You get a link to your blog from my Extended Bloglist… (the others will to, just later when I have more time)

I’m going to close the comments here too… We’re preety much done and this things takes like 30 seconds to load on my broadband!

Donny_the_DMs last blog post..That horse just moved! Hit it again!

Jonathans last blog post..The War Drums of Change

next poster has bacon breath!

Donny_the_DMs last blog post..That horse just moved! Hit it again!

TheLemmings last blog post..Technical Update(s) / Plugins

Come on people, 4 more comments to break the 100 comment barrier… I don’t usually do this but hell why not…

Super secret bacon prize to the 100th poster!

Awe.. come on! But they.. they.. they had that COOL Flash Animation on the D&D website! You know.. the one with that AWESOME Heavy Metal Music Playing (sarcasm) that alerted everyone in my lab that I was, um.. not working?

MWhahahaa… omg.. that was the worst. Some friends of mine had that on our private forums for a few days as the banner.. just for the sheer laughter of (at) it. Oh wait.. its STILL UP on their site. Sorry, I digress… your comment Chatty about their marketing was dead on.

Can we say “MISSED THEIR TARGET AUDIENCE?”

Jonathans last blog post..The War Drums of Change

The idea seems to have merit, but where wizards has stumbled lately is execution. Hopefully this will change.

Donny_the_DMs last blog post..That horse just moved! Hit it again!

No question that they could have done it better. There is no situation where this isn’t the case.

But they did handle it adequately, IMO. They made choices that needed to be made, one way or another, and that not everyone would agree with. And they know that going into it.

They could have done far worse, for the situation they had on their hands.

Above all else, though, the choice they made makes FR more accessible to new fans. FR had some of the biggest barriers to entry around, given the huge amount of history and novels and the feeling that you needed to know all of this in order to run a FR game.* By cleaning the slate a bit, they managed to make the setting seem easier to get into without knowing all the history behind it.

I know they made me want to come back to FR again. And that takes a lot.

* One of the biggest issues with running a published setting is when a player knows more about the setting than you do. This has never been worse than with FR, thanks to the wealth of material out there. And this makes it difficult to introduce something new, as many big fans of a setting will make it a point to correct you, so that you use the material they’re familiar with, so that it doesn’t contradict what they already “know”.

WotC recognised this problem when they developed Eberron. If you look, you will note that many parts of the Eberron world have not been defined by more than a vague paragraph. And many of those never will be. Even the novels have been officially declared as “not canon” by WotC, in order to help with this problem.

@Graham: interesting view – but honestly I think there would have been a few better ways that what they actually did. No matter if they picked to release a pre-campaign setting in spellplague or integrated it as first chapter or initial adventure campaign – or – so many other ways.

TheLemmings last blog post..Technical Update(s) / Plugins

Why does anyone (well, apart from Sean and other industry types) care about the GSL, OGL, or whatever?

More open license means more people using that license and thereby greater probability of good stuff emerging and being sorted. Further, there are several non-D20-related games licensed under OGL, and GSL makes cross-pollination of ideas between D&D 4th and the aforementioned games that much harder.

WotC may win a bit in marketshare, but the roleplaying field as a whole, IMO, loses.

Tommis last blog post..WoAdWriMo

The 100-year gap is, indeed, extreme. Though if they had made it much shorter, the setting would be taking place during the spellplague, rather than during the aftermath. While this would have been interesting, it would not have been good for the sourcebook, as a group would pretty much use it for one campaign, finish the spellplague (while being locked out of caster classes), and then be on their own.

Unless they released a “Post-Spellplague FR campaign guide” a couple years down the road.

But then they’d be seen as milking the audience for more money.

You can’t win.

You described ONE angle of Marketing, not all. Marketing to their existing customer base is also a valid one. And again – considering they had to go to a second printing before the book had hit shelves suggested that they at least surpassed their own goals in that regard. And kudos to them for doing that without needing to blow money on unnecessary TV and print ads.

And Yan’s speculation about Wizards falls in line with their INITIAL press releases… I couldn’t find the original article, but this page looks like a copy and paste: http://rustmonster.net/2007/08/16/dd-4th-edition-announced-gen-con

If you scrub down to the last paragraph you’ll see it discusses WOTC’s marketing strategy.

“Marketing support will initially focus on migrating the existing player base, and then move to an acquisition strategy to re-activate lapsed players and acquire new ones. Midnight launch parties will be used to kick off sales of the first new release in May.”

Thing is, some FR fans hate the changes, others love them. And FR has a history of big, world-altering events being used to explain mechanical changes.

With Eberron, it wasn’t them bowing to protests that stopped them. The option to advance it was there, as was the option to not. But Eberron was originally designed at a specific point in time, and loses a lot as you move further from that time, and this is what made them lean towards not advancing it in the first place.

But aside from all that, it was mainly the fact that work on the Eberron update hadn’t started yet, while the FR work had, since it would be out in August.