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Look, I'm not at all saying that people shouldn't have gotten angry. I think ultimately the leak and subsequent backlash was a net good. Even if WotC had already decided to completely reverse course after meeting resistance from the TPP, it was good that they got very strident feedback from the...

Their strategy as I understand it, was to move to a new license* in which they could have more control over digital offerings, and obtain royalties from TPPs. To this end, they invited major TPPs to hear favorable term offers under NDA, with the intention of obtaining TPP buy-in for the move to...

“Leaking the draft OGL 1.1 and term sheets given under NDA,” was not part of their strategy.

At the risk of generalizing too much from my own experience, I think there were many like our group: we started with B/X, but moved onto BECMI. So we were used to readable typeface and Elmore/Easley art. The AD&D books were great, but already felt terribly old-fashioned. So when 2nd Ed. came...

Let’s go back a little bit to 1998. F.E.A.R. publishes the third edition of Tokyo N◎va, called Tokyo N◎va: The Revolution. In that RPG, they introduce the “scene system.” I made a separate, more extensive write-up on the scene system here, but to summarize, the scene system operated by...

For what it’s worth, Usenet was a thing in the 90s. And in my time on rec.games.frp.misc and rec.games.frp.dnd, there just wasn’t much edition warring. At worst, 1e folks might have been disdainful of TSR’s capitulation to the Angry Mothers from Heck, to which 2e folks would just respond, “Cool...

You know, I was prepared to disagree with GreyLord and point out how 2nd Edition gutted AD&D of its exploration procedures, but looking at them together. There's not as much daylight as I thought. In fact, I'm not sure someone coming to 1e cold, without experience in OD&D, Holmes, or B/X, would...

Echohawk, using sale order numbers is as cunning as a fox appointed Professor of Cunning at the University of Oxford. Even at the low end of these estimates, I marvel that just 10 years ago, the idea of D&D reaching the $50 million/year in revenue needed to become a Core Brand was thought...

This post was originally going to be part of the next installment in my A History of TRPGs in Japan thread, but the subject matter is so rich I felt it would be too long. And also, I think this might lead to more discussion, which might derail the History thread. There's actually a bit of info...

The title of this part is not poetic liberty on my part; it is indeed what Japanese role-players call it. It even has its own Japanese Wikipedia page! Although the 1996 release of Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon Trading Card Game had a tremendous impact on the industry, signs that winter was...

One small correction: MAGIUS was developed in 1995, not 1985.

The surprise hit of Sword World RPG in 1989 had two notable effects. For one, there was a notable explosion of games, from a wide variety of publishers. 1989 saw the release of six new RPGs, which was pretty par for the course since 1985. In 1990, that number doubled, with only five coming from...

Before I read Sword World, I expected it to be basically a fantasy heartbreaker D&D knock-off. Then when I read it, I found it to be a very different set of rules with a distinct aesthetic and an interesting, integrated setting. Still, when I read it, the character generation seemed baroque, and...

Group SNE went gangbusters in the late 1980s, but there were many other developments, as well. First, in 1986, Hobby Japan released a Japanese translation of Call of Cthulhu. But at this time, fantasy role-playing was the taste of the day, and the release went relatively unnoticed. Cthulhu...

I read this as “I like 1e and lichess,” and thought, “Okay, that makes sense.”

A note about putative “mothballing.” D&D was never under any direct threat of being mothballed. Not during 4e or 5e. When Ryan Dancey first mentioned “mothballing” it was in the context of a worst-case scenario for any Non-Core Brand at Hasbro. It also had a specific meaning. Not a reduced...

This next part will focus more on GroupSNE, partly because it is probably the most influential organization on TRPGs in Japan, but also because two of my sources for this are by Hitoshi Yasuda, so I have the most information about them. I looked for some sources by or about the other groups, but...

One day in January, 1983, Hitoshi Yasuda’s phone rang. It was, to his surprise, Koichi Sato, president of Hobby Japan. “Yasuda-san,” he said, “we’d like you to translate Traveller.” It was a dream come true for Yasuda, the perfect combination of his two loves, science fiction and RPGs, and his...

So if we go back to the primordial beginnings of TRPGs in Japan, if one looked around a local toy store or hobby shop in Tokyo, and that shop carried imported board games, one might have found an RPG box set or two. The box set would have been in English, so if you felt comfortable with English...

I ran a session using this last week, so I'd thought I'd give some thoughts. Let's first note what Maps is not. There's a reason they don't call it a VTT. They only ever refer to it as the "Maps tool." Beyond the certain desire to distinguish it from the 3d VTT, I'd say this is also because in...