D&Diesel game session to promote his upcoming film The Last Witch Hunter.

Vin Diesel played a variant of this class in a game with Mercer. He even recorded a video about it. In fact, Vin Diesel's favorite D&D character was Melkor, a witch hunter, which was the inspiration for the movie:

...I met with a writer name Cory Goodman and we started talking. Someone put us together because he was a D&D player. [Afterwards, Cory] went off to write a whole film around my character Melkor. Just the very fact that I”d be playing a witch hunter speaks to how nerdy I was about the game, how committed I was to D&D because witch hunter [wasn”t a] class by TSR at the time. It was a character that you could get from a third party book of characters called The Arcanum. There were a few characters that started there that eventually Dungeons and Dragons took over; one of those characters was a witch hunter.

Like the gentleman class, the witch hunter class mimiced D&D's trade dress but did not use the Open Game License when it was released. So why are gamers reacting differently to the two approaches?
[h=3]Hiding Behind a Screen[/h]The big difference is identity. Generally speaking, most consumers prefer a brand to engage them as people, not as faceless brands. As digital marketing company Pure360 puts it:

The answer is very simple – be human. Humans make mistakes, they’re vulnerable, they learn and try. They don’t get things right all the time but most people’s hearts are in the right place. We connect with vulnerability – it strikes us at our heart because we’re human and we can’t resist connecting with another human – it’s what makes us tick. As a marketer the best thing you can do for your brand is to put faces, names and fallibility to it.

Vin Diesel has always been up front about being a geek-at-heart--he penned the introduction to the 30th Anniversary of D&D book, 30 Years of Adventure. Matt Mercer is a huge advocate for geekdom in general. They created a class that takes the topic seriously and although it's called "witch hunter" there's no direct link to Vin Diesel's movie. Just as importantly, the class debuted on Geek & Sundry, a D&D-friendly site.

Old Spice, on the other hand, released its class on Twitter with no one's name attached to it. Old Spice got enough feedback that they made a follow-up post, relaunching the class with Paizo's blessing and an OGL declaration:

We heard your advice, felt its power in our heart chambers and made some tweaks. We think this plays better. Also, thank you @paizo for the use of Pathfinder®, and guidance to make this for real. Here it is: http://www.OldSpiceGentlemanClass.com

Is one approach better than the other? In the end it doesn't really matter -- tabletop gamers are now a sufficiently large demographic that brands are targeting them. The fact that we're discussing it at all means Old Spice was successful. And that means there will be more co-branded D&D content in the near future. Brace yourselves.

 

[Shasarak]

I think I need to play this class if for no other reason then to get the chance to marry one of the DMs monsters.

 

[Eltab]

I thought the class was tongue-in-cheek, was written to be funny, it vaguely reminded me of the early James Bond movies ... and it would be totally unplayable at the table.

I'm just glad Old Spice came up with the idea before Axe did.
We could have had a class of characters who are 'edgy' (read: behave badly) AND smell bad doing it.