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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5297992" data-attributes="member: 4937">I have no problem with the quantity of material that they produced in that era.  I have a serious problem with the quality of material that they produced in that era.  The basic problem is that from around 1989 to 1998, TSR produced almost nothing worth owning.  Those few items of quality that they produced were swamped under a ton of garbage with low production values, low density of information (big fonts, wide margins, spurious and repetive artwork, ink bling), limited utility, poor writing, bad editing, and no play testing.  It's notable that there is almost nothing that is 'classic' from that era.  The very best material from that era was produced right near the end of it as 'Silver Anniversery' fare that basically celebrated the good old days when the products of TSR had been memorable and fun.  There are hints from developers like Monte Cook of what TSR could have been like, and most of the best writers ended up on the team that created 3e, but 2e's biggest problem was that it was a relative wasteland of terrible products.They drove people from their product.  They weren't addressing the customers actual wants and desires.  They weren't addressing the customers actual complaints with the system or the products.  They had their own agenda, and to a certain extent I'm not sure they were communicating even within the company.  They were completely out of touch and they were arrogant and dismissive of criticism or complaints beginning with the 2e release, which just wrong footed practically every long time player I knew and often for reasons which were completely avoidable.  It wasn't merely that they were releasing source books for playing D&D in Ancient Rome which practically no one had a need for (and those that did, probably knew Ancient Rome in more detail than the sourcebook covered).  It wasn't the breadth of material that killed TSR alone.  It's that so much of the material was just bad.  Take 'Haunted Halls of Evenstar' and 'Terrible Terrible Trouble at Tragidore'.  Please.  I mean seriously, you can't expect to sell material to DMs when the quality of the material and imagination involved is lower than what they are on average producing themselves.</blockquote>

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