Nebulous
Legend
I'm tellin' ya man, if WotC can figure out how to give us more free time, they'd see a huge spike in sales!They should figure out how to design a better work week....
Yeah, but they still wouldn't sell it as a pdf!

I'm tellin' ya man, if WotC can figure out how to give us more free time, they'd see a huge spike in sales!They should figure out how to design a better work week....
Keep in mind that a lazy DM in, say, 1981, would have had access to the following, beyond the core books (and basic and expert D&D rules)
B1 In Search of the Unknown
D1-2 Descent into the Depths of the Earth
D3 Vault of the Drow
S1 Tomb of Horrors
G1-2-3 Against the Giants
B2 The Keep on the Borderlands
S2 White Plume Mountain
T1 The Village of Hommlet
C1 The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan
C2 The Ghost Tower of Inverness
Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits
S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks
X1 The Isle of Dread
A1–4 Slavers Series
B3 Palace of the Silver Princess
I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City
L1 The Secret of Bone Hill
U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh
X2 Castle Amber
PLUS Deities and Demigods, the Fiend Folio, the World of Greyhawk Folio,
PLUS PLUS Monthly issues of Dragon, which had been in print since 1976 (since 75 as the strategic review)
ADD, from even earlier, licensed Judges Guild products.
They may have been industrious with their games, but DMs also still had some help.
True, but, this is what three YEARS into the life cycle of 1e. How much of that would have been available in after the PHB was released? I mean, after 5 months of 5e, you will have two complete 15 level adventure paths. That's about the equivalent of 16 modules. Plus web enhancements (now coming monthly), plus various other odds and sods. Let's see where we are in 2017 before we make this same comparison.
And at that time TSR was making a TON of money. RPGs were the thing to play.
Warmaster Horus said:There was no competition from MMORGs, smart phones, game consoles, Minecraft and Youtube.
Warmaster Horus said:There was no way to get access to a multitude of homebrewed adventures to run via the internet. There was no 40-year legacy of previous products to draw upon and modify. It was a different world.
1976...star wars came out?
Yes. And you see that everywhere, not only in the increased demand of adventures but also on the constant cries for simplification, the complains about easy to understand 3 sentence rules and the demand for shorter and shorter combat (usually the rules heaviest part of D&D). I also think that things like "fail forward" is a symptom of this laziness as people do not want find other ways to succeed once their original thought out plan is blocked. Instead just continue like normal and add en extra encounter later on.
But to be fair, its not only the DMs who got lazy.
Rules complexity isn't a measure of game/campaign complexity. There are complex, long-running campaigns run using simple rules. FYI, my longest running campaign, with the greatest amount of player engagement and most wholly & well-realized fictional world, used a stripped-down version of AD&D 2e -- which half the time I ignored in favor of pure free-form.Too much to consume so only very few are willing to invest too much time in anything specific, thats why there is a demand for more and more premade stuff and even simpler rules.
Adventure Paths aren't my cup of tea, either, but their popularity merely demonstrates that railroading --or a reasonable facsimile of it-- is actually popular with a segment of the player base large enough to make Paizo really, really successful.The rise of the Adventure Path is, IMO, one of the worst things to happen in the gaming space.
I have already responded to this, though at least you said three years and not five.
The DMG and the first wave of those came out in 79..
See, there have been a lot of posts like this in the thread, and they can read a little silly. People had lives back then. They did not think of life as slow paced. (And people have always imagined an earlier, simpler time, its a cliche). Even in the realm of geeky-hobbiess, there where other RPGs and hobby games and other geeky things you could do. (Join the Society for Creative Anachronism, own 50 different avalon hill wargames, watch Star Wars at a theater still showing it 5 years after it came out). But again, we know people are buying and playing D&D. And again, in another thread here some of them are playing it a lot.
Adventure Paths aren't my cup of tea, either, but their popularity merely demonstrates that railroading --or a reasonable facsimile of it-- is actually popular with a segment of the player base large enough to make Paizo really, really successful.