thedungeondelver
Adventurer
Warnung: long, rambly, ranty, probably better off being posted on my own website but I don't get much traffic by way of 3rd edition players that way and that's who this is directed at. Without further ado...
The hydra-like threads on "Am I not WotC's target audience" and "did 4e go far enough" and "irreconcilable differences" has got me to thinking, particularly about the question "what do you want"?
I thought, back in 2002 when I really got on the stick as far as being a huge 1e fanboy, that what I wanted was what it seems like a lot of 3e fans want now: "support".
Well now let's ask ourselves, what does "support" entail? Well, you might say "I want to see my game supported with new products, new adventures, new rules and..."
Let's stop for a second and look at that: new rules and options. I've played 1e for a while now and brother if there's anything I can claim a good rock solid knowledge of it's "lack of support". Myself and a lot of other 1e gamers have gone through and rebuilt and patched and rewritten and tweaked and customized 1e to the point that if it were code, it'd give project managers nightmares. If it were a car, the NTSB would send a SWAT team to our garage to stop us putting it on the street. If it were a house, it'd look like the castle from DRAGON'S LAIR. You get the idea.
Over the years, as a 1e player, I/we have had to pick up ideas and inspiration where we could. When 2e hit, most stuff was backwards compatible if you ignored a few things here and again so it wasn't too bad. When 3e hit, again, there was more legwork to do, but nothing terrible. There were fanzines, there were alternate sources (as I've said elsewhere I've stolen ideas for adventures and incorporated little rule tweaks from time to time from wholly different systems, let alone different rulesets of the same system), fan publications, the occasional tantalizing hint at what could have been from Gary, Frank, Jim, Tim Kask and other luminaries - all bound up and scraped together in manifold forms by different DMs.
The one thing that I never wanted was a complete rules rewrite. You can argue and bitch about the initiative system but I love the AD&D ruleset. Love it. Not the concept of it, not the "vibe" not the "nostalgia". I like the mechanics, I like the way things work. There, I said it.
That kind of "support" is something I never wanted, never looked for, never desired.
So what kind of "support" did I want? Well, dammit, I wanted the rules back in print! I wanted more adventure modules and -
Well, hold on a second.
There were literally millions, that's millions with an "M" copies of the various ADVANCED DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS rulebooks printed and sold. Millions. Even if there's a tiny, tiny percentage of people left out there who care about the game and still enjoy it, that's still a huge number. And the remaining surplus? Still for sale. Not on ebay, not in obscure used bookstores impossible to find, not at addall.com, not in yard sales, but right here.
Not for some "SRS COLLECTORZ ONLY" king's ransom. But for a buck. Maybe two. Hell, I gave copies to someone on this very forum last year or further back. That's how many are floating around.
Now consider when the last copies of those were published, versus the last published and printed copies of 3e and 3.5e books. Add in PDFs, of both editions. See where I'm going with this?
No edition of D&D is out of print. None. The print run starts again when you take the memory stick to Kinkos and knock out a spiral bound copy of THE COMPLETE PSIONCS HANDBOOK or RETURN TO THE TEMPLE OF ELEMENTAL EVIL and so on.
Regarding what I mentioned earlier, about Gary et al talking about rule clarifications and all? Hells bells, 3e'ers! You've got the guys who wrote your version of the game still essentially writing it in PATHFINDER. You've got your DRAGON MAGAZINE still under publication, albeit with a new title. That's more than we ever got, and 1e chugs along, being the AMC Gremlin or OS2/WARP of RPGs.
As to adventures, again, look at the 1e side of things: I have a relatively lean stack of 1e modules - the G series, the D series, the S series and so forth, mostly what Gary wrote with some notable exceptions - and I honestly have not and doubt if I will ever play them all from start to finish as Dungeon Master or player. If I did manage to fuse them all in to some kind of mega campaign, it'd probably last years and years and years. Throw in the occasional homebrew adventure to link stuff up and longer. Now consider if I had every 1e module. And then think about the virtually bottomless well of 3e stuff. Do y'all mean to tell me that you've played all of that out? All of it? Have those of you clamoring for "support" looked at the massive "map-a-week" archive at WotC? I have - and there's no end to the stuff you can match up to those maps (classic ones redone notwithstanding).
So if you don't want the rules re-written, and you don't need a steady source of books (despite having that from the noted places), and you've got adventures to last you until the late 2020's, what do you need WotC for? Screw 'em! Let them sail off into the sunset with 4e while we drift lazily behind, you guys in your boat, we in ours, but all in the same current. Because you know what? Given what we know about history in about five, maybe six years, we'll be bumping into the 4e crowd as they watch the good ship Hasbro cruise over the horizon.
You are the support. Do you want new players? Are you afraid you can't get new players if they can't buy new books? Do what I did. Run an open game in the public venue and have all the supplies ready. Don't engage prospective players in a 4e bad/3e good debate. Sit down, say "game on" and play. Run a solid game and I promise you they won't give a
if you're running original D&D, Basic, AD&D, 2nd Edition, or whatever.But for heaven's sake, don't worry about "support". Every key you hit on the keyboard to outline why you feel abandoned is a key you could be hitting while typing up your new prestige class, writing an article to submit to KOBOLD QUARTERLY or mass-mailing to a group of gamers telling them about your upcoming run through the WORLD'S LARGEST DUNGEON.
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