Col_Pladoh said:
As it happens I was not only a director and officer of TSR back through 1985, but I also received royalty reports for AD&D sales, so there is no problem in me varifying them.
I have no doubt but that your figures are correct. That's not my concern in this.
Also, I have no reason to doubt what i have been told regarding sales of 3E--and 3.5E for that matter. Indeed distribution has changed since I was CEO of TSR. It is far worse today, and RPG sales are way down. There is great concern amongst many game publishers in this tegard. That said, I do not believe any further discussion of this matter will be fruitful, so I am dropping the topic.
This I think is in question. Many figures have been bandied about at various times, many times citing "industry insiders" and "knowledgeable sources", and almost all of them are mutually contradictory. I don't think that there is really any chance of getting a good handle on the "RPG market" overall, and we really don't know anything about the distribution of 3.5e. of course, there is also the additional problem of whether you include third party publishers in your "current edition" count - since several of them are counted (in various measures) among the largest publishers in the industry.
I also think that it isn't really a valid comparison to simply mark off sales for one edition against another. I think it is ridiculously simplistic (and not worthy of you) to assert that the difference is the result of differing amounts of "DM power", especially since the 3e rules make clear that the DM has just as much authority as the 1e rules ever endowed him with. The current RPG market has to compete with options that the market in 1975 simply did not. CRPGs had not even been invented - not until the mid-1980s did they become
any kind of competition, and that was trivial - one or two titles per year. Online RPG options weren't even on the horizon. The RPG market itself had almost no competition for D&D -
Tunnels and Trolls and
Traveller were pretty much it for a while; and although legions of imitators popped up quickly, most of them were shoddy efforts (
Dragonquest, for example). There were almost no VCRs, and certainly no DVDs clamoring for a gamer-geek's budget. And so on.
As for familiarity, I had the distinct chore of spending many sessions playing a 3E based module. The time wasted in looking up rules, typically by players, and then arguing with the two DMs about how to apply them, demanding thaey be applied, was tedious indeed. This happens in many groups I am informed. I never saw nor heard of an OAD&D DM that would tolerate such behavior.
I have seen and heard of dozens of OAD&D DMs who not only put up with that behaviour, but expected it. And, to tell you the truth, I have seen almost no rules disputes in 3e, certainly far fewer that I had when playing 1e or (rarely) 2e. I'd say one adventure is a pretty weak foundation to base an argument on - after the first OAD&D adventure the group I started with still thought that "spells per level" for magic-users and clerics meant that was the number of spells they could cast
until they reached the next experience level, and that fireballs were thirty inches across, and a host of other misconceptions and mistakes in the rules. Many misconceptions resulted in disagreements, and contentious arguments. As I said before, there is a learning curve for 3e. There was also a learning curve for 1e, but you, having developed the system as it grew, never saw it.
