I think TSR was right to publish so much material

[AdmundfortGeographer]

It's interesting that you single out the Gothic Earth Gazetteer. In my first year on the staff of the RPGA (1999), we put together prize support boxes filled with unsellable "dead" product from the later part of the period dicussed in this thread. There were lots of those slim Al Qadim boxed sets, a WHOLE LOT of Elminster's Ecologies 2, and box after box after box of the Gothic Earth Gazetteer.

I got some of those Elminster's Ecologies from the RPGA. I sent them back out to the world by eBay a couple years later. I kept the anniversary Ravenloft mod though.

Then they killed LG and I stopped doing anything with the RPGA . . .

 

[Baphomet]

I dont know about a flood of product like back in the TSR days, as that would certainly be bad for business... but I would most definetly like to see more campaign specific material being released than campaign guide, players book and one adventure.

There has to be a way to support a campaign setting more than that...

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

1) I know TSR blew it, business wise, or WOTC would never have taken over. I'm not talking about their "business", folks, I'm talking about what was good for the community and for D&D
(D&D is not who owns it)

Too many # of items manufactured when they didn't need os many copies of that specific item, not checking which ones sold, and the damn Dragon Dice and book debacle' were what torpedoed 'em from what I recall.
etc etc.

2) They put out so much stuff they helped build our current community, fact whether ya like it or not
Folk saw stuff they as individuals liked, they bought, they played, they cared. You cannot produce a narrow line and generate that much interest back then of a very fringe product.
D&D is now know in some way by most folk in the West.

It was not a very culturally accepted thing to do nor was it "reblliously sexy", the reverse in fact, it was for "geeks" at best.
Now I'd say it's even more unacceptable in the UK than back then!
Reverse in US though, but I'd say in UK back then it was more a case of no one really cared, now though, youngsters have absuredly narrow limits on what their cultures accept, strangely enough

BBS and other online things were for a VERY small elite back then, do not kid yourself, majority of the world did not have any such, hell in 1988-89 it cost me over £1000 on ISP dial up Net charges 'cause they charged BY THE MINUTE in the UK. Uuuuuugh

3) Art:
Hussar
4th ed are brilliant for practical useable layout, they have got that down great
for artwork...um, no, not ONE major piece I have seen in 4th ed is "classic".
Some of the 4th ed Dark Sun ones and a few others have been memorable, but do not hold a candle to 2nd ed days.

As said, some of the 4th ed artists have fantastic skills For example, Wayne Reynolds does amazing detailed work he has tremendous skill, but I do not like the style one bit versus Elmore, Caldwell etc
I've got Easley, Caldwell, Brom and ELmore posters, prints or art books, but not one of the 3rd/4th ed artists. Again not saying they arne't skilled, just the style blows for me :/

The big covers and internal artwork in 2nd ed, holy heck , they had amazing pieces!

Erik Mona,
Don't you dare post blue Rorschach flumphs!! Damn that would be like the Far Realm in RL!

4) Hey I KNOW how much stuff they came out with back then, I still have some of the TSR Catalogues
AD&D A4 folders, pencil tins, you name it.
they missed a possibility in breaking out into D&D condoms, though!
"The Burning Balrog!"..."The Blue Bulette!"..."The Wriggly Womb Wyrm!"..."The Rampant Remorhaz!"
ahem

 

[Dausuul]

1) I know TSR blew it, business wise, or WOTC would never have taken over. I'm not talking about their "business", folks, I'm talking about what was good for the community and for D&D
(D&D is not who owns it)

D&D may not be the one who owns it, but when the one who owns it goes broke and shuts down, it's very bad for D&D.

2) They put out so much stuff they helped build our current community, fact whether ya like it or not

The big expansion of the D&D community took place in the mid-'80s, not the '90s. It was OD&D and 1E that put the game on the map, probably helped along by the Satanism scare--no such thing as bad publicity and all that.

Most of the '90s was a time when D&D was losing market share to other RPGs, White Wolf especially. It didn't help that TSR was widely viewed as very hostile to the nascent Internet gaming community; it was a popular joke at the time that the initials stood for "They Sue Regularly."

It's possible that the number of D&D players was still growing as an absolute--I don't know what their sales figures were like--but certainly the expansion was nothing like the 1E days.

 

[Greg K]

That one thing that should have been released: Night Below. The entire focus of the year should have been on making that cool and desirable. A tenth of the schedule that they did print would have made as much or more money.

I am glad you weren't the brand manager. I, definitely, would have scaled back. However, my list would have been:

Combat & Tactics
Shaman
The Complete Barbarian's Handbook
Encyclopedia Magica, Volume II
Encyclopedia Magica, Volume III
Encyclopedia Magica, Volume IV

Monstrous Compendium Annual Volume Two

Dark Sun Campaign Setting Expanded and Revised
Beyond the Prism Pentad
Dark Sun Monstrous Compendium Appendix II: Terrors Beyond Tyr

Pages from the Mages
The Moonsea

Glantri: Kingdom of Magic

Birthright Campaign Setting
Blood Enemies: Abominations of Cerilia
Player's Secrets of Ariya
Player's Secrets of Endier
Player's Secrets of Ilien
Player's Secrets of Medeore
Player's Secrets of Roesone
Player's Secrets of Tuornen

The Gothic Earth Gazetteer: A Masque of the Red Death Accessory
Van Richten's Guide to Fiends

(I am not a Planescape fan, but I would have included the following)
Planes of Conflict
Planes of Law
Planescape Monstrous Compendium Appendix II

 

[Orius]

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.

This was the big reason. TSR wasn't just producing too much, they didn't know what was seeling, or what people would buy. Then on top of that, there are tons of settings designed to sell big like Dragonlance, but when a setting doesn't sell as much as hoped, there's no research or adertising done, but rather another setting is churned out.

TSR tried to support several self-isolating settings in the same intensity, instead of focusing on accessories that could be used with any setting and only a few setting-specific supplements. For isntance, a "core D&D" desert monster supplement could've been used with FR, Al-Qadin, Dark Sun or Greyhawk.

Lots of crossover stuff would have been cool. And it didn't help the rules were different in the different settings. So while FR essentially didn't go much beyond the core rules, you had stuff like Dark Sun, Ravenloft, and Birthright that had their own unique rules that had to be followed. That made stuff more difficult to import into the setting and export out of the setting, while FR stuff could easily be yoinked at will.

Do you have evidence that the game grew in the 2e days?

Sure do, I started playing in 1993, and I bought a good chunk of my D&D library in 1995 and 1996. Of course, at the time I was more of an exception than a rule it would seem, and I feel that WotC released stuff that was markedly better than what TSR was doing.

While I'm not happy about the recycled art in 4e, I'm pretty willing to say that the 4e books have been pretty darn pretty. There's some very, very high quality art there.

2e had great pieces too. Don't get me wrong. But it was just so bloody hit and miss. Do we really want to go back to the black and white line art for the Monster Manual?

D&D has always had recycled art to some degree, at least ever since I've been playing.

I like the full-color art of 2e better than what was produced for 3e and a lot fo the 4e art. But then, the first half of 2e used a lot of black and white interior art because color printing was still fairly expensive. The PHB and DMG were two color, and we got a lot of black and blue line art inside, the full color stuff in the hardcovers and splats were individual plates. The 1995 printings of the core books and PO books were the first to go full color.

For me, the important thing to do is to look at something like the 1995 release schedule, go over it, and then release that there is literally one thing for that whole year that should have gone to the publisher.

...

That one thing that should have been released: Night Below. The entire focus of the year should have been on making that cool and desirable. A tenth of the schedule that they did print would have made as much or more money.

A better example might be 1996, because 1995 was the redesign of the core books. So that likely drew a good chunk of focus away from other stuff. And much of the core focus at the time was on the Player's Option books too. That I think was the big thing for 1995. I don't remember exactly, but the new core books were released around the spring, while PO was released in late summer or autumn. That doesn't mean Night Below should have been skipped or ignored, but it probably should have been part of the marketing. Something like pushing it as a big adventure to break in the new books.

they missed a possibility in breaking out into D&D condoms, though!
"The Burning Balrog!"..."The Blue Bulette!"..."The Wriggly Womb Wyrm!"..."The Rampant Remorhaz!"
ahem

Oh yeah, that's certainly a form of birth control, alright...

 

[Wik]

Gah. I remember these days. Looking back upon the mid nineties, I can now think of them as "the golden days of gaming" But, if I want to be really honest, they were actually the days of "Thank God I didn't have a good internet connection at the time or I would have realized just how damned poor I was".

Seriously. I would get funds here and there, and put them towards D&D products (and, let's face it, other things teenage boys bought in the late 1990s - alcohol, bad music, and more alcohol). While I had the core books, I never amassed much of a collection.
See, while D&D was our game of choice, when we had spare gaming money, it was put towards non TSR products. The problem being that TSR products often required other TSR products to play, while at the same time could not be used for every D&D product. So, you'd be taking a shot in the dark about whether or not you'd have a product you could "completely" use.

An example that is really clear in my memory, more than a decade later. I got something like a hundred bucks for christmas one year, and went down to my FLGS on boxing day when they do a big discount (you'd roll 3d10, and that was the percentage off on your purchase!) On that day, I got the revised Dark Sun boxed set, the Player's Option Skills and Powers, and a big pad of character sheets. I loved all three. EXCEPT...

I couldn't use skills and powers with Dark Sun. And I couldn't use the character sheets for either, without making modifications (and that kind of defeats the purpose of premade character sheets, doesn't it?). Each product was mutually exclusive.

And oh god, it got worse. We all loved the Dark Sun setting - it was (and is) my favourite setting of all time. However, at the time, we didn't have the psionics handbook (the one I bought got stolen - I've had my 2e psionics book stolen TWICE now). We didn't have the monster book, and Dark Sun has a shortage of monsters if you lack that book. I couldn't get my hands on either book, either, due to my own funds shortage.

So, I wound up trading my Dark Sun books for the Forgotten Realms boxed set, because at least I could USE that with what I had.

And this was why we didn't bother with TSR. It was much better to buy FASA games* - one core book as opposed to three, and every book you bought stood alone. If I bought a weapons book, or a cyberware book, I could use ALL of it (sure, there were hints to buy other products, but that's different).

TSR made some good products, and it made some bad ones (I actually liked Gargoyle! though). So has WotC (remember Ghostwalk? Or the book of Vile Darkness? Or the first 3E splatbooks?). The problem, in my mind, is that TSR produced products that often linked up in strange ways, and scared away those consumers who could not afford to be completionists.

* Except BATTLETECH, which tended to reference other Battletech books. But we generally didn't mind, because it was one of those games where we could play without a DM, and that made it special.

 

[Shemeska]

However, at the time, we didn't have the psionics handbook (the one I bought got stolen - I've had my 2e psionics book stolen TWICE now). We didn't have the monster book, and Dark Sun has a shortage of monsters if you lack that book. I couldn't get my hands on either book, either, due to my own funds shortage.

I feel your pain. I've had my Pathfinder Campaign Setting book loaned out and never returned once, and its replacement loaned out and damaged. And while waiting for the revised reprint to come out, it's up on amazon and ebay for $200 on average. And I find myself in -need- of the book for a project right now. Thank God for pdfs.

 

[LurkMonkey]

I feel your pain. I've had my Pathfinder Campaign Setting book loaned out and never returned once, and its replacement loaned out and damaged. And while waiting for the revised reprint to come out, it's up on amazon and ebay for $200 on average. And I find myself in -need- of the book for a project right now. Thank God for pdfs.

Holy crap! Rilly?

Runs to put copy on eBay

 

[JohnRTroy]

It's okay to pontificate back and forth about what TSR should have done.

But what we really need is to get a historical perspective on it. People who worked at TSR should be interviewed, people who were major retailers should be interviewed, people who acquired the company should be interviewed.

Only by sifting through interviews and facts can we get a good picture. Ryan's statement is a good start, but it doesn't ascertain the whole picture. (And I think Ryan's not the best person to check business accumens--he was wrong about several things such as organized play and I think the OGL may not have been a smart long-term business move--no human being is perfect).

So, somebody should do the research. We need a good book or documentary about TSR/WoTC, something akin to the 40 years of GenCon book, a very good book that really shows the history of the con without going into to many biased viewpoints.