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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8685693" data-attributes="member: 19857">Chalking it up to MtG and Storyteller eating into TSR's lunch missed a key dynamic, I think, which is that roleplayers in the 90s saw AD&D as a dated, bloated system that felt unsatisfying to many groups of people.  The people who wanted more "realism" in their games balked at how "gamey" the system was and went looking for systems that had systems that fed their desire for more verisimilitude (Chaosium's BRP, Rolemaster, even GURPS).  Meanwhile folks who didn't really want more gritty realism were getting frustrated with various things and were looking for alternative types of games.  Of course what they were looking for varied from person to person or table to table - skill systems that didn't shackle them with arbitrary class restriction, or mechanics for social interaction that made a game something other than a combat game, or world-building that was more relevant to folks in the 90s than folks from the 70s.  Sometimes that last one just meant "give me a game that is set on Earth here and now, not some dumb fantasy world that never existed".  The early-to-mid 90s especially was before the Harry Potter explosion of fantasy and a time of trench coats and katana blades. Where even the superheroes had to be rethought to have grim expressions all the time and a multitude of pouches to get people to buy their comics.  It's no wonder that Vampire took off - it's right in that grim and serious, trench coat and katana world.  (It's also no wonder, IMO, that Vampire has never been able to reclaim those heights of popularity for exactly the same reasons).Meanwhile AD&D and D&D both stayed firmly in early RPG design of the 70s and 80s and the products that TSR produced basically catered to people who liked that.  And they stayed that way right up until they went bankrupt, got bought by WotC, and the system was redesigned to be a 1990s game instead of an early 80s game. At which point you both had people who'd been away from it for a while and folks who were too young to be interested in trench coats and katanas anyway and were now abuzz with this Harold Potter person and his fantasy world (and the general burst of interest in YA fantasy that came off of it over the following years) taking a fresh look at it.</blockquote>

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