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Jul 2, 2012 -- 6:09PM, Miladoon wrote:

WoTC provides a ruleset.  IMHO, the ruleset does not provide fun, realism, cinema, absorbtion...The DM and players do.

This is not at all the case imo.  A bad ruleset is a bad game.  If the people playing bring all the excitement they don't need the game.  We could just go out for drinks or whatever.  If we got together to play a game it better be fun by the rules, or we'll play something else.

They need to make the game able to do all of the above without requiring experienced players with their own additions to the game or they haven't really done anything.

All roleplaying games can be fun with the right group, the goal is to make it fun for the most groups possible.  Otherwise why would I pick this over 13th age, dungeonworld or any other fantasy rpg?

A DM and the players play a huge role in whether a game is fun/immersive/whatever, but there are still good rulesets, weaker rulesets, niche rulesets, rulesets that are easier to pick up, etc. I would describe my breadth of experience with RPG systems as "moderate" - I've used a handful of different systems, including most of the really big names plus some random stuff, but even from my position it's clear that different rulesets facilitate different things differently well. There are no shortage of games that are either in D&D's conceptual space, in a subset of its conceptual space, or that encompass its conceptual space. D&D is moderately rules-heavy, moderately difficult to pick up, fairly easy to prep for (at least until higher levels), fairly easy to create characters in, extremely cinematic, fairly abstracted, not at all gritty, high character customizability, teamwork-focused, etc. These are more or less all true of at least 2e through 4e and PF. You can certainly force many of these parameters away from where the system naturally puts them, and in many cases it's not at all difficult to do so, but other systems are much more built around, say, ease of character creation (usually at the cost of mechanical depth and/or option breadth). Other systems spike character customizability even higher, at the cost of making characters harder to put together. (GURPS, for example.)

It's honestly not clear to me what their strategy is with Next. I mean, across the hall at the Magic: The Gathering offices they're enjoying their game doing wildly better than it ever has before, and they got there by focusing on the new player experience. Even if the D&D team wanted to try that strategy - which I think is what they were going for with Essentials - I don't think anyone agrees on what's best for new players and how to do that without alienating existing players.  Magic figured it out (there was some initial grumbling about "dumbing down the game", but they figured out a way to preserve actual strategic complexity while removing a lot of "what the heck does this card even do?" complexity), but I don't know what that looks like for D&D. The conservative strategy may be best - just preserve the people you've got and hope they bring in their friends faster than attrition.

Jul 11, 2012 -- 7:59AM, Karathx wrote:

A complete beginner could sit down and play the game as long as someone at the table kind of knew what they were doing.  I remember DM-ing AD&D for friends as a kid having never played before.  No one else in our group had played before either.  There's no way you could do that with 4e or 3.5.  There's a steep learning curve, even for character generation.  That is probably the biggest barrier to new involvement -- you have to join an existing group.

See, I had an experience which was almost the exact opposite. I felt that AD&D had a much steeper learning curve, because it was much more lethal. In 3.5, and especially 4e, you could stumble your way through the game a bit, and probably survive a bit. And, besides, the mechanics were nice and simple, so even if I was very sub-optimal, at first, I at least knew, largely, what I was doing.