D&D 5E I feel like the surveys gaslit WotC about """"Backwards Compatibility""""

[Yaarel]

Most monsters were literally the same in 2e, just with a stat block with more information.

There were a few broad exceptions- the various fiends, dragons, and (IIRC) giants- but overall, the monsters were mostly just expanded, not actually changed (much).

Some things that were errors in 1e, like illustrations mismatching text descriptions, were reinvented with explanations thus both versions becoming canon in 2e. One could see how the lore evolved.

 

[ECMO3]

conveniently ignoring the 'but I am far from certain on that' part. It was specifically not an option because they printed too much and did not price stuff properly, selling things at a loss.

Exactly. So the new edition failed.

That would have happened with 1e just as well as with 2e, this is not something that is due to the edition.

Perhaps it would have, but it didn't.

If it had happened and there was no 2E then 2E would not have been a failure or a success, it would not have existed.

As it is IRL though 2E did exist and it bankrupted WOTC

 

[mamba]

Exactly. So the new edition failed.

as I said repeatedly, these mistakes are unrelated to the edition, and while 2e did not manage to overcome the incompetence of TSR management, it kept them alive longer than 1e would have. So no, it did not fail.

As it is IRL though 2E did exist and it bankrupted WOTC

TSR went bankrupt, the cause was not 2e though, it just happened during 2e.

Your statement is like saying the leading cause of death is being alive, since you would not die unless you were alive at the time of death

 

[ECMO3]

Most monsters were literally the same in 2e, just with a stat block with more information.

There were a few broad exceptions- the various fiends, dragons, and (IIRC) giants- but overall, the monsters were mostly just expanded, not actually changed (much).

No they weren't. The first 2E adventure I converted was Dragon Mountain and I think i needed to change every single monster in it (except the custom monsters).

To start with even when the stats were exactly the same the mechanics were not.

Kobolds in 2E for example have a 20 THACO, they need a 19 to hit AC 1, 20 to hit AC 0 and 21 to hit AC -1 ....

In 1E they need a 20 to hit on any AC from 1 to I believe -3.

2HD monsters in 1E needed a 16 to hit AC0, in 2E THACO was 18 for 2HD monsters, you had to get to 5 HD before you could hit AC0 with a 16 in 2E.

This made a 2HD 1E Myconoid far more powerful than a 2HD 2E Myconoid.

At the upper end of the scale this was actually the other way around!

 

[ECMO3]

as I said repeatedly, these mistakes are unrelated to the edition, and while 2e did not manage to overcome the incompetence of TSR management, it kept them alive longer than 1e would have. So no, it did not fail.

Fine it is unrelated and the edition still failed.

If a hail storm and flood trashes my Corvette, it isn't because my Corvette was flawed, but my Corvette is still wrecked and it is not correct to say it is a good car.

Your statement is like saying the leading cause of death is being alive, since you would not die unless you were alive at the time of death

It is exactly like that.

If a person dies from being hit by a car at age 25 you can say that cancer was not the cause of death, but you can't say he lived to 30 or that he was successful at achieving long life when in fact he didn't

 

[Mannahnin]

Exactly. So the new edition failed.

As it is IRL though 2E did exist and it bankrupted WOTC

Nah. The company failed. 2E itself certainly didn't bankrupt TSR. Several factors went into that, and overproducing products which cost too much relative to their price wasn't a failing of the overall rules set which SOME of those products were printed for.

 

[James Gasik]

Yeah, because it's not just 2e, Non-Advanced D&D or even Buck Rogers- there's also Alternity, Amazing Engine, Dragonlance Saga, Dragonstrike, Gamma World 4e, and all the darned novels to share the blame for TSR's downfall. You don't need all those games to fail in order to crash a company. One could be a smash hit and you'd still go down the drain if the others became an anchor weighing you down.

 

[Mannahnin]

Yeah, because it's not just 2e, Non-Advanced D&D or even Buck Rogers- there's also Alternity, Amazing Engine, Dragonlance Saga, Dragonstrike, Gamma World 4e, and all the darned novels to share the blame for TSR's downfall. You don't need all those games to fail in order to crash a company. One could be a smash hit and you'd still go down the drain if the others became an anchor weighing you down.

Plus all the board games, Spellfire, the trivia game, spell cards and similar accessories, Dragon Dice, First Quest, DragonStrike...

Plus the factoring agreement taking, what was it, 10 or 15% off the top of TSR's revenues? (Edit: apparently it was 20%)

 

[ECMO3]

Nah. The company failed. 2E itself certainly didn't bankrupt TSR. Several factors went into that, and overproducing products which cost too much relative to their price wasn't a failing of the overall rules set which SOME of those products were printed for.

Ok, so stop telling me how 2E was not a failure and start telling me how great 2E was financially. Tell me how it saved WOTC. Tell me how it was a great business success.

Saying 2E didn't cause the failure and saying it was a success are fundamentally two different things.

While you are at it tell me how 4E was a success, because that was a new edition too and without defending that example too you still are falling short of defending the claim.

You all are driving this discussion well off topic. The claim here that I disagree with is that creating a new edition is a "good business tactic" and the implication is this is pretty much always successful or always good and that is certainly not true historically, no matter how many strawman defenses of 2E you put up.

 

[Mannahnin]

Ok, so stop telling me how 2E was not a failure and start telling me how great 2E was financially. Tell me how it saved WOTC. Tell me how it was a great business success.

Saying 2E didn't cause the failure and saying it was a success are fundamentally two different things.

While you are at it tell me how 4E was a success, because that was a new edition too and without defending that example too you still are falling short of defending the claim.

You all are driving this discussion well off topic. The claim here that I disagree with is that creating a new edition is a "good business tactic" and the implication is this is pretty much always successful or always good and that is certainly not true historically, no matter how many strawman defenses of 2E you put up.

I'm not entirely clear on what definitions you're using, and trying to put them together from your posts doesn't quite make sense to me.

You can review the sales data Ben Riggs shared around the release of Slaying the Dragon. We don't have internal data on sales TARGETS for 2E, so it's not possible for us to judge definitively whether it failed to meet its targets. We know it sold very well on release, with numbers in a similar ballpark to the 1E books, but seems to have had a faster falloff. Of course, '79-'83 was the original fad boom period for D&D, so I don't think we can reasonably set the bar there. In 1989 D&D was not the same kind of pop culture phenomenon. But it was still a tentpole product and sold millions of units of the core books. The products which seem to have sold badly are the proliferation of settings. Which competed against one another.

I don't think it is normal to see Saving The Company as the bar for success of any product, unless the company is in imminent danger of demise and that's its actual goal.* TSR was no longer in imminent danger of demise by 1989, so 2E was not tasked with saving the company. It was aimed at making a more palatable product which wouldn't offend Jim Ward's Angry Mothers from Heck, at making a more CLEAR and UNDERSTANDABLE product without opaque and near-unusable subsystems like 1E's initiative, psionics, and various unarmed combat systems, and at supporting Trad-style play in addition to legacy Classic/Gygaxian play. It succeeded in those goals. Obviously it also needed to sell well, as a tentpole product, but TSR was increasingly expanding the fiction and board game product lines and computer RPG licensing, and the company was not relying on AD&D to carry the entire company.

4E we actually have data to support the argument that it didn't meet sales goals. That it never met the then-goal of being a Franchise Brand hitting 50 million in revenue with a path to 100 million. And that, at least once the publication schedule dropped off toward the end of its run, it opened the door for a competitor to tie and even pass them in sales. Something unprecedented in the history of RPGs.

*(Like, it might be reasonable to judge 1E's Unearthed Arcana by that metric, as it was literally an emergency cash grab. Which makes it an interesting point of comparison. From a sales perspective it obviously was a success. Although from a rules perspective and as a physical book it's been widely decried and criticized.)