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May 28, 2012 -- 12:14PM, Dathalas wrote:

May 26, 2012 -- 8:46PM, professordaddy wrote:

The price point has to provide a completely playable game, to level five, for under $20. This product must be of the "impulse-buy"/birthday-present level for the parents of every twelve-year-old in the developed world. If it is packaged in a way that demands $60 investment just to get started and seriously hooked, d&d dies.

I agree that this is needed for D&D to have a chance of bringing new players into the hobby.  I fondly remember buying my first D&D Basic set and watching it spread through my small town because we could buy it at the local Target for about $12.  It was easy for the kids to sell it to their parents.

In this day and age, Wizards should seriously consider offering a download of the core game for free while also putting a physical copy in mass market stores like Walmart, Target, and Toys R Us.  

Create the familiar 3 core books for current players moving to Next.  Forget the hardcovers.  I don't want to pay the extra cost for them in this economic climate.  

Keep the page count to the absolute minimum for the main core rules.  I want simple, clean rules that are easy to digest and a book that makes it easy to find what I need during actual play.

Yes! Keep the page count to a minimum and make this accessible to kids with a reasonable price. DM advice should be limited to very basic concepts on how to run a game, monster creation, and other usefull rules. Make the fluff that goes into most DM guides an add on book. I still remember getting the 4e DMG. Even a newbie DM would only really need about 20 pages of that book, an experienced one about 3, and most of its really important items were repeated on the DM screen. 

I'm noticing from the posts here that there seem to be collector gamers and just gamers. I have several collector friends in my group. They do enjoy their deluxe leatherbound signed by the authors with design note special editions of some games. That's cool. But I'm just a gamer and am happy to use a pdf, paperback, hardback, box set, or whatever. Price does matter to me because money is tight right now. I want to get started with 5e for the right price or I probably won't bother. I think after 4e a lot of potential customers feel like me.  

May 26, 2012 -- 3:31PM, tpamwow wrote:

I'm loving the playtest so far, just please put everything in one book for the basic game. I can see how this can easily be expanded with the "modules", but want to be able to pick up everything I need in one hardback. Charge $50 dollars for it and load it with monsters, but just make it ONE book to buy in please. A box set including dice would also work for me. 

I can attest to the Pathfinder model. A core rulebook that contains all you need to play, except monsters. I would not want them to cram all the monsters into 1 book. The DMG can, and should, finally be an optional book. Give it nice DM options and advice, but please don't make it mandatory >.>

May 29, 2012 -- 5:35AM, CWBush83 wrote:

I may be in the minority, but having everything in one book would be a pain in my ass as a DM. I don't want to have to wrest control of my MM/DMG/PH (all-in-one) mid combat to check some stats because a player is busy calculating the best way to munchkin up his fighter.

I like the Pathfinder setup of PH/DMG in one, since the DMG is rarely needed on the spot. Keep the bestiary separate so you can pack it full of beasties. 

If you're allowing a player to munchikin you have a bigger problem than having the books condensed.

However, I think the MM should be separate even if the compedium/DMG should come with a few monsters to throw at the players.

Just as an aside, my husband and I were talking about this subject over dinner. He remarked that he was looking through my 4e DMG, hoping to set up a "Me vs Him" battle, no plot, no RPs, just my party against his monsters (basically, a Player vs DM Delve). He remarked that so much of the book was empty space and illustrations. Margins are fine, he said, but there was so much white space as to make the books look unnecessarily large, and the text looked like it was pushed around to fit the illustrations rather than vice versa. He pointed out that in every edition through 3.5, the illustrations were an accent. In 4e they seemed to be the whole point of the page. He's pretty good with design and layout, and suggested that smaller illustrations, even black and white drawings, might do more to set a mood or spark the imagination as the mind rushes to fill in the blanks. Full color splash pages are good here and there, but he felt that in the 4e DMG the text looked incidental to the art.

Whoa whoa whoa I totally disagree!

I don't need a $50 hardback tome.  One thing I loved about this playtest was the ease of separating sections and handing it out.

I'd much rather see paperback versions - something the size of a magazine.

Now I don't want a million pieces either, but if there is a $10 magazine for each class- and one each for DM Guide and Monster Manual- I think you'd sell better.

It always feels like the cost of playing the game is always stuck on the DM because players aren't up for shelling out 40-50 bucks for player books.  I'm sure some of you guys like the big tomes, and hell include them too- but don't make that the only way to play.

-on the illustrations- I love them, load the monster manual and adventures with them.

I just don't want to have 300 page books for little benefit.

If you're going to do tiers again, maybe have a DM book for each tier- even classes maybe? 

Smaller purchases = I can get them over time, while large purchases never make the cut.

And I like buying stuff, but I can't justify buying a huge book when I'm only going to use 3 chapters out of it, and large sections of those chapters are for far beyond the level of my group.