I think TSR was right to publish so much material

[Silverblade The Ench]

over years there's been a point brought up often that TSR produced too much stuff for AD&D, and that was bad for the game and cost them money.
I strongly disagree.

A game needs BREADTH of appeal. This requires catering to lots of people with differing tastes, and generating lots of interest.
Having lots of players, attracted by lots of varied things interesting to them, is vital

Most of us consider the late 80s early 90s the "Golden Era" of (A)D&D. Why? Huge volume of items, so even if some were bad or not to your taste, it was guaranteed some WERE to your liking!

All this made D&D a very fertile, fun thing to be involved with

3rd ed kept a good deal of interest by the Open Game licence with many variant folk producing interesting material (Ihave lots of the Slayers Guides for example, and other stuff).

IMHO however, WOTC "cut their own nose off to spite their face" with the more strict 4th ed system and stopping pdfs.
Sure, piracy and competitors may suck, but, you lose interest of players, they expect and want lots of "stuff", to keep interest high, making a broad fun community.
No one company can create enough content to satisfy a happy "bubbling with excitement" fan base. (This also applies most definately to MMOs said that to them before long time ago, D&D like it or not is in competition with them for folks' spare time)

Hence fan content and competitors are good at keeping the game "bubbling" with excitement, keeping the interest is key, not mere sales income 1st and foremost. The "buzz" will make more money than being a tightwad.
Closed tight control always ends up slowly eroding user base numbers.

TSR failed because of bad financial leadership and foolish investment from what I can gather, not from too much AD&D inventory per se. (the dice issue was the biggie, poor relations/oversight with important seller, She Who Must Not Be Named, etc )

Thus would D&D not be best served by making a LOT of varied material and having looser licencing?

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

TSR went overboard. There was little quality control, there were too many competing lines, there were lines that should have been allowed to die. This was part of their history of poor management.

More isn't always better. Perhaps WotC swung too far to the other extreme with 4e, but that doesn't excuse TSR's bad business practices.

 

[amerigoV]

If someone has the Ryan Dancey (sp) link about when he went to TSR for due diligence, that would give you some good insight. Its not that producing material was bad, it was they produced material without (1) balancing it to other stuff and (2) without researching what the market would buy. They had warehouses full of unsold stuff.

 

[DragonLancer]

While I agree that TSR made mistakes during that time, I have to agree that as a fan of D&D it was some of the best times with 2-3 new purchases every month for a good few years.

 

[Nadaka]

It definately sucks that there is no longer an official source of PDF's for WotC material both 3e and 4e.

But a large volume of products is only a good thing if they are all being bought. The problem with TSR back in the day was that all those vast numbers of books didn't sell and bankrupted the company. This was due to general waning interest in the hobby, strong competition from the alternative horror/fantas World of Darkness and perhaps even customers that felt overwhelmed by their options.

 

[Scribble]

After hearing the Gencon Upcoming Releases podcast I have to say I'm really excited about the direction WoTC is taking for the first time in a while...

I feel like they kind of got trapped into just releasing the same thing over and over and over... Books with more feats, spells, PRCs... Over and over. It looked like the same was happening with 4e too.

But now they're releasing new stuff too like board games, new settings/systems like Gamma world- new types of products for the game...

The "brilliant" marketing thing I think though is all of it is designed to be separate, but have some use for your D&D games. Now I can put my money into this other stuff, without feeling like my D&D game will "suffer" for it.


Seems like they're taking the good parts of TSR's strategy and fine tuning it.

 

[Greg K]

If someone has the Ryan Dancey (sp) link about when he went to TSR for due diligence, that would give you some good insight. Its not that producing material was bad, it was they produced material without (1) balancing it to other stuff and (2) without researching what the market would buy. They had warehouses full of unsold stuff.

Ryan Dancey on the Acquisition of TSR

 

[darjr]

I think TSR really hurt themselves. I'm torn because if they hadn't done things that way there might not have been things that I now like.

I know there are a lot of things that came out during that time that I know next to nothing about, but would there have been an Al-Qadim or Darksun?

I also give a lot of credit to Ryan Dancy for saving D&D and for the OGL.

 

[Shemeska]

After hearing the Gencon Upcoming Releases podcast I have to say I'm really excited about the direction WoTC is taking for the first time in a while...

There are multiple ways of viewing that release schedule. You see innovation, I see some of that but also infer a sales-driven need to try something very different and see if anything sticks.

 

[Celebrim]

I have no problem with the quantity of material that they produced in that era. I have a serious problem with the quality of material that they produced in that era.

The basic problem is that from around 1989 to 1998, TSR produced almost nothing worth owning. Those few items of quality that they produced were swamped under a ton of garbage with low production values, low density of information (big fonts, wide margins, spurious and repetive artwork, ink bling), limited utility, poor writing, bad editing, and no play testing.

It's notable that there is almost nothing that is 'classic' from that era. The very best material from that era was produced right near the end of it as 'Silver Anniversery' fare that basically celebrated the good old days when the products of TSR had been memorable and fun. There are hints from developers like Monte Cook of what TSR could have been like, and most of the best writers ended up on the team that created 3e, but 2e's biggest problem was that it was a relative wasteland of terrible products.

They drove people from their product. They weren't addressing the customers actual wants and desires. They weren't addressing the customers actual complaints with the system or the products. They had their own agenda, and to a certain extent I'm not sure they were communicating even within the company. They were completely out of touch and they were arrogant and dismissive of criticism or complaints beginning with the 2e release, which just wrong footed practically every long time player I knew and often for reasons which were completely avoidable.

It wasn't merely that they were releasing source books for playing D&D in Ancient Rome which practically no one had a need for (and those that did, probably knew Ancient Rome in more detail than the sourcebook covered). It wasn't the breadth of material that killed TSR alone. It's that so much of the material was just bad. Take 'Haunted Halls of Evenstar' and 'Terrible Terrible Trouble at Tragidore'. Please. I mean seriously, you can't expect to sell material to DMs when the quality of the material and imagination involved is lower than what they are on average producing themselves.