I saw the "DnD for Dummies" commercial a few days ago, and was wondering what should be done in terms of game design to get people into the hobby. Here's what I noticed from the commericial:

-No funky dice. Gone is the d20. The woman in the commercial say something along the lines of, "I always wanted to try DnD, but when I saw those 20-sided dice, it just frightened me." Please note that I like both d20s, d6, and d100s. (There was a real mess over at rpg.net about this.)
-Simple descriptors. The man in the commercial brags, "I have all the tools I need to go from 1st level Barbarian to Epic Level Dungeon Master!"
-Watch what you name your game and how you promote it. (See above -- the Dungeon Master thing was probably a holdover from the cartoon series.)
-Pregenerated characters.

I also noted their choice of promoters in the commercial: a mixed-race couple of one white woman into yoga, and one black guy into skeet shooting. Lesson? IMHO, Try for the following target audiences: couples, liberals, people into spirituality and health, and gun bunnies.

I also believe there was an emphasis on story telling over wargaming in the commercial, but it went by so fast I couldn't tell.

And no, I don't own the book. I can't afford it until Christmas, and I don't know if it's really worth buying it for purely game design purposes -- i.e., learning from WotC/Hasbro's marketing research.

What? There was a TV commercial for D&D? Wow. I know that WotC is putting print ads in video gaming magazines, promoting the idea that TT RPG is a more social/cool activity, but I hadn't heard about the TV spots.

Palaskar,

You should do some searching in the Publishing and Theory boards. Designing games for non-gamers has been discussed a number of times.

(BTW, I hate to be the unofficial police man, but the the Indie Design forumm is for discussing actual projects in development. This type of discussion is better suited for publishing or Theory, depending upon you desired focus.)

Whoops. Sorry. Thanks, Timfire.