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5e most conservative edition yet? (In terms of new settings)
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7989966" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>I mean, we're talking like 1992 vs 1998 so six years, yeah that's a difference. Culturally and in terms of what RPGs were being played it was huge, because that's "before the world wide web" to "huge numbers of people have the internet", and RPGers were particularly likely to.</p><p></p><p>And I don't think a single other person here has admitted that it was an extremely difficult time in the RPG industry during the 1990s. Everyone wants to pretend TSR suffered solely because of incompetence, because its a much neater, cleaner story, and features villains and has WotC as lovely bunch of saviours.</p><p></p><p>But that's not the whole story. TSR were an messy and often-incompetent company, for sure, but the double-blow of the rise of other RPGs which captured the zeitgeist of the 1990s and the "youth" of that era (such as myself), and the rise of Magic: The Gathering, which both impinged on RPG profits, and caused RPG companies to think that they had to find an equivalent of it (WW did this by licensing VtM stuff to WotC for Jyhad/VTES, god knows how much money they'd have made if they'd figured out how to do it themselves, it was pretty successful, unlike Dragon Dice), meant they were dealing with a much harder situation, more fluid, more complex, and evolving than people in the '80s or in the '00s.</p><p></p><p>I mean, all that said, the basic competence of WotC, in so many ways (not least the genius of the OGL) was an incredible contrast, so there is that. I do feel like Dancey hyped the incompetence of TSR a bit - some of what he described in shocked terms was fairly normal for a company in its death throes (warehouses full of unsold stock and so on), and he was always really good at telling a story (probably be a great DM though I dunno if he was into that).</p><p></p><p>I'm sorry if this all seems a bit needlessly contrarian, btw. I'm not intending to be. I just don't like it when stories get simplified and things which were big at the time (the rise of WW, the challenge of MtG, and so on) get removed from the story.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 7989966, member: 18"] I mean, we're talking like 1992 vs 1998 so six years, yeah that's a difference. Culturally and in terms of what RPGs were being played it was huge, because that's "before the world wide web" to "huge numbers of people have the internet", and RPGers were particularly likely to. And I don't think a single other person here has admitted that it was an extremely difficult time in the RPG industry during the 1990s. Everyone wants to pretend TSR suffered solely because of incompetence, because its a much neater, cleaner story, and features villains and has WotC as lovely bunch of saviours. But that's not the whole story. TSR were an messy and often-incompetent company, for sure, but the double-blow of the rise of other RPGs which captured the zeitgeist of the 1990s and the "youth" of that era (such as myself), and the rise of Magic: The Gathering, which both impinged on RPG profits, and caused RPG companies to think that they had to find an equivalent of it (WW did this by licensing VtM stuff to WotC for Jyhad/VTES, god knows how much money they'd have made if they'd figured out how to do it themselves, it was pretty successful, unlike Dragon Dice), meant they were dealing with a much harder situation, more fluid, more complex, and evolving than people in the '80s or in the '00s. I mean, all that said, the basic competence of WotC, in so many ways (not least the genius of the OGL) was an incredible contrast, so there is that. I do feel like Dancey hyped the incompetence of TSR a bit - some of what he described in shocked terms was fairly normal for a company in its death throes (warehouses full of unsold stock and so on), and he was always really good at telling a story (probably be a great DM though I dunno if he was into that). I'm sorry if this all seems a bit needlessly contrarian, btw. I'm not intending to be. I just don't like it when stories get simplified and things which were big at the time (the rise of WW, the challenge of MtG, and so on) get removed from the story. [/QUOTE]
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