Knights & Knaves Alehouse

T. Foster wrote:As someone who used to work for a market research company, I strongly suspect that if the results of this survey show "too much" interest in older editions (too many people claiming to play them and not the current or recent editions) rather than making WotC realize there's a market there, they'll just declare it a sampling error and exclude some portion of those responses...

Yup. The concept of the "outlier." (did I spell that right? Looks weird)...
What they're scared of is a huge number of "3e" answers, indicating that they might have gone off track. "1e" will be dismissed, if not as an outlier, as a market that's non-recoverable and thus irrelevant.

I recall hanging around not too long ago with someone who...well... thats all they would talk about: "the rpg market" and "the rpg industry". It was always absolutely in favor of whatever they were saying no matter what. You don't see people getting upset about the "financial monopolizing simulation" games or the "collect the colored cards to candy land" games.

Calls to mind Lord Dunsany...

Whether the dreams and the fancies of Yoharneth-Lahai be
false and the Things that are done in the Day be real, or
the Things that are done in the Day be false and the dreams
and the fancies of Yoharneth-Lahai be true, none knoweth
saving only MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, *who hath not spoken*.

What do you mean what does this have to do with that?

Too many rpg fanatics!!!

geneweigel wrote:I recall hanging around not too long ago with someone who...well... thats all they would talk about: "the rpg market" and "the rpg industry". It was always absolutely in favor of whatever they were saying no matter what.

I cannot understand what makes people concerned about "the industry." Being concerned about a game, sure. Absolutely, in fact. If it's your game, pimp it and love it and play it and buy all kinds of stuff for it. But the industry? The industry is a collection of games, not a thing in and of itself.

geneweigel wrote: Calls to mind Lord Dunsany...

Whether the dreams and the fancies of Yoharneth-Lahai be
false and the Things that are done in the Day be real, or
the Things that are done in the Day be false and the dreams
and the fancies of Yoharneth-Lahai be true, none knoweth
saving only MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI, *who hath not spoken*.

Yood, man. Yeah, I know that dude.
I can dig it, that cat doesn't say anything,
no matter how many tabs are involved.

I love Lord Dunsany

Unless the inclusion of a 1st edition category was due to a clerical error, they have it there for a reason. (It's been on previous surveys.) I'd like to think they are genuinely interested in 1st and 2nd edition data points, possibly for purposes of making the relevant parts of their back catalog available again, or – pessimistically – for purposes of filtering out a subset of responses.

In any case, I appreciated the chance to give a concise, non-venomous explanation of why I'm not interested in 4e.

The way I see it, a thoughtful response in the free-form areas is *way* more likely to have an impact than a rancorous or vitriolic response. Anybody spouting venom is only doing themselves a disservice. There is a chance (no matter how small) of a thoughtful response planting a seed in someone's head that germinates into something much more relevant to the old school, whether from WotC or from some later company that the person ends up working at. You can take advantage of that chance, or you can squander it. Your choice.

Voted.
It was almost too much like filling out all the blasted questions for eHarmony!

For "other" I specifically stated AD&D (1977-1985), as well as checked "First Edition." Hopefully they'll get the message!

Guy Fullerton wrote:Unless the inclusion of a 1st edition category was due to a clerical error, they have it there for a reason. (It's been on previous surveys.) I'd like to think they are genuinely interested in 1st and 2nd edition data points, possibly for purposes of making the relevant parts of their back catalog available again, or – pessimistically – for purposes of filtering out a subset of responses.

Soooo interested, that they repeatedly equate the 1974 game with the 1977 AD&D game. Not to mention that pre-release 4e ads, the ones that bothered to mention earlier editions at all, were decidedly derogatory toward those earlier editions.

Guy Fullerton wrote:In any case, I appreciated the chance to give a concise, non-venomous explanation of why I'm not interested in 4e.

The way I see it, a thoughtful response in the free-form areas is *way* more likely to have an impact than a rancorous or vitriolic response. Anybody spouting venom is only doing themselves a disservice. There is a chance (no matter how small) of a thoughtful response planting a seed in someone's head that germinates into something much more relevant to the old school, whether from WotC or from some later company that the person ends up working at. You can take advantage of that chance, or you can squander it. Your choice.

No vitriol spilling from my keyboard. I gave straight-forward answers to all of the questions. I just believe it was a waste of 3 minutes of my time.

TheRedPriest wrote:Soooo interested, that they repeatedly equate the 1974 game with the 1977 AD&D game.

Yeah, that's unfortunate, but probably understandable for their categorization purposes. I think a *very* low percentage of players from that bucket actually understand or care about the differences between the various versions that happen to fall into the bucket.

My BITD play was both Basic & AD&D (and non-D&D systems too, of course), and my groups were largely clueless about any philosophical differences between them. We did grok the superficial differences (elves as class versus elves only as race, etc.), but those weren't even particularly relevant. We used D&D modules and supplements with AD&D and vice-versa.

Only recently have I begun to understand and appreciate the subtle philosophical differences between the various editions prior to 2nd. And I'm probably the only player in my current AD&D group that even cares about that stuff.

And once you include some supplements in an OD&D game, it starts to get really close to AD&D.

Mythmere wrote:I cannot understand what makes people concerned about "the industry." Being concerned about a game, sure. Absolutely, in fact. If it's your game, pimp it and love it and play it and buy all kinds of stuff for it. But the industry? The industry is a collection of games, not a thing in and of itself.

Yeah, that kills me. At some point, TSR and/or WotC managed to get "the industry" equated with the hobby in a lot of gamers' minds. Which is, of course, great for them because for all practical purposes TSR was/WotC is "the industry."

Guy Fullerton wrote:

TheRedPriest wrote:Soooo interested, that they repeatedly equate the 1974 game with the 1977 AD&D game.

Yeah, that's unfortunate, but probably understandable for their categorization purposes. I think a *very* low percentage of players from that bucket actually understand or care about the differences between the various versions that happen to fall into the bucket.

My BITD play was both Basic & AD&D (and non-D&D systems too, of course), and my groups were largely clueless about any philosophical differences between them. We did grok the superficial differences (elves as class versus elves only as race, etc.), but those weren't even particularly relevant. We used D&D modules and supplements with AD&D and vice-versa.

Only recently have I begun to understand and appreciate the subtle philosophical differences between the various editions prior to 2nd. And I'm probably the only player in my current AD&D group that even cares about that stuff.

And once you include some supplements in an OD&D game, it starts to get really close to AD&D.

But by that logic they should lump 2E AD&D in as well and label the bucket "pre-3rd edition." The dividing line between OD&D+supplements and AD&D is pretty blurry (despite TSR's insistence to the contrary at the time, because they were trying to deny royalties to Dave Arneson) and yeah, to a 9 year old kid the fact that the Moldvay Basic rulebook and the AD&D MM belong to two different editions isn't entirely clear, but certainly the D&D Rules Cyclopedia is pretty obviously different from 1E AD&D -- moreso than 2E AD&D is -- and also anybody who's still playing one of those versions now and is going to take that WotC survey and vote for one of them almost certainly registers the difference between them.

I'm not saying they need to go into the level of detail of separating out the various Basic Set iterations and whatnot, but would it really have been so onerous of them to offer 6 choices instead of 5:

[]Original edition (first released in 1974, includes the various Basic, Expert, etc. sets & Rules Cyclopedia)
[]First edition (first released in 1977)
[]Second edition (first released in 1989)
[]Third edition (first released in 2000, includes v3.5)
[]Fourth edition (first released in 2008)
[]Other:________________________________

T. Foster wrote:But by that logic they should lump 2E AD&D in as well and label the bucket "pre-3rd edition."

You know, I thought about that quite a bit actually and decided against going there. But since you bring it up

As much as I agree that 2nd edition play is really close to 1st as long as you stick to just PHB+DMG, I think there might be some value to WotC in keeping those buckets separate. My overall 2nd edition customer experience was *very* different than that of prior editions. When I think about what 2nd edition was, I think about the Complete handbook series, a bunch of boxed sets, many colorfully branded campaign worlds, and that sort of thing. To a lot of people, 2nd edition means Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Al-Qadim, Dark Sun, Planescape, etc. Some were also 1st edition settings, of course, but boy did they get a big push for 2nd edition.

From today's perspective, I imagine that very different sorts of players purchased from the 2nd edition pdf back catalog compared to those who purchased from the 1st edition pdf back catalog. At the very least, one might imagine a difference in a 2nd edition customer's willingness to gobble up lots of new settings & stories (willingness to drink from the fire hose!) compared to a customer in their 1st edition bucket.

The dividing line between OD&D+supplements and AD&D is pretty blurry (despite TSR's insistence to the contrary at the time, because they were trying to deny royalties to Dave Arneson) and yeah, to a 9 year old kid the fact that the Moldvay Basic rulebook and the AD&D MM belong to two different editions isn't entirely clear, but certainly the D&D Rules Cyclopedia is pretty obviously different from 1E AD&D -- moreso than 2E AD&D is -- and also anybody who's still playing one of those versions now and is going to take that WotC survey and vote for one of them almost certainly registers the difference between them.

Yeah, I don't have a great response for that, but I would guess that most current RC players don't grok anything but the superficial differences. Maybe 1 person per gaming group, as with my own AD&D experience.

In any case, the survey seems to completely punt on the various later incarnations of Basic. If I were a Basic player of anything RC or later (like the early-to-mid-90's boxed sets), I don't know what I would have picked in that survey.

Touching on my previous point about the difference between 1st and 2nd edition, I'm not familiar enough with the offerings for RC to know whether the BITD customer experience for RC was more 1e-like or 2e-like. For those who know, what was it like?

I'm not saying they need to go into the level of detail of separating out the various Basic Set iterations and whatnot, but would it really have been so onerous of them to offer 6 choices instead of 5:

[]Original edition (first released in 1974, includes the various Basic, Expert, etc. sets & Rules Cyclopedia)
[]First edition (first released in 1977)
[]Second edition (first released in 1989)

Personally, I don't think it's quite right to lump LBB in with Basic, but admittedly I don't have any first-hand BITD experience with LBB, so I reserve the right to be totally wrong. All I know is that when I read about LBB play, it sure sounded like there was lots of supplement use, thus making LBB pretty much equal with 1st edition.

And picking a 1st edition date (for that definition of 1st) is tough, isn't it? Technically 1977, sure. A little bit later is probably more pragmatically correct, though. And then you have to hope the typical survey taker can remember whether they fell into a bucket that was a really long time ago, or a really long time ago minus just a few more years.

Guy Fullerton wrote:And picking a 1st edition date (for that definition of 1st) is tough, isn't it? Technically 1977, sure. A little bit later is probably more pragmatically correct, though. And then you have to hope the typical survey taker can remember whether they fell into a bucket that was a really long time ago, or a really long time ago minus just a few more years.

But the question wasn't "which versions have you ever played?" it was "which versions have you played in the last 3 months?" I doubt there are many people who've played a OE or 1E game since Feb. 2009 who aren't sure of the difference (unless their involvement is so casual that they're not going to be taking this survey anyway).

According to WotC's official branding of their D&D product, there were 3 Editions, and now there are 4 Editions. It's a perfectly valid scheme.

1st Edition D&D: Gygax TSR (Original, Basic, and Advanced)
2nd Edition D&D: Post-Gygax TSR (Classic and Advanced)
3rd Edition D&D: WotC d20
4th Edition D&D: WotC current product

Of course around here we like to get more nuanced and talk about our favorite "Holmes + Eldritch Wizardry & Monster Manual & DEFINITELY NO UA...edition", but from where WotC is standing, broader strokes are no doubt convenient.

What's funny to me is that ONLY in the Post-Gygax TSR era would "1st Edition" officially mean specifically OAD&D.

Guy Fullerton wrote: From today's perspective, I imagine that very different sorts of players purchased from the 2nd edition pdf back catalog compared to those who purchased from the 1st edition pdf back catalog. At the very least, one might imagine a difference in a 2nd edition customer's willingness to gobble up lots of new settings & stories (willingness to drink from the fire hose!) compared to a customer in their 1st edition bucket.

Actually, I would be willing to bet that pretty much anyone who bought the AD&D/2e back catalogue also bought the AD&D/1e back catalogue. The same would not hold true in reverse, however.

Falconer wrote: According to WotC's official branding of their D&D product, there were 3 Editions, and now there are 4 Editions. It's a perfectly valid scheme.

1st Edition D&D: Gygax TSR (Original, Basic, and Advanced)
2nd Edition D&D: Post-Gygax TSR (Classic and Advanced)
3rd Edition D&D: WotC d20
4th Edition D&D: WotC current product

that is an interesting possibility; I just figured they had omitted Classic and lumped D&D (1974-77) in with AD&D/1e (1977-1989).