I don't want 5E, I want a definitive D&D (the Monopoly model)

[Hussar]

/edit to add

Just a quick Google turned up this - FIFTY FIVE SF and Fantasy Movies to watch out for in 2011

That, I think, sums it up right there. Granted, not all of that list is stuff I'd really count as genre, but, by the same token, there's stuff in the ballpark of either SF or Fantasy coming up pretty much every WEEK this year.

 

[Dausuul]

This is all just my recollection, and everyone seems to have a different take on the history of D&D: There were some moments when D&D became somewhat mainstream. It has just been on a popularity decline since the mid-80s or so (with a few brief booms if I remember). Even through the 90s though you could find the red boxed set in toy stores. I know because I bought a bunch of them for the heck of it.

There is a difference between D&D being in mainstream stores and selling in mainstream stores. Anybody can get product onto shelves if they're willing to pump enough money into it, and TSR was; that doesn't mean it will sell once it's there. As prosfilae points out, a flood of returns from big bookstores played a part in TSR's slide into bankruptcy.

Efforts to bring D&D to the masses have not ended well. TSR tried it and it only hastened their death spiral. WotC tried it with 4E and ended up creating a big new competitor. We're a niche hobby, always have been. I applaud efforts to widen the appeal of D&D, but wagering big bucks on taking the game mainstream is a fool's bet.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Let's take TV, just for a second. I watched the second season of Legend of the Seeker tonight. I watched Lost through it's entire run. I'm watching Warehouse 13 tomorrow night. Andromeda, Battlestar Gallactica, Stargate (at one point THREE concurrently running shows), Buffy, Firefly, Fringe and that's just what's on my Japanese TV.

A very different situation. Cable was less widespread and it wasn't like you had the kinds of cable programming and variety you get today.

And, look at the movies you named. When I said B grade movies, that's pretty much what you listed. Deathstalker? Conan? Time Bandits? Krull? Sure, I LOVE those movies. But, I'm a geek of a certain age. OF COURSE I love those movies.

Conan wasn't a B movie. It was a big budget film for its time. You are also leaving out movies like Excaliber or Clash of the Titans. These weren't movies only geeks were watching at the time. And for kids you had countless films like The Neverending Story, Dark Crystal, Star Wars.

But, compare to what you get now. Harry Potter features top of the line actors. Real A list people. Lord of the Rings has some pretty serious names. Even things like Disney's The Wizard's Apprentice has Nicholas Cage in it. Never mind the Pirates of the Carribean movies.

Clash of the Titans had Laurence Olivier, conan had Max Von Sidow (James Earl Jones, but don't know how big he was then), Time Bandits had the Sean Connery, Dune had Sting, Star Wars had Alec Guiness and Peter Cushing, Secret of NIMH had Dom Delouise and Derek Jacobi. Hawk Slayer had Jack Pallance, Last Unicorn had Mia Farrow and Angela Lansbury.

I love 80's fantasy movies. I do. But, I'm under no illusions as to how bad they really are, and how outside of mainstream.

I think you are underestimating how mainstream many of these films were. They might look pretty bad in hindsight, but I remember many of them having star power and high visibility.

Why not? And I'm honestly curious about this. Like I said, you've got healthy, strong growing online communities. You've got one company that's growing like gangbusters (Paizo) producing a version of D&D. The other big one is still doing pretty well from appearances - the DDI seems to be pretty successful. Convention attendance is up to record numbers. We have Facebook apps for D&D coming. Outside of D&D, the Underworld movies seem to have done pretty well. D&D and other gaming fiction seems to be healthy and easy to find.

Honestly this is based on what I've seen locally in the gaming community and on what I've been advised as I've started my own gaming company. I am just not seeing that the hobby is growing, more that it is becoming more insulated. We have a strong base of gamers. But paizo grew by eating into wizards customer base. I don't think they attracted many new players. And 4E, by isn't where wizards wants it to be. You could be right, and I certainly hope you are (it is in my financial interest for you to be correct). But I just believe at the moment that there is less new blood coming into the hobby than in years past. Hopefully I am incorrect.

Heck, I see Forgotten Realms fiction translated into Japanese at the local bookstore (R A Salvatore stuff mostly) and I live in the back end of nowhere in Japan.

I don't know if I would use Japan though as an accurate measure of what is going on in the states and in Europe. And you are talking about one (highly successful) fictional line based on a D&D setting.

So, why do you think the hobby is shrinking?

I don't know. I think it has booms and busts. There was a period in the 80s when I think it was a new thing, and really more of a craze. In the 90s, I think the geek stigma faded a bit, so by the time 3E came out, it had some broader reach. But I believe the geek stigma may be coming back to a degree (this is really hard to demonstrate and I really hope I am wrong, but I just get more of a "oh you play D&D, isn't that for geeks" kind of a vibe these days). I also think the vocabulary we use as gamers and the mechanics themselves have started to present a barrier to new players. Not to mention the splat book model (where you have a bunch of hardcovers that probably look similar and could potentially confuse new gamers).

Again, I could be wrong on this one. I think it changes by gamers making the activity more visible again and by society being less judgmental of "geeks" or "nerds". It could be that this is the case with young people though and I am just looking at the world from the vantage point of my age.

 

[Bedrockgames]

There is a difference between D&D being in mainstream stores and selling in mainstream stores. Anybody can get product onto shelves if they're willing to pump enough money into it, and TSR was; that doesn't mean it will sell once it's there. As prosfilae points out, a flood of returns from big bookstores played a part in TSR's slide into bankruptcy.

Efforts to bring D&D to the masses have not ended well. TSR tried it and it only hastened their death spiral. WotC tried it with 4E and ended up creating a big new competitor. We're a niche hobby, always have been. I applaud efforts to widen the appeal of D&D, but wagering big bucks on taking the game mainstream is a fool's bet.

My understanding is the early efforts to get books in book stores and toy stores wasn't TSR's major issue. TSR had a lot of issues. But they went bust in 97-98 or so, long after they had tried to break into mainstream markets.

 

[Hussar]

Clash of the Titans had Laurence Olivier, conan had Max Von Sidow (James Earl Jones, but don't know how big he was then), Time Bandits had the Sean Connery, Dune had Sting, Star Wars had Alec Guiness and Peter Cushing, Secret of NIMH had Dom Delouise and Derek Jacobi. Hawk Slayer had Jack Pallance, Last Unicorn had Mia Farrow and Angela Lansbury.

Sean Connery also did that Gawain and the Green Knight movie. Mr Connery has done a LOT of very, very B movies.

And Star Wars was a B movie. By that point in time Alec Guiness wasn't exactly at the height of his career. Conan starred a no-name actor that no one had ever heard of before.

I'll say it again FIFTY FIVE genre movies in this year alone. That's one a week, every week. And it's not like this is new. This has been going on for the past ten years. I'm fairly willing to be that there are more genre movies hitting the mainstream theaters in the past ten years than in the previous thirty or forty years.

This is a very, very good time to be a genre fan.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Sean Connery also did that Gawain and the Green Knight movie. Mr Connery has done a LOT of very, very B movies.

And Star Wars was a B movie. By that point in time Alec Guiness wasn't exactly at the height of his career. Conan starred a no-name actor that no one had ever heard of before.

Sure, the first one was a B movie. By the third that wasn't the case at all.

Think you are being a little dismissive of Connery. What about Laurence Olivier?

I'll say it again FIFTY FIVE genre movies in this year alone. That's one a week, every week. And it's not like this is new. This has been going on for the past ten years. I'm fairly willing to be that there are more genre movies hitting the mainstream theaters in the past ten years than in the previous thirty or forty years.

Again, how many fantasy films this year that aren't straight to DVD or made-for TV?

I think a lot of this is people just remember the successes or the movies that achieved cult status. The films that came and went fade from memory.

This is a very, very good time to be a genre fan.

Sure, I don't disagree. But the early 80s was a much better time to be a fantasy fan in terms of volume.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think there are definitely differences, but these are minor compared to the differences between editions of D&D. I've played Monopoly since I was a kid, and the game has basically had the same structure and been recognizeable since I first tried it in 1980. Compare D&D from 1980 to today and I think you have alot more drastic changes.

Until 4E, you could use materials pretty close to interchangeably, just flipping AC for the pre-3E editions. A lot of what makes Castles & Crusades great, IMO, is the almost seamless way you can use it with any pre-3E version.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Until 4E, you could use materials pretty close to interchangeably, just flipping AC for the pre-3E editions. A lot of what makes Castles & Crusades great, IMO, is the almost seamless way you can use it with any pre-3E version.

I would agree with this. In my opinion it feels like much the same game from 1E to 3E, and then takes a much bigger jump with 4E. However I do think the changes from 2E to 3E are greater than the changes from 1E to 2E (though in some ways 3E brought back a lot of familiar 1E elements).

 

[Dausuul]

Until 4E, you could use materials pretty close to interchangeably, just flipping AC for the pre-3E editions.

Say what?

Sure, you could use AD&D stuff in 3E... as long as you didn't mind calculating Fort/Ref/Will saves from scratch, adjusting hit points and damage to a radically different scale, figuring up touch and flat-footed AC, making up ability scores for monsters, assigning skill points and feats, figuring iterative attacks, converting multiclass characters, and a billion other details.

1E and 2E were close enough to use material from one in the other pretty freely, but there were big translation issues between AD&D (either edition) and 3E. Maybe not quite as big as pre-4E to 4E, but plenty big enough.

 

[Pentius]

But I believe the geek stigma may be coming back to a degree (this is really hard to demonstrate and I really hope I am wrong, but I just get more of a "oh you play D&D, isn't that for geeks" kind of a vibe these days). I also think the vocabulary we use as gamers and the mechanics themselves have started to present a barrier to new players. Not to mention the splat book model (where you have a bunch of hardcovers that probably look similar and could potentially confuse new gamers).

Again, I could be wrong on this one. I think it changes by gamers making the activity more visible again and by society being less judgmental of "geeks" or "nerds". It could be that this is the case with young people though and I am just looking at the world from the vantage point of my age.

Well, this is just an anecdote, but since we're going off personal observations anyway...

Two or three weeks ago now I was hanging out with one of my friends, who is also one of my players(and a new one, to boot). We were holding the game at his apartment, and as DM I made sure to be early, so we were just hanging out on the steps, talking about the upcoming game. No less than three of his neighbors and two passersby stopped what they were doing, came over to us, and wanted to know more about our upcoming game, namely, if they could join. One of these guys was a gamer already, the rest just had friends or siblings that played or had played, or had heard of it and figured the rest of fantasy stuff was cool, so why not? I had to turn down five potential players, in one day(heck, in about half an hour) because my group is already full(and two of those are new to the hobby, too). If we had had an extra outgoing DM that day, who knows?

For reference, my group and I are all mid-20's and by looks I'd say the guys we talked to that day were, too.