Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne talks Dungeons & Dragons: World of Warcraft and wishes Don Reents a happy retirement.
Wizards of the Coast is making a big push to make sure its first Gameplay Expansion for Dungeons & Dragons sells successfully (see “’D&D: World of Warcraft’“), offering stores incentives tied to the quantity of books purchased. For the first time, a D&D book will release with three covers: a standard cover, alternate/WPN store cover and a collector’s edition cover. Ordering six copies of any cover gets a store a metal display rack similar to the one given out with the release of the 2024 updates for the D&D core rulebooks.
Order 12 copies of any cover in any combination and the store receives the metal display rack and a free copy of the Standard cover book. To encourage stores to really push their orders, if a store orders 24 copies of any combination of covers they will receive a large display holding 12 to 15 books and a free copy of the Collector’s Edition cover.
In addition, in an effort to move even more D&D: World of Warcraft merchandise to customers, stores ordering at least one of each SKU of the assorted D&D World of Warcraft products, which means at least one of each of the covers, the DM Screen, Icecrown Citadel Adventure Map Pack, Miniatures Horde Pack and Miniatures Alliance Pack, will receive an assortment of unpainted Murloc miniatures to give away with the purchase of D&D: World of Warcraft products. Although the promotion does not dictate how the miniatures are to be given away, it recommends giving one to each customer buying both a book and one other related D&D: World of Warcraft product.
I hope WotC puts some effort and additional promotional dollars into not only the D&D: World of Warcraft promotion, but also into letting people know about it, making the Murloc figure a rare and hard to find item. Too often, companies come up with promotions and then rely on social media or word of mouth to get the word out about them. In the case of most recent promotions, the customer comes in, makes a purchase or qualifies for the promotion, but has no idea about it and is surprised when we give them the item for which they qualified. We make in-store signage, as other stores do, but if a company decides to go to the effort to design a promotion, also go to the effort to let the target market know about it.
I want to also congratulate Don Reents on his announced retirement from Chessex Manufacturing (see “Donald Reents Retires“). Don has been a fixture in the industry and Chessex was the first national distributor to compete with The Armory, eventually merging the two companies in 1998. Chessex was also the first company to greatly expand the varieties of dice that stores offered to the hobby game customer as well as related items such as Battlemats, tokens and markers.
But the thing I most remember about Reents was sitting down with him at Ft. Wayne PenteCon back in the late 90s and pelting him with questions about baseball and his thoughts about various aspects of the sport and its fans (which I incorporated into my dissertation). So Don, happy retirement, thanks for the help and to paraphrase Douglas Adams, “So long and thanks for all the dice.”
Comments? Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Source: ICv2
