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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Henry" data-source="post: 3838641" data-attributes="member: 158">It's so hard to tell if a "starter" set will fly in today's market, because it seems like WotC has done it twice, and both times people weren't happy with it.Think about the "German Board Game" craze of the past few years -- each player only has a few to a couple dozen options available to them, allowing hundreds of permutations to encourage play, but without drowning the new player in them. Having it as almost a totally different game based on d20 would seem to make the most sense: The Holmes / Moldvay versions (the Moldvay was EXTREMELY popular, I recall Gary or someone else from TSR at the time telling me) had maybe 20 to 30 choices for the player to make, tops  - ability scores, about 7 classes / races, hit points, basic AC, and spell choices, of which there were a few. That's one of the things I think made its success -- the simplicity that allowed the whole thing to fit in about 64 pages. Such a pared down game would kill off feats, skills, and only giving 1 or 2 powers to each class. I have no idea how complicated the new racial and class abilities are, but I would almost think they have to be stripped to bare minimums to make character creation very simple for such a basic set.THEN you'd hit them with a couple of pages of "IF YOU LIKE THIS GAME..." previewing the hundreds and hundreds of options that the full game gives you. After all, most of those "German Board Games" focus on strategy/gameplay over customization, and I think that's where you can hook people. The biggest draw of RPG's in my opinion has always been in both the strategy and the roleplay, rather than the rules and the character-building. To much character-building or rules to GET to the strategy or roleplay, and it starts to turn the light off for the new players.This is the single biggest thing I can't understand about TSR/WOTC. The biggest sales uptick of all time was back circa-1980, when they happened to have a basic ruleset with full character generation options inside for levels 1-3.Side thought that just occurred to me -- we can't discount the "D&D is Satanic" craze of the early 1980's as part of that draw, either, but I do believe you're right in that it may have been the most popular boxed set of D&D ever.</blockquote>

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