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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 5657142" data-attributes="member: 32740">Oh agreed.  There were indeed other factors at work and it would be an utter failure to attempt to emulate those books in this day and age.  Times have changed, RPG's have evolved.  While 1E still has a LOT to recommend it I have no problems pointing out that it does also have significant inadequacies and failures. As for how it really spread and succeeded that's speculation for anyone (even those who worked at TSR).  It was years after I started playing 1E before I ever saw D&D products of any kind in anything other than a hobby store and afaik TSR kept no kind of track of how new players were entering the hobby.  I would even guess that MOST people were entering the game by word of mouth.  They would only pick up the rule books later and then they were mostly used as reference works and did not actually and because they "knew" the game already would not READ the books start-to-finish (which would explain why so many people - myself included - were so ignorant for so long about how 1E actually worked rather than how they themselves learned to run it or played it). I agree that TODAY (and in hindsight) they could have done a LOT better.  If 1E were released as a new game in todays rpg environment it would fail utterly and would only be remembered as something to be mocked mercilessly (like F.A.T.A.L.?).  At the time, and admittedly in part because people just didn't know any better, those elements of unnecessary complexity and quirkiness were appealing to the emerging class of gamers who could then cling to it as something else they knew about and ostensibly understood that others were clueless about - like computer programming.  It worked at the time.  But then success/failure of ANY game has to be looked at not just by the merits of the rules in and of themselves but by the environment in which it was competing.  In the case of AD&D there was no real competition.  I mean, RUNEQUEST?  Puhleeze...  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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