Knights & Knaves Alehouse

T. Foster wrote:. . . if I hang around too long I'm inevitably going to let slip that I hold the vast majority of them in utter contempt . . .

This is sad on several levels.

WGrinn wrote:

T. Foster wrote:

gleepwurp wrote:If you want to blame somebody for the way that 2e jumped the shark, you also need to blame the gamers who kept buying everything that TSR was pumping out.

Oh, I've been blaming them for years; decades even*. It's one of the reasons I have to limit my interaction with "mainstream" rpg society to small doses -- if I hang around too long I'm inevitably going to let slip that I hold the vast majority of them in utter contempt, which tends not to go over too well.

I think this is somewhat an unfair accusation. There are many AD&D players, myself included, that never had the opportunity to play 1E as an intro to the game.
There was no internet, no forum, no eBay, there was only the local game store and any adverts in magazines like Dragon. So post 1e was the only thing available for anyone to play with nothing else which to compare.

Of course people who never saw 1E and only knew 2E are in a different boat than people who saw both and chose 2E over 1E (or saw both and didn't register any difference between them).

JLowder wrote:

AxeMental wrote: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 universal appeal, making D&D accessible to non-hobbyists or at least easier accessibility to hobbyists. The things many people praise about 1E--the unique voice in the prose, the quirky rules, the difficult and challenging character progression--are all things that peel off potential mass market players. So you're not going to be able to sustain both--a difficult-to-access rule set and "wide general appeal."

Cheers,
Jim Lowder

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. This is a classic mistake made by marketers of many things where the audiance is assumed to be mind numbed idiots and hense the products are dumbed down (this mistake is also common in other product catagories, take movies for example). Back then, AD&D appealed to us and we didn't know anything about "gamers" or "hobbiests", we were just kids who wanted to keep playing cops and robbers and our make believe games for a little longer (and for some of us the rest of our lives).


In any event, TSRs gross market size (as in number of players) shrunk not due to rules changes (in the sense of making them clearer) but rather due to its unlike-able"look"...good God who chose the art..., focus away from simplistic dungeon crawling (into what...romance novels), presentation (railroads, published novels with modules/settings that followed them), focus and its general chasing of novelty (all to "modernize" a game that was built on the "classic fairy tale" world...brilliant marketing ).

Suddenly the game that you could pick up and start playing for under 40 bucks cost 3x more (back in the early 90s I totally realized what a scam the whole thing was and pittied the fools buying up all their crap). It would be like suddenly there were 20 books published that you had to buy to play Risk (in an official way) when the board game was all you really needed to get the best experiance. Sure the super geek could keep up (even be proud of his collection), but the average normal kid who had a life outside the table? Forget it.
In the end it was a few people at TSR squeezing the lemon for everything it was worth, once it was dry, they drove off in their BMWs leaving a once great brand with millions of players in the garbage heap with a fraction of the original players (1000s rather then millions) left with closets full of splat books and modules with terrible illustrations and sappy romance stories within (and if they were lucky a dungeon with a few rooms).

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. I could care less if he was a good guy, history is full of "good honest" folks with bad ideas they institute. If Carl Marx was a "good honest guy" that wouldn't make his contributions to mankind (massive poverty, stealing of personal property, exploitation of the masses, loss of individualism to the betterment of the "group") any better. In the end I'd hate what he stood for just as much. Zeb being a good guy is a non-issue. No one personally bashed Zeb (that I can see) they bashed what he did to our hobby. If you can't make that destinction, that is your problem really, not ours.

The secret of AD&D's marketing success in its peak years (early 80s) was based on a sort of paradox, or even a lie -- the game was aimed at, and written for, adults, even though the core audience was actually kids aged about 10-14. These kids were the ones buying the books and playing the game (and even submitting stuff to Dragon and TSR -- there's tons of examples out there of people sheepishly admitting that a letter or article they wrote for Dragon magazine with a studied "adult professional" tone was really written when they were 14 or whatever) but they all thought they were doing something adult -- something above their expected level of intelligence and sophistication, something vaguely dangerous and forbidden. Hell, this dynamic existed within the very Gygax household -- two of the primary playtesters of his "adult" game were his teenage sons -- Ernie in the 70s, Luke in the 80s (and, for that matter, Alex in the 00s).

A big part of the appeal of AD&D for us 80s kids was the difficulty of understanding it -- that you had to be smarter than average to understand it and, once you did, you earned social cachet by explaining it to the other kids (who didn't have their own copies because they couldn't afford them or their parents wouldn't let them, or who had the rulebooks but couldn't make any sense out of them because they didn't understand the Latinate abbreviations and words like "milieu" and "antithesis of weal"). Likewise with the illicit artwork with violence and nudity and pictures of demons and sacrificial altars and stuff -- and the media-panic surrounding it. Sure anybody who had read the books and played the game knew the accusations were all total crap, but it definitely made the game seem "cooler" (and yes, hard as it is to believe nowadays, there was a time -- when I was in 4th-6th grade, so 1984-86 -- when D&D (or, rather, AD&D -- the D&D boxed sets by Moldvay and later Mentzer were the dirty little secret, the way those of us who understood the game had by and large actually learned it, but we'd never admit that openly because that was "kiddie stuff" whereas AD&D was the Real Thing -- just like we'd sure as hell never admit to watching the D&D cartoon or playing with D&D action figures, even though most of us did ) was considered cool, where the kid with the biggest collection of stuff and best understanding of the rules (usually because he had an older brother who he'd learned it from, or because he secretly had one of the Basic Sets (see above)) had an "instant in" with the popular (note: middle-school popular, which is different from high-school popular when cars and drugs and sex are involved) crowd).

When TSR started changing the game around -- making it more kid-friendly by simplifying the language and sanitizing the content, actually marketing it towards the age of people who were playing it rather than the age of people those playing it looked up to and wanted to be like -- the appeal was lost, and D&D went from being the cool, dangerous thing that the smart and sophisticated kids played to being the boring thing that nerdy kids play, which is how it's been known ever since. By making D&D into something safe and accessible that anyone could understand and play, it became something nobody wanted to play.

Trent, I wish your experience held true across the board. It would have made middle school a lot more fun. Maybe I missed that phenomenon because of age (IIRC, I'm a few years younger than most of the guys here) or geography (again, IIRC, you grew up in the eastern mid-west near some fairly large cities, whereas I grew up in the middle mid-west in a rural area at the very heart of the Bible Belt), but playing AD&D in the early 80's in my hometown definitely wasn't something that held any sort of social cachet. In fact, my experience was that admitting you played D&D wouldn't get you anything but strange looks and ridicule from the vast majority of peers. The two exceptions were the nerdy, bookish, fantasy/sci-fi fan crowd (me and my friends) and the stoner, heavy-metal crowd (definitely not my crowd) who were outsiders anyway and had nothing to lose by engaging in a shunned, underground activity like D&D.

Good points, Trent.

Why is it so hard for some to understand that children want to be adults? Even my 4-year-old daughter gets indignant when someone calls her "baby".

I have a different perspective on the decline of D&D. I don't think it was due to the release of 2E or splatbooks or any of that. I think D&D was a fad, & like all fads, it faded after its time in the sun.

I was introduced to D&D by my older brother. This was in 1983, while my older brother was in middle school. I remember him coming home one day from school and telling me about this new game, how he had went into this room of a dungeon, killed a dragon, and won all this loot during lunch in the school cafeteria, or something like that.

Back then, you had Monopoly, Pong, Atari 2600, anything else I'm forgetting? There was nothing like D&D, & D&D blew the doors off of everything else available at that time. I thought D&D was cool because the older kids were playing it. My brother bought a number of BX/AD&D books. But after a brief time, the novelty of the game wore off on my brother and his friends. For him, it was just a passing fad, he got really into it, & then dropped it. For me, however, I never got completely over it. It always held a certain magic for me.

By the time I got into middle school in the late 80s, I transitioned from D&D to what was then more popular there - RPGs like Robotech & TMNT. By this time, RPGs were only for the nerdy, it was no longer considered cool.

I didn't have anything to do with RPGs during high school. The time I spent gaming was playing Streetfighter & Mortal Kombat at the arcade.

In college, many of my friends turned out to be gamers, so we got a regular D&D group together. We played 2E for the simple fact that that was what was in stores. There was no Ebay back then. Many of my D&D friends started getting into RPG computer games, though I never could get into them. When Everquest came out, me & my friends gave up pen & paper RPGs altogether.

I think the decline has more to do with it being a fad, rather than because of some new rulebook or whatever. When my college group was playing 2E, we only owned a few books, mainly core. A few of my friends had a couple of splat books, but we only actually used the core books. The splat books were looked at as fun for reading, but not necessarily great for play, & none of us ever felt compelled to buy it just because it was out there. It was more like it was out there if we wanted to have some more RPG stuff to read.

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. In the early 80s, D&D had all the signs of a fad: was considered cool for a couple of years, you had D&D this, that, & the other thing, a lame cartoon, etc.

Steve wrote: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.

Those are good points, add to that the onset of WotC's Magic: TG CCG and White Wolf's World of Darkness, these both pulled a large number of half-hearted AD&D players away, probably more than any other table-top hobby next to GWs 40k.

AxeMental wrote: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 reading hundreds of pages of rules to play a game. Most 7th graders are not all that interested in reading at all. Reading is not a regular pursuit for many, many people in the US, kids or adults. And the more difficult the reading, the less likely it is to appeal to a wide audience. I wish it were not true, but that's the way it is.

As for the rest--yes, the game got more expensive with all the supplements and has continued to get more expensive. But that would have been true even if no new editions had ever been released. Inflation and cost of living increases happen. Printing has grown incredibly expensive in the past couple decades. Companies need to make money to continue to operate. But no players ever really needed pre-packaged adventures or settings like Greyhawk or Dragon Magazine or any books beyond the core rules, so TSR, even in its earliest days, was guilty of the sort of business practices you're objecting to. Did this line expansion accelerate? Sure. One of the problems with a game like D&D being owned by increasingly larger companies is that they want not just profit, but escalating profits year over year, to make the stockholders happy.

Of course, you and everyone else have always had the ability to stop buying the supplements and the additional products. And if enough people stop buying them, the company will stop making them. It's as simple as that, really.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder

Steve wrote: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. Declines in reading. Declines in free time, even for kids. It all works together to bleed people away from what is a time-intensive, reading-intensive pursuit.

The decline in the RPG market seems a lot like the decline of comics. In the 40s, there were comics that sold a million copies a month. In the 1950s and 1960s, Western Publishing canceled any book that did not sell 500,000 copies a month. The top-selling comic in June 2009 sold 168,539 copies.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder

thedungeondelver wrote:There actually were monster cards for AD&D; four sets IIRC. They were not well received.

(I for one would like to get my hands on them but that's just me...)

I thought they were cool. One of my friends had them, when I lived in Hawaii (late 80s). That was the first time I'd seen them.

Check out some of the Otus illustrations from monster cards.

T. Foster wrote:The secret of AD&D's marketing success in its peak years (early 80s) was based on a sort of paradox, or even a lie -- the game was aimed at, and written for, adults, even though the core audience was actually kids aged about 10-14. These kids were the ones buying the books and playing the game (and even submitting stuff to Dragon and TSR -- there's tons of examples out there of people sheepishly admitting that a letter or article they wrote for Dragon magazine with a studied "adult professional" tone was really written when they were 14 or whatever) but they all thought they were doing something adult -- something above their expected level of intelligence and sophistication, something vaguely dangerous and forbidden. Hell, this dynamic existed within the very Gygax household -- two of the primary playtesters of his "adult" game were his teenage sons -- Ernie in the 70s, Luke in the 80s (and, for that matter, Alex in the 00s).

A big part of the appeal of AD&D for us 80s kids was the difficulty of understanding it -- that you had to be smarter than average to understand it and, once you did, you earned social cachet by explaining it to the other kids (who didn't have their own copies because they couldn't afford them or their parents wouldn't let them, or who had the rulebooks but couldn't make any sense out of them because they didn't understand the Latinate abbreviations and words like "milieu" and "antithesis of weal"). Likewise with the illicit artwork with violence and nudity and pictures of demons and sacrificial altars and stuff -- and the media-panic surrounding it. Sure anybody who had read the books and played the game knew the accusations were all total crap, but it definitely made the game seem "cooler" (and yes, hard as it is to believe nowadays, there was a time -- when I was in 4th-6th grade, so 1984-86 -- when D&D (or, rather, AD&D -- the D&D boxed sets by Moldvay and later Mentzer were the dirty little secret, the way those of us who understood the game had by and large actually learned it, but we'd never admit that openly because that was "kiddie stuff" whereas AD&D was the Real Thing -- just like we'd sure as hell never admit to watching the D&D cartoon or playing with D&D action figures, even though most of us did ) was considered cool, where the kid with the biggest collection of stuff and best understanding of the rules (usually because he had an older brother who he'd learned it from, or because he secretly had one of the Basic Sets (see above)) had an "instant in" with the popular (note: middle-school popular, which is different from high-school popular when cars and drugs and sex are involved) crowd).

When TSR started changing the game around -- making it more kid-friendly by simplifying the language and sanitizing the content, actually marketing it towards the age of people who were playing it rather than the age of people those playing it looked up to and wanted to be like -- the appeal was lost, and D&D went from being the cool, dangerous thing that the smart and sophisticated kids played to being the boring thing that nerdy kids play, which is how it's been known ever since. By making D&D into something safe and accessible that anyone could understand and play, it became something nobody wanted to play.

Hmmmmm, apparently, T Foster is my long lost twin brother.

AxeMental wrote: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 dichotomy: maintaining 1E (in whatever state you define as its ideal form) was not the only option for creating something of value. Heck, the community here isn't even clear on what is and is not good about the original editions.

Beyond that--yes, there have been personal attacks here. Calling someone a liar is a personal attack, particularly when the claim is based on no evidence. Calling someone a "bad person" or assuming someone worked on a project as a way to attack Gary or anyone else--those are indeed personal attacks. Assuming you know motivations--for anyone, but particularly for people you do not know--is simply a bad idea. Almost as bad an idea as deciding someone is or is not a good person based upon the products they worked on for a game company.

Cheers,
Jim Lowder

Lance Hawvermale wrote: This is sad on several levels.

Not really. 95% of the gamers I've met are too damn creepy and pathetic to hang around with. Players like Myth, Philo, Grim, RedPriest, Francisca, Jeffery St. Clair, and some others I've met face-to-face seem to be the exception not the rule.

northrundicandus wrote:

Lance Hawvermale wrote: This is sad on several levels.

Not really. 95% of the gamers I've met are too damn creepy and pathetic to hang around with. Players like Myth, Philo, Grim, RedPriest, Francisca, Jeffery St. Clair, and some others I've met face-to-face seem to be the exception not the rule.

I have to agree. Some of the creepiest and most pathetic people (as North said) I've ever met were sitting at a gaming table. Not saying all are, just that it tends to draw the losers and the simply batshit insane.