I would make it my mission to figure out how to decouple the D&D brand from social stigma.
People are going out in full force to watch movies based on comic books. Iron Man is perfectly mainstream and acceptable. If somebody wants to be an annoying Ironman fanboy, its viewed as that person being a social misfit and not held against Ironman or comic books.
If WoW comes up in a conversation, it is 'acceptable' now days. Your average person 'gets it' when you say that you just like to log in with your friends and kill a couple hours doing something as a group. They don't auto-assume that your weird and have dorrito stained shirts if you play WoW. They don't make that assumption even if they've met one of those dorrito stained wow players, they just assume *that person* has problems in *their* life, and its not a reflection on WoW.
If D&D comes up in conversation, and "D&D" = roleplaying games to your average person, then the person your talking to don't get it. They start picturing that shop rat who roams around looking for someone so he can tell them about his character. So D&D doesn't come up in a conversation, because if it does, you just happen to omit the fact that you've even heard of it before. Because you don't want them applying a mental neckbeard and dorrito stains to you. Even if it is totally unfair, you just accept that life isn't fair.
I think the key to the decoupling would be to get main stream people to think "D&D = specialty board game". People will 'get' that, and frankly, its the aspect of the game that will get main stream people to play it. Trying to sell someone on the idea of pretending to be an elf is never going to be very successful. D&D isn't actually about pretending to be an elf anyways.
If your selling the idea that there is this specialty board game out there where you play as a group and you can select to play as the fighter, the priest, the wizard or the thief, and the goal is to make it through a dungeon where you fight goblins and search for treasure, people can process that.
Once they understand that, then you can sell them on the idea that getting together to play that board game every two weeks is just "friends hanging out playing a board game", and to keep it interesting, they the results of the last game carry over into the next weeks game. All that treasure you collected was put to use, and now your characters are a little better and this time we'll fight harder monsters.
Once they understand that, they'll understand the idea that well, maybe some narration would keep things interesting, and knowing why the fighter or wizard is out in dungeons gathering treasure, and why is there treasure down here in this dungeon... Actually, why are we even in a dungeon at all? This is stupid, we should totally play a game where our pieces are people who are flying an airship across a dark continent littered with the ruins of an ancient giant civilization or fight desert raiders, mutants and the god-kings in their city states.
So I'd tell the designers to take the 4E rules, and to sit down with them and to use them to use the general ideas in those rules to make a *board game* with some game pieces (wizard, fighter, priest rogue), some power cards, some loot cards, and some monsters. The product should NOT be some half baked "this game is kinda lame but its ok because it is only an introduction to this better game where you pretend to be an elf, so that excuses it not being fun, because pretending to be an elf is totally fun", the board game would have to be barrels of fun taken all by itself. If the game does well, put out expansions that add more and more elements of the 4E game system until you just got them buying the books.
I wouldn't put the D&D brand anywhere on the box. I'd just include one of those 4-5 page "we make these other products too" pamphlets in the box.
Then I'd get Walmart to stock the board game.
That is what I would do if I was in charge.
People are going out in full force to watch movies based on comic books. Iron Man is perfectly mainstream and acceptable. If somebody wants to be an annoying Ironman fanboy, its viewed as that person being a social misfit and not held against Ironman or comic books.
If WoW comes up in a conversation, it is 'acceptable' now days. Your average person 'gets it' when you say that you just like to log in with your friends and kill a couple hours doing something as a group. They don't auto-assume that your weird and have dorrito stained shirts if you play WoW. They don't make that assumption even if they've met one of those dorrito stained wow players, they just assume *that person* has problems in *their* life, and its not a reflection on WoW.
If D&D comes up in conversation, and "D&D" = roleplaying games to your average person, then the person your talking to don't get it. They start picturing that shop rat who roams around looking for someone so he can tell them about his character. So D&D doesn't come up in a conversation, because if it does, you just happen to omit the fact that you've even heard of it before. Because you don't want them applying a mental neckbeard and dorrito stains to you. Even if it is totally unfair, you just accept that life isn't fair.
I think the key to the decoupling would be to get main stream people to think "D&D = specialty board game". People will 'get' that, and frankly, its the aspect of the game that will get main stream people to play it. Trying to sell someone on the idea of pretending to be an elf is never going to be very successful. D&D isn't actually about pretending to be an elf anyways.
If your selling the idea that there is this specialty board game out there where you play as a group and you can select to play as the fighter, the priest, the wizard or the thief, and the goal is to make it through a dungeon where you fight goblins and search for treasure, people can process that.
Once they understand that, then you can sell them on the idea that getting together to play that board game every two weeks is just "friends hanging out playing a board game", and to keep it interesting, they the results of the last game carry over into the next weeks game. All that treasure you collected was put to use, and now your characters are a little better and this time we'll fight harder monsters.
Once they understand that, they'll understand the idea that well, maybe some narration would keep things interesting, and knowing why the fighter or wizard is out in dungeons gathering treasure, and why is there treasure down here in this dungeon... Actually, why are we even in a dungeon at all? This is stupid, we should totally play a game where our pieces are people who are flying an airship across a dark continent littered with the ruins of an ancient giant civilization or fight desert raiders, mutants and the god-kings in their city states.
So I'd tell the designers to take the 4E rules, and to sit down with them and to use them to use the general ideas in those rules to make a *board game* with some game pieces (wizard, fighter, priest rogue), some power cards, some loot cards, and some monsters. The product should NOT be some half baked "this game is kinda lame but its ok because it is only an introduction to this better game where you pretend to be an elf, so that excuses it not being fun, because pretending to be an elf is totally fun", the board game would have to be barrels of fun taken all by itself. If the game does well, put out expansions that add more and more elements of the 4E game system until you just got them buying the books.
I wouldn't put the D&D brand anywhere on the box. I'd just include one of those 4-5 page "we make these other products too" pamphlets in the box.
Then I'd get Walmart to stock the board game.
That is what I would do if I was in charge.
