Failed Game?

[molonel]

No version of D&D that I know of has failed. They've all sold well, and they've all had a very strong fan base.

I agree, for the most part, although I think there were not only mismanagement of the company behind 2nd Edition AD&D, but also problems in the game that killed it.

The only edition that really "failed" in any sense was 2nd Edition, in my opinion, and 3rd Edition is treading the line on some of the same problems.

D&D is a good thing, right now, but 3.5 burned a lot of independent publishers, and depending on how 4th Edition is handled, I can see 3rd Edition - which is a game I like, and enjoy playing - being an even worse mistake if they aren't careful.

 

[Fifth Element]

Well, that's certainly a non-sequitur.

So somebody who's played WoW 5 or 6 hours a day since the game came out is always necessarily right on business decisions made by the company that distributes it, game structure and design, or comments about the game itself?

Well, I see I should have used the [sarcasm] [/sarcasm] tags...

 

[Umbran]

I agree, for the most part, although I think there were not only mismanagement of the company behind 2nd Edition AD&D, but also problems in the game that killed it.

However, I think we should make a distinction between "a game that failed" and "a game that ran down a bit earlier than it had to". I think it is pretty clear that economically, no single edition can last forever. They all have to end, and be replaced in the market, in order to support viable business. So, ending isn't failure, it's just part of the normal lifecycle.

Complete failure, to me, requires that the thing die very, very early - the core game itself being so bad, or so poorly marketed, or the like, that it never got a solid base of players. By this measure, 2nd edition succeeded, but may (or may not) have died a little early.

 

[wingsandsword]

I would say Basic Editions released in the 2e era after the Rules Cyclopedia failed, as you very rarely see someone who had picked up gaming with them. It is not like TSR didn't try, either - there was a bigass box, a box with pewter Ral Partha figurines, a set with CD-tracks... they just failed to engage the imaginations of a new generation.

I'm one of those people who picked up gaming with them. I know at least one other person like that too.

Those box sets had one notable advantage, they were sold with board games in toy stores, not in a specific section of a bookstore (often an out-of-the-way part at that). That opened them up to people who might not find it since they'd have to go looking for it.

The biggest problem with those box set basic editions was that most of the D&D product line at the time was geared towards AD&D (which I think most of the player base was too), and if you learned Basic D&D with that box set, if you went and tried to find an existing D&D group to play with, you'd find, like I did, all kinds of differences between what you know as D&D and what they knew as D&D. It more goes to the general problem they had with supporting two incompatible but separate product lines both under the D&D name.