Ben Riggs Releases Historical Sales Numbers for D&D Settings

[Ruin Explorer]

They put them together, and published through random House...but TSR was responsible for returns, which ultimately blew up in their faces.

OH BOY wow damn that's not a great deal TSR.

 

[Parmandur]

OH BOY wow damn that's not a great deal TSR.

They were paid by Random House with advances on novels and game books. So tSR would pump out novels and gamebooks every year to collect their advances, and hope they didn't have to pay random house too much for returns, or would pump out books to cover the returns cost with more advances. What happened in '96 was that Random House had so many returns they didn't want to.pay any more advances, and the bill was fully due.

 

[Mezuka]

Despite how we view 1e and 2e now, back then there was definitely a stripe of "why would I buy a 1e book when 2e is out now" going on and I suspect retailers were burned by it.

Actually, some people who tried 2e didn't like it and returned to 1e. I've read on an old school forum they continued buying 1e core books, for new players, after 2e was out.

 

[Dire Bare]

Was TSR even the one publishing the novels back then? They sure weren't later, and WotC aren't now.

Yes, TSR published their own novels back in the day . . . in partnership with Random House. TSR staff did all of the commissions (for both words and art), hired the writers, editing, marketing . . . basically they did all the work except the actual printing and distribution to the book trade. The partnership wasn't a bad deal for TSR, they focused on their strengths and let Random House focus on theirs. And it made TSR a LOT of money and the various D&D novel lines dominated mass market bookstore shelves at the time, and even helped usher in an era of tie-in fiction that other publishers jumped in on. (Although, Star Trek had already been doing it for a while before Dragonlance hit the shelves).

What sunk TSR was shady and incompetent business practices across their entire business, and eventually the market changed and the novels weren't returning what they used to . . . . and then when TSR couldn't pay their bills to Random House, there was no one left to get those books to bookstore shelves anyway.

 

[Parmandur]

Actually, some people who tried 2e didn't like it and returned to 1e. I've read on an old school forum they continued buying 1e core books, for new players, after 2e was out.

Doesn't seem odd, people are still doing that today.

 

[Mezuka]

Doesn't seem odd, people are still doing that today.

Never said it was odd. But today they buy them from Drivethru, not from FLGS as in the 80s.

 

[Parmandur]

Never said it was odd. But today they buy them from Drivethru, not from FLGS as in the 80s.

Well, TSR had flooded the market, so there were copies to move.

 

[Nikosandros]

Well, TSR had flooded the market, so there were copies to move.

I've read somewhere that the 1e manuals were kept in print for some time after 2e came out.

 

[Mannahnin]

Keep in mind what else is going on at the time - in 1989 TSR published 2e. The huge number of returns of unsold Greyhawk Adventures is probably because it came out literally months before the new edition dropped. Despite how we view 1e and 2e now, back then there was definitely a stripe of "why would I buy a 1e book when 2e is out now" going on and I suspect retailers were burned by it.

I'm not really sure I buy this, because being around then, that wasn't an issue I saw at all. On the contrary, there was a lot of "buy this even though it's 1E, because it's still totally usable. And if you look at the sales of OA, a deep-1E book, they're low but not impacted by this, unlike GH.

I definitely saw this. I think what you're saying is more true of modules, and certainly some folks did mix the editions freely. But I knew a whole lot of gamers (and I generally was one) who generally saw the two editions as sufficiently different that they didn't want to bother with conversion work.

I don't think it helped that Greyhawk Adventures is also just kind of a bad book. Even Jim Ward concedes that he was super rushed writing it and couldn't get in adequate testing time for the novel mechanics, like the section on zero level characters. The cover art is classic, but I finally sold my copy off to a collector friend some years back (now kind of kicking myself, considering the prices today) because every time I read the thing I found it remarkably lacking in material I would actually want to use in a game.

 

[Nikosandros]

When I first got the 2e PHB, I had recently started a huge AD&D campaign which was full of stuff missing in 2e: we had an illusionist, a monk and a cavalier-paladin from UA. It just felt natural to us to mix the two editions... For a long time, I had on the table the PHB, UA and 2e PHB.