NeoGrognard

As guy who is getting on in his years, I’m surprisingly not very nostalgic. You may be scratching your head at this; after all I talk a lot about my gaming past. I also have a large RPG collection, with some definite gems, including a Purple Box Basic Set still in the shrink and an old TSR matchbook from the OD&D games, pristine, complete with all original matches and emblazoned with the old office’s phone number (snort!). I’m definitely a historian and a collector, but unlike a lot of other gamers I look at the past as instances of lessons and progress, not as the good old days that I need to go back to. 

The games I play today are hands-down better than the games I played when I was younger. Much of that has to do with the progress of games in general with the last 30 years. But nostalgia is powerful. Memory is a strange mistress. We not only remember our sense of things and facts, but—maybe even more strongly—we remember emotion. Nostalgia seems to be literally the act of reliving emotion from all those years ago. Those emotional echoes are like a narcotic, powerful, alluring, and can often sell product. While I’m rarely nostalgic, I get its allure.  So I wasn’t surprised when, sitting at a staff meeting sometime last year, the D&D management team announced that Wizards would be producing a D&D Red Box—also known as the Essentials D&D Starter. A box set that would look visually like the 1983 basic set with 4e material inside. I actually thought it was a good idea, to a point. 

Who knows, maybe I’m not feeling the love of the new D&D Red Box, because it wasn’t my basic set. Mine was the earlier Purple Box complete with the Erol Otus cover. We basically bought it to get the dice. Back in my day we walked 10 miles up hill in the snow to get polyhedron dice. And we bought them from Lou Zocchi.

I’ve watched gamers go absolutely giddy over trade dressing. Heck, Goodman Games business model during the 3.5 days was almost entirely predicated on nostalgia, even digging up Erol Otus for covers. Erol Otus! Now, these days I can respect his sense of design and color, but when I was younger I could not fathom why he got so much work. I really hated his artwork. But there are folks out there who will buy an adventure or a supplement just because it features an Erol Otus cover. 

But I don’t know if there are enough. 

It’s obvious that the D&D Red Box has two target audiences. The nostalgia group and those people out there who may want to play D&D but don’t know how to get started. I think it will have a degree of success with the former and will likely fail at the latter. 

Why? Well first off, you can download the quick play rules, a demo of the character builder, and H1 Keep on the Shadowfell for free on the Wizards of the Coast website right now. Sure, you get the dice, tokens, and dungeon map from the boxed set, and you can purchase it for as little as $13.59 on Amazon, but the younger generation is going to check it out online first before they buy anything. This is why demos and previews are important in the video game market. Marketing games to 12-22 year olds has changed dramatically in the past 27 years. They need it to be active instead of passive, or it just doesn’t exist to them. Sure, some D&D Red Boxes will make it under the Christmas tree or as birthday or bar mitzvah gifts, and some of them will even get played, but if you’re going to have a D&D acquisition plan, you have to understand who you are trying to acquire, not hope that the spirit of 1983 will win the day.   

It would have been much smarter do what Magic: The Gathering did, and create a demo-ish product on Xbox Live Arcade. Like Duel of the Planeswalker, it could simplify the game mechanics just enough to teach new players what it is like to play the tabletop version without overstressing digital resources or blowing young impressionable minds. Those who really like the game and want more will naturally gravitate toward the full tabletop game. It seems to have been a highly successful project for Magic. I can tell you this, there seems to be more of my students playing Magic: The Gathering regularly than there are those who are playing D&D. I’m hoping to change that soon, at least in my little small bit of the game space. 

We love boxed sets because we grew up with boxed sets. But the RPG boxed set went the way of the dodo in the late 80s. RPGs need a fundamental paradigm shift in order to gain the new audience that Wizards and other companies seem to desperately want. In order to figure out what that shift is they’re going to have to start looking at that audience they want to attract instead of the contents of their aging brains. 

Even the nostalgia group is tricky. While I think most current D&D fans will purchase it, the mere fact that it has 4e rules in it will turn off those ridiculous edition warriors. Not a big deal, really. Those folks are buying Pathfinder anyway. Some edition warriors will buy the box almost as a fetish act, but those sales are a lost cause in terms of capitalizing on the potential of a beginners’ game experience—getting new people to play the game. If you just end up selling this product to your invested fanbase, this kind of product fails. See I think the nostalgia part is just a gimmick. The idea is if you can get your invested fanbase to buy a beginning set, they will go out and teach new people to play the game, or at the very least buy a few copies and distributed it to the uninitialized masses. 

I just don’t think that is going to happen. Hopefully I’m wrong.