2e.... more flavor than 3e?

[Storm Raven]

So your players were idiots who didn't know how to listen. That's not the fault of the game designing approach.

Yes, it is the fault of the game designing approach. Anyhting that unneccessarily makes my job as a DM more difficult to run my campaign world as I envision it is an impediment to my game. Impediments to my game is a mark of bad game design.

They came to the game to certain expectations that they obtained from reading the published material. They had to be told that those expectations were wrong for the campaign, and those expectations would crop up all through every campaign. "dwarves are like this", "elves are like that", "orcs do this", "demons are like that" and on and on. The fluff gets in the way. After a few years of 2e, I switched to GURPS - because GURPS doesn't burden you with lots of useless fluff.

More common is the opposite problem - what if you want to keep the fluff but use a different set of rules? What if you wanted to convert the book to a new edition of the game? What if you want to run the game using GURPS or FUDGE or Storyteller or Runequest or HeroQuest? Or what if you want to make up your own rules? Or what if you want to run it free-form, with no rules at all?

The fluff, very often, becomes mostly useless when translated to another game system. For example, the 2e fluff concerning magic item creation is completely useless for 3e, or GURPS or most other games, because those have radically different assumptions built into their rules concerning how magic items operate, let alone how they are created. Most fluff translates very poorly.

All that rules crap, whether 2e or 3e, becomes useless in such an instance. Useless filler, leaving no reason to buy the product at all.

If you don't want to actually play the game, then maybe buying the game rules is not for you. People who buy the game books to use with other systems is a secondary market at best for most RPG publishers - catering to such a subset is a sure recipe for failure.

All the beautiful fluff from 2e is still as valid as it ever was, while the rules-oriented material is, if you no longer play 2e, nothing but dead trees.

The fluff for 2e started out being useless to me. It is even more useless now.

 

[Pants]

All the beautiful fluff from 2e is still as valid as it ever was,

Assuming the person likes the flavor.

 

[Arnwyn]

I'm curious to know if the generic setting 2e books really had more flavor than the generic setting 3e books.

You want the objective truth of this?

...

Good luck with that!

I'm not sure if the market reflects your ideas here. In 2e, flavor dominated, and TSR nearly went under (for a variety of reasons). Demand for D&D game books dipped during that era, despite many hard-core gamers' fond memories of the glittering purple prose and fluffy beauty of the text. When 3e came out, demand spiked, and a couple years of crunch filled books drove the market. Over the last year or two, WotC has been producing lots more "flavorful" books with less rules and more crunch, and everyhone is talking about how the TRPG market is crashing.

Without adequate and specific data, I suspect your correlation is tremendously flawed.

 

[Crothian]

And this demonstrates my point. D&D was more successful between 1979-1989 than it ever was in the 1990s when it produced piles of fluff.

But that was more because second eidtion caused people to leave the game and there was more compitition and the RPG Industry ran into problems with the CCG explosition. Its not like the fluff was the reason for this.

 

[Glyfair]

Yes, since it has the D&D logo. I wouldn't consider it new, though, since the setting existed during the 2e days. (Which was part of the reason I mentioned Warcraft may not count.)

What about Wheel of Time & Diablo? Did they have the D&D logo? Arguably, the settings weren't new.

 

[Greg K]

But that was more because second eidtion caused people to leave the game .

Was it actually second edition that caused people to leave the game or did more people just happen to leave during that period? Second edition, kept my friends and I playing AD&D a little longer than we would have. However, we were bound to leave anyway. Exposure to numerous other systems just left us jaded on the mechanical side of AD&D despite liking the settings and several supplements.

 

[Greg K]

Yes, it is the fault of the game designing approach. Anyhting that unneccessarily makes my job as a DM more difficult to run my campaign world as I envision it is an impediment to my game. Impediments to my game is a mark of bad game design.

They came to the game to certain expectations that they obtained from reading the published material. They had to be told that those expectations were wrong for the campaign, and those expectations would crop up all through every campaign. "dwarves are like this", "elves are like that", "orcs do this", "demons are like that" and on and on. The fluff gets in the way.

No, its not the fault of the game. Its a problem with the player(s) not comprehending that a DM running his or her world is free to deviate from the published material.
I don't consider it a much different problem from many 3.x players on WOTC's boards, who expect the DM to use every rule supplement written by WOTC and complain that disallowing book X or rule y from book z means you are not playing DND correctly or whom get tee'd off about GMs who house rule changes to classes, etc. to capture a particular flavor for the campaign.

After a few years of 2e, I switched to GURPS - because GURPS doesn't burden you with lots of useless fluff.

Really? I switched, because I thought GURPS had better mechanics.

 

[Ogre Mage]

2nd edition had better flavor and fluff, but its rules and crunchy bits stunk it up.

 

[el-remmen]

I think a perfect example of 2E fluff w/rules that really worked was Pirates of the Fallen Stars.

I loved that book. I have never run an FR campaign and likely never will, but my homebrew has lots of little islands, ships and pirates. The book had rules for ships and sailing that were more detailed than the generic ones in the DMG and came along with a ton of NPCs and ship names and descriptions of islands, etc. . .that worked perfectly well in my game with slight tweaking.

I haven't come across any 3E content that has worked for me the same way - but then again, maybe I am not looking as hard as I once did as I feel I have all the source and inspiration for stuff I will ever need already.

 

[el-remmen]

Oh, but I wanted to add - that PotFS was a rare book - and a lot of 2E books while having what i considered a great source for mining things for my own homebrew had some horrible rules that I would have to house rule.

The Complete series varied wildly in the level of power it gave kits.

Just compare the Complete Book of Thieves (the first I think) to the Complete Book of Elves. . .

then again, the elf book had some wonky "fluff" in it, too (artificial limbs, anyone?) - but I loved the stories and stuff in there and the detailing of the stages of an elf's life.