Knights & Knaves Alehouse

So you agree with me then, that challanging and interesting books should be presented to kids at a younger age so that this interest can continue on into adulthood. All kids should read every day, as should all adults. It's a great idea. But that wasn't your point. Your point was about D&D being po...

Maybe where you were from, but here in Los Angeles in the late 70's/early 80's AD&D was firmly in the realm of 'stoner/musician/artist counter-culture'. That was part of the audience, but it wasn't the core. Here's an early 80s ad for D&D. Gives you a clear idea of who the game was aimed at, who th...

I've got my own personal experiences that contradict your assertion. Just because D&D was for sale in hobby stores, I can assure you that it appealed to people waaaay beyond the nerd hobbyist. In fact, most of the players, especially the women, wouldn't have been caught dead playing Napoleonics, as...

You seem to hold a low opinion of 7th graders (and kids in general I suspect). You could not be more wrong. By way of highlighting how far off these sorts of speculations can be, let me offer some specifics. I'm very active in gifted & talented education locally; I'm the parent rep for a large scho...

there's now about 25 years of screwing the pooch and allowing the perception to grow that D&D is a kiddie nerd game, that'd take some serious work to turn that around to appeal to "older" folks as first time players. It's not the 18 - 22* years old that are different, it's the perception of the gam...

Was Zeb part of this change (part of the machine interested in making huge profits on the short rather then creating something that would last forever? Did he fight to keep the game similar to what existed in the late 70s and early 80s? We all know the answer to those question. You set up a false d...

I think the combination of the passing of a fad plus the changes in gaming options (video, arcade, computer, & eventually Internet games) is probably the true cause of the decline. Some great points, Steve. The splintering of the entertainment market, particularly for teens, has a lot to do with it...

Jim, sorry but I have to completely disagree with you here. AD&D appealed to me and my friends (of what 7th graders) because of Gygax's writing and its complexities not despite them. You're assuming you are representative of the larger potential market. Most 7th graders are not interested in readin...

Note that 2e never hit the "broad, general appeal" target either and (from what I can gather) never topped the success of 1e in the ~1980-84 period. So it doesn't appear that the strategy to simplify the language and mechanics was the key to break-out success either. The D&D brand has grown in doll...

Didn't 1e achieve wide general appeal? D&D became known to the public as a brand by the late 70s/early 80s, though often through negative news stories and religious panic propaganda, but it wasn't selling mass market numbers. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but from what I've heard, D&D was ...

The changes made (the publication of UA and later books) may have saved the company in the short term, but lead to changes that doomed its wide general appeal, Brand identity and ultimately the company's collapse. The changes in D&D over time have been largely aimed at giving the game broader unive...

Y'know, despite it's provocative title, that thread is actually about the moderation practices at Dragonsfoot for about a page and a half. And then it drifted off to about 3 and a half pages of nonsense about metal bands and California produce markets. It may have drifted off to other topics, but i...

But I'm not sure any of the employees that worked there, short of the stake-owning executives, could have really made that happen. Because of the personal hard feelings between Lorraine and Gary, and the continuing legal problems between Gary and TSR, no one below Lorraine herself was going to be a...

Mike has already answered this question: he wasn't even aware of the things people were saying about Zeb until someone pointed out a blog that linked to this site. For me, it was someone at the local hobby shop pointing me toward the "Zeb is a Liar" thread. They knew I'd worked with Zeb and think h...

where the people releasing the products knew full well that most of what they were releasing was sub-standard (cf. Rose Estes novels), but kept on doing so anyway because people kept paying for it. You miss the third alternative. There were people at TSR after Gary left who were passionate about th...