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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6215179" data-attributes="member: 22424">It's been a while since I read it, but the timeline in the 25th anniversary boxed set gave some details. As I understand it, it was the result of some spectacularly bad mismanagement.My understanding is the Gary was away at the time (in Hollywood working on the cartoon?), and in his absence TSR made a lot of investments, some of them quite bewildering (I believe one was in a needlework company, or something equally bizarre). Plus, they paid for company cars for a huge number of employees. Basically, it was just a case of spending too much money, too foolishly.IIRC, the immediate crisis was that Gary returned, they rushed out two hardbacks in quick succession (UA was one, and I think OA was the other), they pushed back their plans for 2nd Edition, and they brought on a couple of new investors. Sadly, those investors later allied with one L. Williams, but that was a while away...I must stress, however, that this is all half-remembered stuff I read years ago, and it's also only one side of the story. And, as the Vorlons say, truth is a three-edged sword.That's true, but...If we're still talking about prepublished adventures (e.g. Dragonlance), then the simple fact is that the adventures will always have a limited scope, simply by virtue of the limited page count. Dungeons must be finite (or have bits saying "what lies beyond here is for the DM to fill in"), adventures can only cover a subset of possible interactions with NPCs, etc...So, while I'll decry many published adventures are "soulless railroads", and while I'll expect a good adventure to support many paths, they still have to have some sort of formula behind them, even if it's a formula unique to this one adventure.Of course, as soon as we move beyond just talking prepublished adventures, then things open up hugely.Agreed. Though I would actually accuse 1st Edition of that very same flaw - in that edition Gygax massively expanded the material that went before, filling in a lot of gaps, and tried to create a single, comprehensive ruleset for all tables. Indeed, some of his more infamous writings reek of "play it my way, or it's not AD&D!" - though how much of that was hyperbole I'm not sure. (Ironically, it appears that the game he actually played was much lighter than AD&D 1st Ed.)I actually think that that may be a natural human tendency - the first draft is necessarily light and full of gaps, so we do a new draft that fills in the gaps, we go further and further down that route... and then we realise that the whole thing has become about the rules much more than the fun. (In my own case, at one point my house rules for 2nd Ed amounted to a complete rewrite, including all of the kits... just before "Player's Option" came out and invalidated all my work. Likewise, at one point I had almost completely rewritten Vampire: the Masquerade. And the net effect of all that work was a less-good game. Oops. <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=":)" /> )Agreed.That would be nice. Given that 3e's "Book of Challenges" appears not to have done very well, and given the rise of the Adventure Path in recent years, I fear you may be disappointed. I'd like to be wrong about that.</blockquote>

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