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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5416567" data-attributes="member: 2067">This. This is the thing the Red Box and the DM's Kit and the Essentials Line partially wanted to fix, with varying degrees of success. There's not exactly a clear on-ramp to the game, something you can just pick up and go "This is all you need to play D&D forever. And if it's a lot of fun, you can get this other stuff, too!"The Red Box is a solid attempt (marred mostly just by some less-than-stellar rules info and a lack of expandability). The DM's Kit seems decent (marred mostly just by being available in bits and pieces in other places). The Essentials line works pretty well (marred mostly just by confusion with some existing players who have a strong WTF MAGIC MISSILE ALWAYS DOES DAMAGE?! NO FIGHTER DAILIES?! OH NOES TEH SYMMETRY! OMG THEY ROOND MAH GAME!" vein). There's also problems inherent in the system. 30 levels and 2+ years to see them all (playing on a weekly basis) and the difficulty of setting up a face-to-face game all weave a tangled spell of problems.There's still plenty of room for improvement in this area, though they have made a fairly solid try at the thing, and I do hope they keep it in mind going forward. D&D is only in competition with an MMO in the same way that...I dunno...Yahtzee is. They're really, very different things. Some similar trappings, some definite overlap, but if D&D wanted to compete directly with WoW, they'd rip their videogame licence from the color-blind chimp hands over at Atari and give it to a team that's made a good videogame in the last decade while ditching the tabletop all together. Fire the designers and developers, use their salaries to buy a programmer or two, and kick this 900+ page junk to the curb.But that's not what they're doing.So they certainly believe a tabletop RPG has something unique to offer an audience who could certainly grow beyond its current limits. I don't think the dudes previously at the head of D&D really grokked what that was, if the design of 4e speaks to what they thought it was. Mearls might. He seems pretty sharp. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Videogames are a different beast, and D&D would be well-served paying attention to them only enough to make the occasional polygonal dungeon game, and focusing on making tabletop gaming something that is as fast, easy, and fun to do as it can possibly be (ideally while retaining D&D's expansible, customizable ruleset).</blockquote>

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