Lago's Kickass D&D-Book Marketing Strategy!

[hogarth]

Why didn't TSR and 4E release their Boxed Sets for the edition right at the beginning of the edition's lifespan?

Because RPG boxed sets just don't sell very well. Or at least they haven't sold very well since 1985 or so. (Counterexamples are welcome.)

Why are they releasing a boxed set now? Beats me. Maybe they figure a boxed set makes a better Christmas present.

[Meikle641]

Ghostbusters? For the ectoplasm?

Honestly, the book with the most in common with Ghostbusters is Ghostwalk. Ectoplasm all over the damn place.

Maybe some joke about spoonbending or New Age crap would fit better, heh.

[Blasted]

Why didn't TSR and 4E release their Boxed Sets for the edition right at the beginning of the edition's lifespan?

Because RPG boxed sets just don't sell very well. Or at least they haven't sold very well since 1985 or so. (Counterexamples are welcome.)

Why are they releasing a boxed set now? Beats me. Maybe they figure a boxed set makes a better Christmas present.

I think a boxed set has some life at the beginning of the cycle when everyone's going to buy all of the rulebooks again anyhow.
It makes for a simple proposition "Buy this box" rather than "Buy this book and this book and maybe this book"
I can't think of any RPGs with boxed sets off the top of my head, I think that this is because it's only applicable where you can replace "buy this and this and this" with "buy this". Not many RPGs have multiple books required to start playing the game.

[Orca]

The main reason to do a boxed set - aside from just doing something that the last marketing guy didn't, which is still my bet - is so you can drop everything that a new roleplayer might want to start with.

Dice, an adventure, maybe some minis, maybe these days a CD with some multimedia or character generator on it.

IMO you could do this at the start of an edition as easily as at the end of one.

[Lago PARANOIA]

IMO you could do this at the start of an edition as easily as at the end of one.

Well, that's my point. Why didn't 4E do this at the beginning of the edition instead of the end?

[hogarth]

Not many RPGs have multiple books required to start playing the game.

Indeed. For example, in 4E D&D, most players only require the Player's Handbook to start playing.

Why didn't 4E do this at the beginning of the edition instead of the end?

Because $104.95 (retail) for a game would give people sticker shock? What I don't understand is why they bother with a boxed set at all.

[Username17]

Because $104.95 (retail) for a game would give people sticker shock? What I don't understand is why they bother with a boxed set at all

I agree that I would get sticker shock from a game costing over $100. Hell, I get sticker shock from Dresden Files RPG. The thing is, they really don't have to print up 525000 words over three hard back books to explain how to play a fucking game. Seriously, they don't.

Shadowrun 4a is a sprawling document that is too long, and it still clocks in just under 300k. And that includes genuine story breaks for multi-page fiction of variable quality. The rules for Arkham Horror, including the expansions, clock in at about 30k. Not three hundred thousand words, not five hundred and thirty thousand words. Just 30 thousand. Including the basic rules and the Innsmouth Horror expansion laid end to end.

The simple fact is that the basic concepts of D&D are pretty simple to explain. And if you wanted to make an edition that came in at under 100 pages, you could. Not with 4e's word count eating gobbling system, but something recognizably D&Dish could easily get hacked down to something that was manageable. And you could fill the rest of the box with some dungeon tiles and a sample adventure and some dice and shit. Heck, you could even have the adventure booklet be set up like Betrayal at the House on the Hill and provide for like a dozen (or a hundred) simple adventures. And it would still cost less than the three D&D books because all told you'd have killed less than 1/3 as many trees.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Frank, what all do you think that a boxed set should have?

I gave my suggestions earlier in the thread for what I think should go into a boxed set, but I'm curious as to what you think. My suggestion for a boxed set would set one of them at about $49.99 US dollars (though 35 of that is eaten up by the PHB), though I suppose that it could sell for even cheaper.

[Username17]

Frank, what all do you think that a boxed set should have?

I gave my suggestions earlier in the thread for what I think should go into a boxed set, but I'm curious as to what you think. My suggestion for a boxed set would set one of them at about $49.99 US dollars (though 35 of that is eaten up by the PHB), though I suppose that it could sell for even cheaper.

You don't have to charge $35 for the Player book in the box set. It's a box set, you don't have to - or even want to - put a 320 page hard bound tome in the damn thing. For fuck's sake, you're selling it in a box. The player's booklet could be an actual 40 page pamphlet held together with a staple. It doesn't fucking matter.

So you need three pamphlets:

• Player's pamphlet (Heroic Tier only, 5 races, 8 classes) - 40 pages
• DM's pamphlet (basic DMing advice, some treasure, list of mix-in-match missions) - 30 pages.
• Monster List (pile of heroic tier monsters) - 30 pages.

Then you bust out a pile of Dungeon Tiles, some character and monster tokens, some pregen character sheets, and some dice. Boom. You go for a price point of something like 30 bucks.

You're making a game. You are selling it in a box, and competing with Descent and Betrayal at the House on the Hill. You're a big publisher, and if you keep the fiddly bits down, you can have a very attractive price point.

-Username17

[hogarth]

So you need three pamphlets:

• Player's pamphlet (Heroic Tier only, 5 races, 8 classes) - 40 pages
• DM's pamphlet (basic DMing advice, some treasure, list of mix-in-match missions) - 30 pages.
• Monster List (pile of heroic tier monsters) - 30 pages.

Then you bust out a pile of Dungeon Tiles, some character and monster tokens, some pregen character sheets, and some dice. Boom. You go for a price point of something like 30 bucks.

You're making a game. You are selling it in a box, and competing with Descent and Betrayal at the House on the Hill. You're a big publisher, and if you keep the fiddly bits down, you can have a very attractive price point.

-Username17

Of course, Wizards came out with this boxed set in October 2008 (with dice, tiles, pregens and chopped down rules), and guess what? It's out of print, presumably because it didn't sell worth a shit.

On the Paizo boards, people ask about boxed sets from time to time. The standard response is: Boxed sets cost more to make and they don't sell. Here's a typical post from James Jacobs, from a thread creatively titled "Boxed sets". Now maybe Frank knows something about how to make a great boxed set that ol' J.J. doesn't, but I'm still at a loss to think of a great RPG rules boxed set in the past 20 years. And yet Wizards of the Coast keeps cranking out D&D boxed sets of one type or another from time to time.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Well, the reason why I wanted to package a full Player's Handbook into the game was that I wanted people who were satisfied with the game to still feel the 'sting' of missing content.

If someone has a Player's Handbook that lets them get to level 20 but the DMG and MM only lets people go to level 5-7 or so, then people feel the pressure of having access to interesting content that they can't use when they run out of accompanying material. So in order to activate the content they have access to but can't use they buy more of the books.

The risk I'm concerned with is that packaging the Boxed Sets as internally complete might convince people to just start over and try the game out with new characters rather than 'graduating' to the accompanying hardcore books. Out of sight, out of mind and all.

Actually when I think about it that sounds really dumb. Because if Boxed Sets are internally complete and people like it they will purchase three extra books instead of two extra books like they would with my scheme. So nevermind.


Speaking of bilking the customer for money, I think a good solution might be to have Boxed Sets come with Boxed Set-exclusive powers/magical items/monsters. That might convince people who started out with the hardcover books to take a look at the Boxed Sets. Especially if you do things like package them with dungeon tiles and a subscription to DDI.

[Lago PARANOIA]

hogarth, one of the reasons that the D&D Boxed Set didn't sell so well was because they already produced a proto-starter set early on. The Keep on the Shadowfell adventure.

Of course it may also have been the fact that 4E just didn't sell all that well. What was the comparison of sales of the boxed sets to the actual books?

[Lago PARANOIA]

You know Record of Lodoss War, Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance? Those were campaign settings created almost entirely from peoples' games of D&D. I'd also go as far as to say that they're the lynchpins of D&D's 'mainstream' appeal, such as it is. This indicates to me two things. The first one is that people are willing to put a lot of work into their campaign if they think that there's a chance that other people will read and enjoy it. The second one is that people like reading the after-action reports of other peoples' games.

So I think we can finagle the core ideas of these phenomena into some kind of marketing thing.

Anyway, here is the idea. They run three promotional contests, all based in the default campaign setting that comes with our new edition. The goal of the contest is simple; the group(s) that have the best after-action report from running campaigns in this setting wins. The prize for the winner is that they get to have the transcript of their adventures immortalized in a D&D webcomic. And they also get to have some of their original thematic elements retconned into the fabric of the game. So if they have a really cool idea for a villain or an NPC or a monster or a city, it's now part of the default campaign setting.

If one of the contest entries are really good, whoever owns the IP for D&D should strongly consider publishing said webcomic.

[hogarth]

hogarth, one of the reasons that the D&D Boxed Set didn't sell so well was because they already produced a proto-starter set early on. The Keep on the Shadowfell adventure.

Right. But I thought the implication was that there's something inherently awesome about boxed sets that makes them better than something like Keep on the Shadowfell. I'm not seeing it at all.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Right. But I thought the implication was that there's something inherently awesome about boxed sets that makes them better than something like Keep on the Shadowfell. I'm not seeing it at all.

Here are the contents of the Keep on the Shadowfell module:

* A 16 page 4th Edition quick-start rules booklet including five ready-to-play characters
* An 80-page adventure booklet
* 3 large size, double-sided full-color battlemaps
* A light cardboard portfolio

That's not really much different from the boxed set we're trying to push. The key differences is that we're going to put a bit more geegaw into it (like dice and a CD for some of our character building tools) and that instead of being contained for one adventure it'll have a smattering of expansion material for DM to run when they're tired/finished with the old adventures. But the CORE content of starter tiles, premade characters, and out-of-the-box functionality is already there. If you put everything that came with Keep in the Shadowfell into a cardboard box I wouldn't have any problems with people calling it a Boxed Set other than the fact that many people probably won't already own the dice to play the game--though whether that's a bad thing or a ploy to get people to go overboard at the Waldenbooks counter buying dice is subjective.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Regardless, Keep on the Shadowfell is really, really badly edited. In terms of density of typographical/stylistic errors, it may exceed even Complete Divine. Well, maybe it's not that bad. But it's still pretty horrible.

http://wizards.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wiz ... faqid=1387

This is not counting straight-up typos or the numerous difficulty revisions made for battles or the fact that the skill challenge system was ludicrously broken. The FAQ just gives you a hint of the massive pile of fail that awaits within.

Keep on the Shadowfell's skill challenge debacle was so awful that it permanently tainted the image of the system, probably making it the most damaging book to 4E D&D alongside the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide and the Player's Handbook. The bottom line is that since Mike Mearls and Bruce Cordell wrote this module, I'm sure that people who actually put effort and skill into writing it would do a much better job.

[Lago PARANOIA]

This is from another thread, but I think that it's still relevant:

Well, I couldn't give a rat's ass about D&D fiction. But still, it has to say something that fifteen years ago D&D novels were on the New York Times bestseller list and now they're giving up on them completely.

D&D needs to find a way to court writers to write Dungeons and Dragons fiction. It's one thing to underpay writers for your rule system, but whoever owns the IP for D&D should not short-change the novelists.

One of the criticisms that I have heard about Dungeons and Dragons fiction is that it tends to drift from the source material the longer that it goes on, which removes opportunities for the original product line to grab customers. On the other hand, people note that fiction designed to boost D&D tends to suck. I haven't read anything of FR/DL/GH but I would not be surprised if this was true.

I really don't have an idea of how to deal with this. It seems the best thing to do would be to write a really interesting and robust campaign setting that strengthens the prose when elements from it are advertised rather than weakened. But I'm not a writer.

[Doom]

>>D&D needs to find a way to court writers to write Dungeons and Dragons fiction. It's one thing to underpay writers for your rule system, but whoever owns the IP for D&D should not short-change the novelists.<<

This isn't going to happen. It's all about control of the IP, and anything less than a stranglehold is unacceptible. A friend of mine wrote a few D&D novels, and the rules he had to write under made it essentially impossible to do anything but churn out pablum. The specs were something along the lines of no children, no blood, very limited violence, must model something specific to game rules at least 1/chapter, no new characters other than the one specifically permitted by the contract, must include certain established characters, established characters must perform to established guidelines (subject to approval), established characters cannot be given any new traits...it just went on and on.

I never wrote any significant fiction for WoTC, but when I wrote for Dragon, I'd get these ridiculous notes from the 'rules trolls' as I called them. One time wrote some rules for surviving without water, had something like a DC 50 check for 3 weeks without...they said no, since characters just shouldn't last that long, was unrealistic. Seriously, "unrealistic" was the word they used, despite the insanely high difficulty.

Another one was when I had some 'armored mage' rules, nothing huge, a cumulative feat that reduced armor arcane spell failure percentage by 5% each time you took the feat. Completely shut down. "Wizards absolutely positively cannot wear armor", they considered it unbalancing...and it didn't matter how many contradictions to this 'unalterable' rule I pointed out.

It wasn't that many years ago that this was the sort of thinking, however misguided, that dominated WoTC thought.

It's memories like that that make me chuckle at 4e, and consider the possibilility that it was written completely by Hasbro, and not 'developed' by WoTC or 'based on D&D', because the people I worked with couldn't conceive of 4e, for good or ill.

[Lago PARANOIA]

This isn't going to happen. It's all about control of the IP, and anything less than a stranglehold is unacceptible. A friend of mine wrote a few D&D novels, and the rules he had to write under made it essentially impossible to do anything but churn out pablum. The specs were something along the lines of no children, no blood, very limited violence, must model something specific to game rules at least 1/chapter, no new characters other than the one specifically permitted by the contract, must include certain established characters, established characters must perform to established guidelines (subject to approval), established characters cannot be given any new traits...it just went on and on.

Then the people in charge of the project are absolutely retarded. Dungeons and Dragons is a loss-leader. It's an extremely profitable loss-leader, but it's nonetheless one of these. Now while I agree that some house rules are necessary to protect the brand (no graphic rape scenes, no guns, no aliens, etc..) these people need to remember that the vast majority of the non-gamer fanbase doesn't give a shit whether a graduate from the Fighter Academy can track wolves the best out of the party. Only a hopeless fanboy cares about such things anyway.

You don't make your moneymakers conform to your foot-in-the-door projects. From a strict marketing perspective, the D&D project should take pains to reflect what's happening in the more popular products--not the other way around. The only reason for WotC to do this is to get off to their power. What's baffling to me is that Hasbro lets WotC get away with this.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

The thing is, I'm sure the part about not introducing new characters in the novels is a WotC innovation. After all, TSR apparently let Salvatore introduce not only Drizzt, but a four-person party of new characters to the Forgotten Realms. In this respect, there seems to have been more freedom in the old days.

On the other hand, TSR had some crazy rules of their own. Reportedly, Ed Greenwood created Manshoon's army of a million clones because an old TSR editor insisted that the bad guy couldn't win, which meant he couldn't live. Thus, the only way Greenwood could have Manshoon as a recurring villain was to give him a gazillion clones.

D&D fiction also suffers from the fact that game designers' efforts to write fiction can be hit-or-miss. Since a lot of the early fiction (especially the original DL novels) were written in-house, this problem became identified with a lot of D&D fiction.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Designing a new motherfucking monster manual.

While I'm still on the fence of whether players should have universal spell lists (like in 3E) or class-unique power lists (like in 4E) as both systems have their advantages, I'm firmly of the opinion that monsters should draw all or nearly all of their powers from a universal list.

So. Some design principles.

1) Monsters should have universally worse powers than a player. This is to prevent stupidity like eladrin NPC wizards having better At-Wills than a PC one. It breaks suspension of disbelief that someone else has access to a power that will always be better than what a PC will get, no matter how hard they try. And if a PC still insists on learning the Dragon's Breath spell that some loser fairy sorcerer casts, they only get to have the improved Dragon's Breath spell available to PCs.

2) Tags in conjunction with generic powers will be used as much as possible. Seriously, the monster powers in even 4th Edition take up too much space. Here's what I mean.

1st Level Wizard: Lightningball: Standard Action. Ranged 10 Burst 1. +4 / 2d6+2 lightning damage vs. Reflex. Slows enemy on a hit for one turn. Recharges 4-6.

9th Level Sorcerer: QuickMindBlizzard: Move Action. Ranged 25 Burst 2. +12 / 4d6+8 ice damage vs. will. Slows enemy on a hit (save ends). At-Will. If the enemy targeted is a cold-blooded creature, they are also weakened (save ends).

No. Here's how it should be. In the back of the monster manual, there's a basic template for a power called Ranged Burst. The Ranged burst power says that it's At-Will, targets reflex, and is a standard action. Enemies whose powers deviate from this will be tagged. For example:

1st Level Wizard: Lightning ball. +4 / 2d6+2. Ranged Burst 10. [Lightning] [Slows 1] [Recharge 4-6]

9th level Sorcerer: QuickMindBlizzard. +13 / 4d6+8. Ranged Burst 25. [Cold] [Slows S] [vs. Will] [Move-Action] If the enemy targeted is a cold-blooded creature, they are also weakened (save ends).

3) Signature monster powers that a wide variety of critters use often but aren't really different from all that other don't need to be generically statted. You can seriously just have an entry in the back of the book that says 'Desecrate' or 'Anti-Magic Field' or 'Plane Shift'. 3E's system of having a list of spell-likes a monster uses is actually really helpful and convenient... if you know what the spell-like abilities do. Otherwise it's just extra flipping. So instead of having like 4 different Evil Eye writeups, just write fucking one of them and have the four monsters refer to that one power. And in the future you can have more monsters that use that power and you can have players go 'oh yeah, I know what that does'.

4) Still continue to give monsters wild and woolly powers that don't fit the mold. Writing up the rust monster's power just isn't worth the time even though we'd miss it if it wasn't there. Just write their power up normally even if it takes extra space. If done properly, it will give a monster character that's just lacking in a lot of monster books.

But seriously, like 75% of monster abilities follow a template. And rather than pretending that the template doesn't exist, you can save space, make life easier for the DM, and increase system mastery.

5) With all that space you're saving, write decent prose detailing the monsters. While honestly the gelatinous cube doesn't need more than a paragraph or two saying what it does, if the goblinoids get less than two pages dedicated to a generic overview of their biology and culture then that is a travesty.

But don't put the damn monster writeup next to the stat block. That shit is distracting and makes it harder to search for the specific monster you need. Make it completely separate. When you're trying to pull out monsters on the fly, you don't have time to read the flavor text; it's just unneeded in those situations.

6) Monster roles were actually a damn good idea. 4E kind of sucked at its implementation because its exception-based design principles make the monster roles too ephemeral beyond 'artillery = shooty, solider = melee ass-kicker, everything else in the air!'. But they're actually really helpful for DMs who haven't memorized the entire monster manual. So throw them in.

7) Hardcore heresy time.

Monster artwork? Put it all in the monster stat blocks. Seriously. The monster entries should pretty much be pure text except with a picture now and then to break up the monotony. Why?

When you're casually reading through the monster manual to get a better idea for its culture or to build an adventure, you have time to flip back to the stat block to see what it looks like. So there's no need to have the pictures right there.

But when you're a DM already at the table trying to pick out a monster on the fly, people do not have time to flip back to the prose space and read what the monster does then go back to the stat block and plop it down. If a DM is in that much of a hurry for a monster then the deciding factor should be because it looks cool after deciding that its stats are appropriate.


So, got all that? Here's what our monster manual, which will be 250 pages, should look like.

• Cover page with kick-awesome artwork of the signature monster. The 4E Monster Manual I and II are the only ones in which I can tell you what's on the cover without looking. Because the person who decided on these covers had good taste.
• Credits.
• Table of contents.
• Player races.
• The monster flavor text. This should seriously read like a section of an encyclopedia. I should be able to look up 'demon' and get a good idea of the demon divisions, what they want, and their common traits. And to encourage people to pick up monster manuals, this section should also have writeups for player-races, too. This means that humans and warforged should get a damn entry. This should be 30% of the book.
• Monster advancement, monster tweaks like giving a monster a new power or making them stronger/weaker, blurbs explaining things like alignment, terrain, etc. This doesn't need more than 5-6 pages.
• The actual monster stat blocks. This should be 35% of the book.
• The list of generic and uncommon powers for monsters. This should be the rest of the book except for the index, so about 30%.
• List of monsters by challenge rating/role.
• Back cover with a kick-awesome picture of another monster.

75 pages to have monster statblocks doesn't seem like a lot, but trust me, it's a LOT if you use your space efficiently.

[Pixels]

This is something that has always bugged me about Monster Manuals: my primary concern when flipping through stat blocks is CR. The alphabetic ordering means I have to go to the back of the book, look at what is available for the CR range I'm interested in, then trek tediously through the entire length of the book to see various monsters and determine if they fit the theme of the encounter. If they were ordered by CR to start with, I could simply look around the CR 8 section when I want to build an encounter for 8th level characters. Flip a few pages further to get to CR 9 for more challenging monsters, a few pages back for less threatening baddies. You'll have to provide an A-Z index for people to look up ogres when they want ogres, but you can just replace the CR index. Just my two cents.

Of course, I think the whole thing would be better in hypertext format, but people do persist in liking dead trees.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I don't think that's very helpful because it just adds more steps when looking up monsters for a 'themed' range.

If I have an orc warparty, as long as the orcs are all reasonably within the CR of each other I would rather use orc barbarians/orc warpriests/orc theurges/orc axethrowers than orc barbarians/shadow mastiffs/chuuls/ghasts. Having to flip back and forth several times just to get an orcly theme to the band would really get my goat.

I think the CR-first system only has an advantage when you don't mind paring up ropers with ogre magi.

[Koumei]

And Mind Flayer Knights riding atop Beholders.

Actually, that's such a great concept that it should be mandatory for all games.

[Crissa]

Well, there's going to be ropers in the same dungeon as the orc warparty, if not the same encounter.

-Crissa