D&D General And You May Ask Yourself- How do I play D&D? Commercialization and the Closing of OD&D

[Umbran]

That is rather obvious, though. If you want to sell more rules, the game needs to have more rules.

Or, you be Grant Howitt, and you put out a bunch of one-page games.
Honey Heist and Crash Pandas may not exactly be multi-year-campaign kinds of games, but gosh are they fun.

 

[Helpful NPC Thom]

The Misc. forum is the stuff of legends.

 

[Mannahnin]

The first attempt was the 1977 Holmes Basic Set, which for some reason is probably the most obscure of all D&D editions. What exactly the plans were for this one I don't know, nor am I familiar with what content it actually delivers and how accessible it is. But it came out the same year as the AD&D Monster Manual. I would guess with the Basic Set and the MM, you could run a game out of the box.
The Player's Handbook followed in 1978, and the Dungeon Master's Guide in 1979.

I tried reading the PHB and DMG, and I have to say they are still really esoteric tomes that remained very much incomprehensible to me, though my preconceptions of the d20 systems might have been more a hindrance than a help in that regard.

Now the interesting point that I want to come to is that in 1981, four years after the Holmes Basic Set and Monster Manual, and two years after AD&D was complete with the three rulebooks, TSR created the extremely compact Basic and Expert Sets, B/X. Compared to the three AD&D book, this game is absolutely tiny. The Basic rules and the Expert rules are 64 pages each, which includes all the monsters (2 times 16 pages) and a lot of duplicate material. And also in a font that has probably half the amount of actual text per page.
And it is this version of Dungeons & Dragons that really sold like crazy. To my knowledge, it significantly outsold AD&D, if you include it's second edition BECMI. But it's also a much cheaper product, so I have no clue which of the two games created the most revenue for TSR.

Holmes also sold quite well, and it was the immediate heavy beneficiary of the massive media notoriety that came from the James Dallas Egbert incident.

How a pending lawsuit changed the original Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set

Jon Peterson uncovers the hidden history of the Holmes Basic Set

www.polygon.com

It was a good idea to target a module at beginning dungeon masters — but it also had clear implications for the legal situation. Previously, when Arneson sought a 5% royalty on the whole contents of the Basic Set, he was effectively asking for money that was going into Gygax’s pocket. Now, he would instead be asking for money earmarked for his friend Mike Carr. Carr had negotiated a 2% royalty on the $5.50 cover price of all copies of In Search of the Unknown sold, either in the Basic Set or sold separately.

If anyone hoped this would alter Arneson’s calculus, it came too late: Arneson’s lawsuit would drop in February 1979. But surprisingly, that legal case would not be the biggest D&D news of 1979. In September, the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III, who famously was believed to have become lost in the steam tunnels beneath a Michigan university, would suddenly catapult D&D to mainstream notoriety. And with that, sales of the Basic Set rose dramatically. Right before the steam tunnel incident, the Basic Set might have sold 5,000 copies a month. By the end of 1979, it was trading over 30,000 copies per month, and only going up from there.

With the Basic Set carrying In Search of the Unknown now bringing in nearly 100,000 sales per quarter and rising, the 11 cents per copy due to Mike Carr started to amount to real money, especially in pre-1980 dollars. Those quarterly royalties would likely exceed the annual salary of a starting TSR employee, and if Basic Set sales kept growing, it could easily overtake Carr’s own salary. Carr had some difficulty getting the Blume brothers, Gygax’s business partners, to honor the agreement — though eventually, they did. It turned out a module like this would could bring significant income to its author.

We also have documented cases of folks teaching themselves to play just from the Holmes set, without needing a mentor (Dan "Delta" Collins of Delta's D&D Hotspot and Wandering DMs is one).

It was a success in that vein, but I don't think TSR had entirely settled how they wanted to use it. As I recall John Eric Holmes proposed the idea of the Basic set to introduce people, rather than TSR initiating it. I haven't read my copy of The Game Wizards yet, but it's possible that royalties also factored into why B/X was done a few years later. Maybe he had negotiated a deal that TSR thought was too generous, after the fact. Or it may simply have been that Gary wanted to incorporate rules changes (like variable weapon damage) which Holmes had not, because Holmes based his set more on the three original little brown OD&D booklets, not anything that came after.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I used to think that @Snarf Zagyg got a hard time from some people on these forums for no good reason, but based on having looked at that thread at his behest, I need to reconsider.

In fairness, if anyone ever says that something is too obvious, and no one can dispute it ...

Just remember that you can never truly understand how often you can work out if you work out every other day. I mean, really, how many days are there in a week? Is a week Sunday to Sunday? When do you even start counting?

It's one of the mysteries of life that we can never truly solve.

 

[Maxperson]

I used to think that @Snarf Zagyg got a hard time from some people on these forums for no good reason, but based on having looked at that thread at his behest, I need to reconsider.

I only got as far as the guys arguing about how many times a week you can work out if you go every other day.

 

[Fenris-77]

I've found that, for the most part, my answer to the question how many days can I work out if I work out every other day is usually one, or none. Let's call that the new math.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I've found that, for the most part, my answer to the question how many days can I work out if I work out every other day is usually one, or none. Let's call that the new math.

Really, it depends on the definition of working out....

I try to do bicep curls on the reg!

 

[Fenris-77]

Really, it depends on the definition of working out....

I try to do bicep curls on the reg!

I switch arms every pint in an attempt to not get huge tennis arm on my pint drinking side.

 

[Umbran]

LOOK AT IT.

I think we need to factor this in to the "lather, rinse, repeat" discussion over in the other thread.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I think we need to factor this in to the "lather, rinse, repeat" discussion over in the other thread.

See, Umbran, there's two kinds of players of TTRPGs.

First, you got the people who, when they agree to play D&D every day, only manage to get in 3 sessions most weeks.

But then you get the other types of players. You know, the real dedicated types. They play four times a week, week in, week out.

And quite frankly, all frustrations in gaming come from a failure to design games to cater to one type, or the other. We need to design our games to either cater to the hardcore, four-a-week player, or the people who are insufficiently galaxy-brained and can't muster up the necessary reasoning to play that much.

You've heard it here first!