I read the first post, and thought "I too, have a modest proposal..."

A fun thread, and surprisingly productive!

Quote from: TonyLBThere are already a fair number of games on the market that require people to go through a lengthy learning process before playing them.  No matter how many games there are (like oD&D, Toon, TFOS, etc.) that don't require such a process, those other games would still exist.  Low-entry games don't leave the high-entry-minded folks without any place to turn.  Contrariwise, they do help provide the experience of enjoyable play to people who can't or won't wade through a high-entry text.  Sounds like a win-win to me.  Diversity rocks!

"Low-entry", "lite" games are only preferred or sought after by the hardest of the hardcore gamer. I'm not sure if that's irony or what. To me, the "lite" rpg is just another gamer fetish niche.  

And to counter Ian Abstentia, I've personally encountered plenty of people who taught themselves D&D3.5 as their first RPG. The trick is, they bought themselves the PHB, managed to read enough of it to make a character (not that hard, really), and then sought out and joined an existing gaming group. One of those people is in my current gaming group. (Technically.. two-- Joel started playing D&D with us back in 2001. But again, it was his first RPG outside of Final Fantasy, and I met him because I ran a demo game his friend just happened to drop in on).

That bolded part is crucial. Whenever people talk about this topic (how people will theoretically become involved with rpgs), it always seems to be treated as this individual activity. "I'll just throw Star Wars d6 in front of them and they'll instinctively become new roleplayers." It just doesn't work like that.

The self-selection step (the part where a guy says "This book looks interesting, I want to try this out") is important, sure. But it's not that important. That's step 1.

The critical factor involves someone actually go to meetup.com or wherever else, and post an ad searching for other players or other gaming groups and people to people connections. That's step 2. If your game does not make people do this, then your game will not be picked up by new gamers. Ever. Post all the anecdotes you want, I'm afraid that's the way it just works.

(for all you itchy game designers who take offense at that, you can overcome this by providing the meetup method with your game. Either a mailing list or a meetup group or something - some community where you can connect users of the game to each other.)

You can't have step 2 without step 1. But step 2 is the only one that matters when it comes to self-selecting gamers.

I also think that the best thing to do with a 'low-entry' game as you mention above, is a tie-in to some hot media property, and then get it into mass-market retailers.

In the example of D6 Star Wars given by Settembrini, that's a great 'entry' product.  The system is fairly simple, the rulebook is very 'hand-holdy' and everyone knows how to pretend to be a Star Wars guy.

During the height of popularity of the films, "Lord of the Rings" would have been well-served by something like this (indeed, I recall Decipher did such a hybrid board/RPG game for both of the first two movies).

Quote from: Ian AbsentiaBut you're an experienced RPGer.  Toss something like D&D 3.5 in front of the average person without any guidance, and I doubt you'll get so positive a response.

Pffft. Bollocks! I was not even 13 when we started - with Basic D&D, and then about a month later, Advanced D&D1e. We got right into it and had a smashing time.

Did we get everything right? No! Of course not. But shit, my mate is in his 30s and been playing GURPS for six years and still gets the rules wrong.

Kids like the complexity. They enjoy the challenge. We only think we need a simple ruleset for newbies because so many of us are bad teachers of things, if it's complex we'll confuse the poor newbie with our confused mumblings, if it's simple we might do alright. We don't need simple games for the newbies' sakes, but for ours.

Quote from: Kyle AaronKids like the complexity. They enjoy the challenge.

Some kids like the complexity, and for them it is good that there are complex and challenging texts.

Some kids don't like the complexity.  I'm not convinced that these kids wouldn't enjoy actual roleplaying.  For them, I think it's good to also have texts that expect less dedication.

Best of both worlds, to my mind, is to have ... well ... both worlds.

I really don't quite understand why people are saying stuff like "D&D 3.5 is inaccessible to blah, blah, blah ...."  Whether it's true or not (and I tend to think "not"), I just don't understand the motivation to go there.  Seems to me that the point to be made is "Rich texts are cool, simple texts are cool too, they're cool in different ways and nobody needs to diss either of them in order to advocate for the other."  But hey, what do I know ....

J Arcane and Abyssal Maw are pissed off from listening to the pro-D&D, anti-3.5 crowd, Rules Compendium/Castles & Crusades/D&D lite crowds rant against their preferred system, so they're arguing in an equally asinine way in the opposite direction. Why the two of them think it's wrong somehow or an affront to their own preferred popular and successful system to produce a second game under the D&D name which caters towards a rules-lighter crowd I'm not exactly sure. (Maw attempts an argument above to the effect that it's unnecessary; new roleplayers often can't or don't want to learn from existing roleplayers, however, and in addition this argument ignores that there are people who want a lighter system for other than teaching purposes.)

The old D&D basic set moved one million units in a year as late as 1989, I find it hard to believe that there wouldn't be some room for a similar product under the D&D name today, which could have 3.5 stuff like feats, skills, and PrCs built on top of the smaller framework in the imagined game, and I don't think there's any evidence that Basic and Advanced D&D did anything to hurt each other back in the day.

Why this stuff crept into my asinine thread, I have no idea.

Quote from: Calithena...The original 'swine' game was Runequest...

Man, I went over to Runequest because I liked Hit locations and limb severing.

I never really thought of it as "Artsy" I mean come on...Ducks? :raise:

Quote from: CalithenaThe old D&D basic set moved one million units in a year as late as 1989

No. I have no idea where these numbers come from, but they're completely crazy.

The thing you have to understand about D&D is that WotC has no interest in pushing a specific agenda vis a vis game design. The only agenda that R&D has is making a game that the maximum number of people enjoy.

TSR was in a similar position - they tried to make a game that sold. They didn't sit around and say, "Hey, we like rules heavy games, so let's keep making those," and use that as an excuse to kill basic D&D.

If you look at the past 30+ years of RPGs, you see a steady trend toward more and more rules, just as you see a steady trend of more and more players.

Were I to take a pop culture psychologist stab at it, I think there's a tipping point between, say, watching TV and playing D&D. Once you're far enough away from watching TV to wanting to play D&D, you're also in a position of wanting something you can really sink your teeth into. The rules light games are aimed at an audience that isn't interested in crossing that line. At the point where you don't want rules, you might as well skip rules entirely and go into freeform RP, LARP, or plain old acting.

(The exception would be the basic set, which serves as a gateway to the full blown game. However, turning the gateway into a full game didn't do TSR any favors. Remember, TSR didn't cancel Basic D&D out of a sense of dogmatic adherence to a particular design ethos. They cancelled it because AD&D was far and away a better seller.)

Quote from: mearls(The exception would be the basic set, which serves as a gateway to the full blown game. However, turning the gateway into a full game didn't do TSR any favors. Remember, TSR didn't cancel Basic D&D out of a sense of dogmatic adherence to a particular design ethos. They cancelled it because AD&D was far and away a better seller.)

Only by the time that they'd turned "Basic D&D" into a lumbering hardbound book with a price point as high as any AD&D book, and rules just as complex.

As much as the Rules Cyclopedia is really cool (and I LOVE the RC), that's not the product I'm arguing needs to be made.  I'm arguing for the Red Box D&D basic set, which as I understand it was the single bestselling version of the D&D game in any of its formats.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPunditOnly by the time that they'd turned "Basic D&D" into a lumbering hardbound book with a price point as high as any AD&D book, and rules just as complex.

As much as the Rules Cyclopedia is really cool (and I LOVE the RC), that's not the product I'm arguing needs to be made.  I'm arguing for the Red Box D&D basic set, which as I understand it was the single bestselling version of the D&D game in any of its formats.

WotC does produce a basic set for D&D, but it's an intro product aimed at the RPG-curious who shop at Toys R Us, Borders, and Barnes & Noble. It isn't meant to be a complete game. Whether it's better for the basic set to be it's own thing ("Here's everything you need to make characters and build a dungeon") or an intro ("When you've played the three adventures in this box, go buy the Player's Handbook") is a separate issue.

The key is that it's difficult to say if red box D&D is the best selling version of D&D, and if it is why it sold so well. It's possible that it did sell lots of copies to stores like Sears and K-Mart, but then all those copies ended up gathering dust in warehouses. It's also possible that it had great numbers, but it was kept in print far longer than any other basic set. Year over year, it might not be the best selling version.

It's important to remember that AD&D was pretty much the flagship game from the beginning. It received more support, sold more units, and had a bigger impact on the hobby. Basic D&D may have led a lot of people to go on and play AD&D, but there isn't much evidence that I've seen that says it had more players.

In any case, basic D&D or a set like it *is* important in helping people go from not playing RPGs to playing RPGs. The thing is, once they've made that step it seems that most of them want something with the depth of D&D 3e. Now, that doesn't excuse the pointless complexity that lurks in 3e, but it does speak to the options and depth the game offers.

(I've often toyed with the idea of taking the SRD and making a simplified version of D&D that kept or even enhanced the depth of play. Basically, strip down all the fiddly rules for climbing, flight, the details buried in the skill descriptions, and then increase the options for building characters.)

Quote from: mearls(I've often toyed with the idea of taking the SRD and making a simplified version of D&D that kept or even enhanced the depth of play. Basically, strip down all the fiddly rules for climbing, flight, the details buried in the skill descriptions, and then increase the options for building characters.)

While you are at it, how about the grapple rules?
I mean, as you say, complexity is not bad.
But grappling is rather byzantine and a PITA to administer, as a player.

QuoteWhy the two of them think it's wrong somehow or an affront to their own preferred popular and successful system to produce a second game under the D&D name which caters towards a rules-lighter crowd I'm not exactly sure.

Because it's not actually what the gaming public at large actually wants, except for a vocal minority of internet-savvy grognard types desperately clinging to the past, paired with a bunch of avowed D&D haters who've used the excuse of the OGL to try and teach the rest of us how D&D is "supposed to be", the way Bruce Baugh did with Gamma World 6th.  

Because the idea that new games need "simpler", dumbed down rules is fundamentally patronizing and insulting to the very people we're supposed to be bringing into the damn hobby.  People aren't that stupid, by and large, and even the ones that are can usually tell when they're being talked down to and treated with kid gloves, and no one likes that shit.  

Because I don't think Wizards has the resources to expend on two game lines, and if the influence of said vocal minority actualyl took hold, what we'd really get is one gameline, contorted to suit the tastes of a bunch of people who don't even like D&D anymore.  There's hints of this in SAGA as it is.

What you like isn't D&D anymore, and it never really was.  The filter of decades of nostalgia, experience, and liberally applied houserules, has a tendency to smooth out the labyrinthine special-rule-on-special-rule approach of old guard D&D.  

Get over it, stop trying to change what is D&D into something else, something it isn't anymore, go back to your damn basement with your 30 year old books, and leave the rest of us the hell alone.

The rest of us teeming millions are having plenty of fun with the real D&D, and don't need you trying to water it down for "our benefit".

Quote from: SettembriniWhile you are at it, how about the grapple rules?
I mean, as you say, complexity is not bad.
But grappling is rather byzantine and a PITA to administer, as a player.

I've heard that a lot, but never had the problems, especially with the cleared up rules in 3.5. It's a modal interaction, as opposed to most other attacks, but in the end really not that complex, as the possible outcomes are rather limited. I'm not sure how one could reasonably reduce the complexity. SWS tried, but IMHO oversimplifies a bit.

Also I'm not sure whether the special attacks would be something I'd take out of a basic D&D version. Novice players, with no preconceptions often want to do combat maneuvers, and some guidelines how to do that are always helpful, especially if the DM is a novice, too. Tripping, grappling and disarming are pretty common, sundering, bull-rushing and overrunning can probably go the way of the dodo.

Mike - the million number came from the acaeum once upon a time, who credited it to a TSR or WotC staffer. I can't find it now and you're in a way better position than I to know so I'll assume it's false.

I think there were a sizable minority of OD&D players who didn't go to AD&D and a somewhat larger minority who played Moldvay/Cook or Mentzer instead of AD&D in the mid-eighties. But AD&D may have been the better selling game for all that. It was pretty easy to move back and forth in any case so lots of people played hybrids; 3e was a separation from that.

The only question I'm interested in here is economic - whether it makes sense financially for TSR/WotC/Hasbro/whoever owns the property to consolidate the game under a single ruleset (as now) or to split between a lighter and heavier version (as TSR did). I think 3e is a great choice for the latter; I just wonder whether a product along the lines of the other would be a good thing today.

I do know that a lot of the kids in my neighborhood started playing with the basic sets and only moved to AD&D or the advanced sets later. In fact, I'd say the majority of us who started playing between 8 and 10 years old back then did that. Of course, most of us did move on to AD&D, and what most of us played was a hybrid of the basic rules with stuff cherry picked from AD&D. So it paid big dividends in the sense that my getting the Holmes set at the department store led on to lots of other things. Maybe the current basic set does that, I don't know.

Quote from: mearlsIf you look at the past 30+ years of RPGs, you see a steady trend toward more and more rules, just as you see a steady trend of more and more players.

This is true, but I don't think you can look at the history of the industry as anything like a history of success, so I'm not much moved by this sort of argument.

Anyway, I'm glad to know that you all are at least considering these issues at Wizards. I hope you'll forgive me for hoping that someone decides the numbers make sense to produce a lighter version of the game someday, while keeping the full crunch 3e option open to keep folks like J Arcane (and me when I was in high school - I would have died for a game like 3e back then) happy.

The other issue I hope you guys are considering is how to get people who aren't gaming into the hobby. I think the D&D minis are a good project along those lines, though it would be cool if you could publish some sort of easy dungeon/exploration type game to go with them maybe.

@grapple rules:

The devil is in the detail. I play in a weekly group, in which we palyed through Shackled City, Age of Worms and now Savage Tide.

We had two monks in the campaign, who specialized in grappling.
Still, everytime there´s differing opinions on what can be done when.

Starting a grapple is easy after a little practice. Determining who can end the grapple when, which modifiers apply to which escalating state of grapple-hood is not.
And when is damage done by whom with which?
What actions can you take?
Which grapple checks to make for multiple attacks? What about the defender?
Multiple escape attempts?
Haste?

How often do you have to win a grapple check consecutively, before you are free again?
Which square do you end up?
Who is prone when?

This has to be looked up every fucking time, because everyone remembers differently.

And we are dedicated, rules-savvy guys in that group.