D&D General Why grognards still matter

[Lanefan]

The MCU started because Disney took Iron Man, a C-List hero barely anyone cared about, and made a good movie with him.

Was Disney even involved with the MCU at that point?

 

[Chaosmancer]

I think whales are probably more important.

Not sure what % of whales are grognards vs newer players who are super keen and willing to spend $$$$$

I doubt it. They don't release enough books for that, unless the whales are the ones purchasing the super-niche and expensive things. Like, are we counting the people who buy the $500 giant Tiamat mini and does WoTC get a cut of that? Even if so... that has nothing to do with the rules of the game. Someone playing 2e is just as likely to want a cool Tiamat mini as someone playing 5e24

 

[Hex08]

Was Disney even involved with the MCU at that point?

Nope

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think whales are probably more important.

Not sure what % of whales are grognards vs newer players who are super keen and willing to spend $$$$$

The problem is whales in D&D can't "go big".

Like, with MtG, a whale can spend $2000 or more on card packs easily, maybe far more, just chasing cards and so on.

With D&D, you can buy pretty much all the books that come out in a year for a few hundred dollars. And then what? There's not much else official to spend money on, just merch and minis, and even those there's only so much.

This is partly why they want to have the 3D VTT with MTX, so they can get whales who can spend much, much large amounts of money.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To nitpick the definitions, I was given to understand that after 1979 or maybe 1980, they wouldn't have been Gen X.

Yes...? I don't understand what your nitpick is, here. In 1977, not all Gen Xers had been born yet. That's what I said.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The guy lays out a harsh truth. The most hardcore of fans? They don't have good ideas for moving a franchise forward. They just want more of the same thing they have gotten in the past, which isn't a recipe for success. Because every actually successful project that becomes beloved alters something, it goes in a new direction, it changes our perspective on the product.

It turns out, appeasing fans via imitation and trying to infinitely drag out the stuff they liked before, is almost always less successful than a well-executed new vision. Even if you execute that imitation and nigh-infinite extension really well, it just wears out eventually.

It's one of the reasons why I have always, always, always hated the "we need to make magic feel magical again" argument, because it's fundamentally unsound. The reason magic felt magical in the 80s is because the people who want to see that now were kids who didn't know the spell list back to front, who couldn't name the monster manual in alphabetic order by clade and by raw name, who didn't know the statistics of three quarters of all magic items, etc. Healthy ignorance--the ignorance of the uninitiated, which all people necessarily have when they start out!--was the single biggest factor in magic "feeling magical", and no amount of rules trickery or trying to take magical things away from players or making magic painful and costly, or any other technique you might use, can ever replace that awestruck feeling of discovery and exploration as you learn what's in the books.

In order to make D&D magic feel magical again, it has to either:

Jettison all the classic spells and magic items for totally different things (which the folks who want "magic to feel magical again" will never accept)
Abandon the way D&D approaches magic in general and replace it with something new (which will never be acceptable in a mainline D&D game, we've already seen that proven)
Stop having magic be systematized at all, and instead express magic in a freeform but still balanced way (which no D&D design team would ever willingly do because it's a design nightmare and far, far too likely to fail)

Failing that? We will never have magic that "feels magical" again, because the magical-feeling-ness was bound up in not knowing how magic worked. Once you know the rules, they aren't magical anymore, they're systematic. So you either need to keep the base system and jettison all the details (path 1), or you need to replace the base system with a radically different base system (which fans have proven they're unwilling to accept even a minor rewrite of that system), or you need to abandon the idea of having a "system" at all (which the designers are, quite reasonably, unwilling to do).

 

[AnotherGuy]

The MCU started because Disney took Iron Man, a C-List hero barely anyone cared about, and made a good movie with him.

Yeah that's a strawman.

Who did hardcore Marvel fans want to see on the big screen? The Fantastic Four. Who has never had a good movie?

So by that metric Ramey should have not done Spidey as there were was a Spidey movie prior.
We are in the era of remakes, alternate timelines, reboots. And it is not just in Marvel...we are constantly remaking/rebooting old movies.

The Fantastic Four. Spider-Man had some good movies with the Ramey movies (which to my knowledge were the first major Spider-Man films), and Spider-man is huge... but how did the Amazing Spider-Man movies do? And what is the most popular Spider-Man movie franchise out there right now? Spider-Verse, who takes Miles Morales, who is not someone that hardcore marvel fans were advocating for.

Do you really want to compare the latest slew of Marvel movie failures to Mike Morales alone and use that as your metric?

The guy lays out a harsh truth. The most hardcore of fans? They don't have good ideas for moving a franchise forward. They just want more of the same thing they have gotten in the past, which isn't a recipe for success. Because every actually successful project that becomes beloved alters something, it goes in a new direction, it changes our perspective on the product.

Change is fine. I'm not advocating for no innovativeness. You have me mistaken with someone else.

EDIT: As an example, Marvel characters died. That certainly would usher a change.

 

[Alzrius]

Yes...? I don't understand what your nitpick is, here. In 1977, not all Gen Xers had been born yet. That's what I said.

The nitpick is that you said there were "six more years' worth" of Gen Xers waiting to be born in 1977...which would mean that there were Gen Xers being born up until 1983, even though by then they would have been Millennials and not Gen Xers.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yeah that's a strawman.

Is it? Iron Man has long been an Avenger, but he was hardly the top-flight, everyone-loves-him character that he became because of Mr. Downey's performance. As a film, Iron Man definitely does do some of this thing, and it's a pattern you see in plenty of other entertainment spaces. Remember when we had the era of (alleged) "WoW-killer" MMOs? Not a single one of them succeeded. The thing that finally took WoW down a peg, that finally got people into another game...was WoW itself failing to deliver. From what I've heard, they've turned the ship around and the fans are largely hopeful again (I made my peace with WoW long ago), but it's going to take more than two successful expansions to win back the goodwill they lost.

Or consider Watchmen. Not the film--the "graphic novel". Watchmen is a good story (albeit not for the reasons many of its fanchildren love it!), but it and a couple of other similar comic stories from around that time (such as God Loves, Man Kills) almost directly inspired the so-called "Dark Age" of comics, where everyone had grim and gritty reboots and all the new heroes had edgier-than-thou sobriquets like Deathbloom or Bloodnyte or whatever with kriaytyve spellyng and outfits that showed lots of T&A and used guns and knives and probably did drugs etc., etc., etc.

It's not a strawman to say that it's quite common to see a popular and well-made thing that worked, and then a whole passel of imitators came along, trying to distill out only the secret sauce without really understanding or putting in the necessary effort. It's no guarantee, but it certainly isn't uncommon either. Further, many sequels suffer tremendously from what various groups (I first encountered it in music) call "sophomore syndrome/slump", where a first attempt does incredibly well and a second attempt...doesn't. Consider the different responses to Avatar: the Last Airbender and Avatar: the Legend of Korra. LoK was actually okay, though it made a number of stumbles and not all of them can be blamed on executive meddling. (Seriously, deleting Korra's past-life connections--literally forcing a shattering of spiritual traditions, a forgetting of one's past and where one came from, in order to integrate into modern society!!--was....not a good look and not well-handled. To say nothing of its piss-poor handling of spirits...but I digress.)

Point being: True sequels are hard. Merely following the outline of a previous successful work is even harder, and often fails...but people keep trying anyway.

So by that metric Ramey should have not done Spidey as there were was a Spidey movie prior.

I....think you are misunderstanding. There wasn't one. Raimi (not "Ramey") directed the first Spider-Man film in over 20 years. And, like Iron Man, it got two sequels and then petered out (no pun intended.)

We are in the era of remakes, alternate timelines, reboots. And it is not just in Marvel...we are constantly remaking/rebooting old movies.

Oh, believe me, I'm quite well aware. It's usually my generation they're trying to pander to with these things. I call it "Instant Nostalgia"; we're getting "live-action remakes" of animated films that, in some cases, aren't even a decade old. And for most of them, the fact that it's live-action is literally the only thing going for them.

Do you really want to compare the latest slew of Marvel movie failures to Mike Morales alone and use that as your metric?

I mean...I don't think that's that far off-base? There's a reasonable thesis there. Whether it was well-defended is a different question, but "taking a somewhat obscure character and making a good film about them" has some teeth to it. I'd want to more carefully analyze the sample set, to be sure, but...well, I mean, I used ATLA and TLK for a reason, ATLA definitely was a risky and fairly experimental concept but it is still beloved and cited frequently, while TLK (for a variety of reasons, as noted above) is...not as well-received.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Is it? Iron Man has long been an Avenger, but he was hardly the top-flight, everyone-loves-him character that he became because of Mr. Downey's performance.

The fact that Iron Man is not top-flight as you say and that they went with him as the spear point of the Marvel Universe is not a case against hardcore fans.
In the spirit of this thread, particularly the OP, I feel that much like grognards were analysed, one could do the same with hardcore fans, but not necessarily by age. We shouldn't paint hardcore fans as some sort of silly vile monolith so we can throw strawmen after strawmen against them.

As a film, Iron Man definitely does do some of this thing, and it's a pattern you see in plenty of other entertainment spaces. Remember when we had the era of (alleged) "WoW-killer" MMOs? Not a single one of them succeeded. The thing that finally took WoW down a peg, that finally got people into another game...was WoW itself failing to deliver. From what I've heard, they've turned the ship around and the fans are largely hopeful again (I made my peace with WoW long ago), but it's going to take more than two successful expansions to win back the goodwill they lost.

I seem to be missing the point you are trying to make here with regards to hardcore fans.

Point being: True sequels are hard. Merely following the outline of a previous successful work is even harder, and often fails...but people keep trying anyway.

On this we agree.

I....think you are misunderstanding. There wasn't one. Raimi (not "Ramey") directed the first Spider-Man film in over 20 years. And, like Iron Man, it got two sequels and then petered out (no pun intended.)

Thank you, the previous poster used Ramey and it looked off to me, and I forgot to google the right spelling. Sure, it petered out, but to no fault of the fanbase, hardcore or otherwise IMO ofcourse.

I mean...I don't think that's that far off-base? There's a reasonable thesis there. Whether it was well-defended is a different question, but "taking a somewhat obscure character and making a good film about them" has some teeth to it. I'd want to more carefully analyze the sample set, to be sure, but...well, I mean, I used ATLA and TLK for a reason, ATLA definitely was a risky and fairly experimental concept but it is still beloved and cited frequently, while TLK (for a variety of reasons, as noted above) is...not as well-received.

Bold emphasis mine.
That is always the best, whether it be an obscure character or obscure actor, it is very satisfying when something great is created and gets that recognition.
I feel like the 5% hardcore fans on the one side and the 5% change for the sake of change on the other side are the worst people to cater to.
There is a large middle-ground hardcore fanbase which wants these films to succeed because they want these characters that they care about (well-known or obscure) to be celebrated at large. Despite missteps (as I saw them) with the Marvel Netflix shows, I was a fan of those and given Disney's current track record I'm worried how they are going to handle DD. I mean that 3rd season of DD was a dream. I loved the direction they were going with Luke Cage and Iron Fist. Personally I remember I didn't quite enjoy Punisher s2 (need to watch it again) and I have still to watch s3 of Jessica Jones.