I think TSR was right to publish so much material

[Steel_Wind]

While I agree that TSR made mistakes during that time, I have to agree that as a fan of D&D it was some of the best times with 2-3 new purchases every month for a good few years.

Without putting too fine a point on it? That's the publication schedule that Paizo Publishing currently has.

Every month, Paizo releases:

1 x 96 page adventure path book
1 x 32 page/or 64 page campaign or player companion
2 x 16-20 page PF Society Scenarios

In addition to that, the other Gamemastery product line is good for one of the following:

1 flip mat/map pack; or,
1 map folio/gamemastery card deck

This is in addition to the larger 64 page books that come about once a quarter and the hardcover releases, also once a quarter, on average. We'll leave their new fiction line out of the picture for now.

The end result is that by emphasizing adventure and campaign material for one world only and de-emphasizing new rules (at least, compared to the one-hardcover-a-month pace that WotC had for ver 3.5), Paizo currently has as robust a publication schedule as we had in the heyday of 2nd edition. All without the rules bloat that buried 3.5 in a slurry of power creep options, too.

Importantly, Paizo is not releasing multiple world settings which is the one thing probably buried TSR at the relvant time. There is only Golarion in the Pathfinder Campaign setting and its many-regional/cultural-analogs-in-one-world approach to world building is what Paizo has placed its bets upon.

Does it work? So far, the products are selling well and Paizo has had its most profitable year to date.

Whether this publication schedule is sustainable over the long haul remains to be seen -- but provided the game is not buried under its own weight in rules -- there is reason to be believe that this is a sustainable publication pace for now.

Anyways, there seems to be a view that WotC sets the standard in terms of publication schedule. While that may once have been the case, I would argue that with Pathfinder, that is no longer the case.

I would also point out that the only reason Paizo can get as aggressive as it is with publication schedules is due to their unique advantage of having subscribers to their product lines which provides Paizo with a level of guaranteed sales on product ship. Much, if not all of Paizo's printing costs are covered by their subscribers on product shipment. On some product lines, like Adventure Paths, it's a robust enough level of a subscriber base that Paizo is in the black on the product the moment it ships, every month.

This is an important business advantage that Paizo has leveraged and developed from their magazine subscriber base and webstore. It is a method of gaining direct sales, and making the most of their working capital so as to ensure longterm solvency of the company -- all in a manner that no other RPR publisher has ever enjoyed.

It's what makes the aggressive publication schedule that Paizo has actually work. If Paizo was having to front the cost of all printing all that inventory and carry it for 6 month or a year before it was profitable? It is unlikely they would have chosen to have such an aggressive publication schedule if that were the case. The subscriber base is what makes it all work for them.

 

[Beginning of the End]

over years there's been a point brought up often that TSR produced too much stuff for AD&D, and that was bad for the game and cost them money.
I strongly disagree.

By strongly disagreeing with that, you're strongly agreeing that TSR should have gone bankrupt. Because the one is very closely related to the other.

Most of us consider the late 80s early 90s the "Golden Era" of (A)D&D. Why? Huge volume of items, so even if some were bad or not to your taste, it was guaranteed some WERE to your liking!

I'm going to take an educated guess here and say that you're currently 32 years old. Why? Because that would have made you 12 in 1990. The personal golden age for anything tends to be 12 years old.

No one company can create enough content to satisfy a happy "bubbling with excitement" fan base.

You're contradicting yourself. TSR was even more draconian with its licensing and managed to produce your personal golden age all by itself.

It's notable that there is almost nothing that is 'classic' from that era.

I also agree that quality was a problem. But I disagree with the verdict that no classics were produced. Off the top of my head: Dragon Mountain. Night Below. Return to the Tomb of Horrors. Gates of Firestorm Peak. A Paladin in Hell. Dark Sun. Al-Qadim. Planescape.

With all of that being said: I think it's almost certain that WotC did over-react in attempting to correct the course of TSR's misguided ship. Some of these over-reactions (like their decision to largely abandon adventure modules) have been more or less corrected. Others seem to be deepening (like the decision to significantly decrease the depth of support for pre-designed campaign worlds), although that may be in response to their ongoing market analysis.

I understand WotC's desire to sell every product they produce to every single person playing the game. But while that was an attitude that was tolerable when they allowed third party publishers to fill the less prominent niches, it means that interests aren't being served and sales are being left on the table now that WotC has largely pulled everything back in-house.

It's as if there were only one company making movies, and they insisted that every single movie appealed equally to all demographics. So instead of a nice mix of romances, comedies, and action films, everything needs to be romance-comedy-action film.

 

[Stoat]

"Too much stuff" well you weren't meant to buy it all, folks!! Didn't this occur to anyone else?

From TSR/WotC/Dancey's perspective, this was a problem. TSR was spending time and money developing products for smaller and smaller sections of its (already relatively small) fanbase. Folks didn't buy it all, and the company lost money as a result.

Frex: I played Spelljammer. I never bought a single Planescape product. I never bought a single Greyhawk product. I never bought any Dragonlance stuff. I bought the Ravenloft "black box" and one or two Ravenloft adventures, but none of the Van Richten's stuff and none of the other boxed sets. I never bought Maztica. I never bought Kara-Tur. I had the Al-Qadim softcover, but nothing else. I never bought any 2E Forgotten Realms stuff (I had the Grey Box from 1E). I never bought any of those green splatbooks about playing Vikings or Celts or Roman centurions.

See all that stuff I didn't buy? It cost TSR a pile to make, and they had, essentially, no chance of selling it to me. And all the Spelljammer stuff I bought? Plenty of folks hated it and wouldn't go near it.

All those groovy product lines divided the player base into little subsections. Ravenloft people, Forgottren Realms people, Planescape people, Spelljammer People, Red Steel people, etc. etc. etc. Once you found your preferred setting, there was little incentive to go outside it. The cost of producing that stuff is more or less fixed, and the amount of money customers are willing to spend is limited. At a certain point, it seems that TSR passed the point of diminishing returns. They were making more stuff than they could sell.

 

[Alan Shutko]

True. On the other hand, in that time I bought all the Mystara stuff that came out. I buy almost none of the stuff WotC puts out now. Their production costs are lower, but their potential customer base might be as well.

 

[Neonchameleon]

True. On the other hand, in that time I bought all the Mystara stuff that came out. I buy almost none of the stuff WotC puts out now. Their production costs are lower, but their potential customer base might be as well.

Even if it is the case that the customer base is lower (which I doubt), to quote Ryan Dancey again (same link) "I discovered that the cost of the products that company was making in many cases exceeded the price the company was receiving for selling those products. I toured a warehouse packed from floor to 50 foot ceiling with products valued as though they would soon be sold to a distributor with production stamps stretching back to the late 1980s."

In short, they weren't selling what they were producing and even when they were the marginal lines made a loss. Carrying customers for obscure games was helping kill them.

 

[Philosopher]

I think it's worth it to draw a distinction between what is good for the game/hobby, and what is good for a company. The sheer diversity of campaign settings produced during the '90s was one of the best things that could have happened for the game, while at the same time being almost the worst thing that TSR did. Now, the two are not completely separate. If companies do poorly all around, then no one would stay in the business of producing gaming material, and the game/hobby would suffer. My point is that the two do not always overlap. There can sometimes be tension.

TSR shot itself in the foot by producing so many settings. Given that WotC ended up saving the game from oblivion, in retrospect I'm glad that TSR did so.

The basic problem is that from around 1989 to 1998, TSR produced almost nothing worth owning.

Another distinction worth making is between game mechanics and flavour. While the 2e core had decent rules (especially for the time - I know, some of you will disagree), the game mechanics of all the expansions were generally not well done. But the flavour from the 2e era (with the exception of removing the names "demon" and "devil") was absolutely fabulous.

I kind of doubt WoTC is just randomly tossing ideas out there though.

Shrug- I see your view as coming from a pessimistic starting point.

I can't speak for Shemeska, but I don't think that randomly tossing out ideas is necessarily a bad thing. As long as there is some reason to think that the products might do well (no company has unlimited resources, after all), it makes sense to try out a few new products in this way. The best market research comes from how products do on the market.

 

[GregChristopher]

I think it's worth it to draw a distinction between what is good for the game/hobby, and what is good for a company. The sheer diversity of campaign settings produced during the '90s was one of the best things that could have happened for the game, while at the same time being almost the worst thing that TSR did. Now, the two are not completely separate. If companies do poorly all around, then no one would stay in the business of producing gaming material, and the game/hobby would suffer. My point is that the two do not always overlap. There can sometimes be tension.

Yes, yes, yes

This is precisely the problem.

 

[Celebrim]

Now that I strongly disagree with.

Ok. But I suspect we are just going to have another difference of opinion argument.

Let me take a case in point.

"The Illithiad" is a relatively strong book, but it was also produced in 1998 during the Silver Anniversary flurry of really good stuff that was produced just as TSR was folding. It was produced by Bruce Cordell who was one of the few good 2e writers, and therefore it falls generally in the class of books I was thinking of when I wrote: "The very best material from that era was produced right near the end." And, f you'd never bothered to spend much time imagining the Mind Flayers, it was probably a revelatory book.

However, if you'd been playing since the late '70's or early '80's what you instead got was a book that introduced a new origin and mythology for mind flayers which contridicted much or all that had been previously published in Dragon magazine and elsewhere, and which was not particularly more interesting than what you might have expanded upon using that as a basis. In essence, it is an example of the very retcons you reject elsewhere as excuses to print new material.

The Sea Devils contains flashes of useful information, but would be a typical example of exactly the poor production values, poor editting, and unnecessary page bloat jacking up the price that I was complaining about.

I'd like to point out that the Sahuagin and the Mindflayers are Gygaxian monsters. They aren't new creations. They are just more detail put into someone else's good ideas. This wasn't so much expanding the value of TSR's intellectual property as it was cashing in on that IP.

Spelljammer and Dark Sun were met with derision in the groups I was familiar with. Spelljammer was classified with joke modules as attempts at humor that had gone awry. I was always of the impression that setting flopped.

Dark Sun seemed moderately more successful, at least if the marketting then and nostalgia now is to be believed, but in the groups I played with the fact that everyone was psionic, play started at 3rd level, and you could play tri-kin caused it to classified generally with the trend toward more and more munchkin settings. We never got hooked into it, spent most of the time we poured through its contents laughing at it, and rightly or wrongly the adventures and novels tie ins were classified unread as likely to be poorly written railroads along the lines terrible FR dreck being churned out at the time. I couldn't tell you the name of one Dark Sun module, and I've never seen them repeatedly (or ever) listed when someone at EnWorld asks people to name their favorite adventures.

I admired Planescape as a setting and as an excercise in creative writing, but I never wanted to play there, nor did I ever buy any of the product. Many people found it very offputting, and while I disagree, I can also easily see why.

"...here's a point many folk don't get: YOUR stinker maybe MY fave! "

I get that entirely.

"The Illithiad" was outstanding. So they sure could make quality.

Yes, they could. I didn't deny that. Bruce, Monte, Skip and a few others were doing excellent work especially right near the end.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I can't speak for Shemeska, but I don't think that randomly tossing out ideas is necessarily a bad thing. As long as there is some reason to think that the products might do well (no company has unlimited resources, after all), it makes sense to try out a few new products in this way. The best market research comes from how products do on the market.

I think I agree. Brainstorming isn't bad, as long as it doesn't cost you too much money. It's essentially a way of taking risks for (possible) gain, something companies do all the time. Unfortunately, TSR seems to have gone too far down that route, expending large amounts of money on lots of copies of product lines that didn't sell, then continued to make new products on the failing lines.

 

[Lanefan]

During the 2e era (about '89 to '96) one had to be careful to sort the wheat from the chaff...and yes, there was a lot of chaff.

The problem I ended up finding with quite a bit of it was even when I'd decided something was worth buying and bought it, 2 years later it would fall apart; and that included the core books!

Right near the end of 2e's run the quality improved, both in material and production (e.g. Spell Compendia) but by then TSR's ship was sinking fast.

At the time, it was too much. Now, in hindsight and given what's passed since, all that material represents a useful resource to draw from.

Lanefan