Not Reading Ryan Dancy

[sjmiller]

people who are internet active are likely to look for or prefer an internet game.

I would have to strongly disagree with you on this point. I am extremely "internet active". I am on the net every day using it co communicate, do research, and generally stay connected to the world. When I play games I prefer to play them away from my computer. I spend all day looking at a monitor, why would I want to spend my nights doing that? This is true not only of myself, but of all but one member of my gaming group. For me, and for many people I meet, gaming, including RPGs, is meant to be a face-to-face experience, not something you do online.

 

[drothgery]

"The biggest competitor to 3E wasn't White Wolf, or Palladium, or any other publisher's game. It was 2E, and 1E, and OD&D."

Boy this gave me pause.

What's so surprising about this? If you ask Microsoft what the biggest competitor to Windows Vista is, they'll tell you it's Windows XP (and that's only because it's been a long time and XP was a lot better than 9x/ME and a pretty sharp break; otherwise, the pre-XP versions would still have significant market share).

Is that why those systems were buried?

No. It's just a recognition of the state of the market; when WotC was launching 3.x, the vast majority of the people they were trying to sell it to were playing 2e, 1e, and/or OD&D (me, I was in the no-game limbo I'd been in between finishing college and moving to SoCal; I picked up the 3.0 core rules, but wasn't actually playing). If they didn't think 3.0 was good enough to switch to, they wouldn't have.

 

[thedungeondelver]

What's so surprising about this? If you ask Microsoft what the biggest competitor to Windows Vista is, they'll tell you it's Windows XP (and that's only because it's been a long time and XP was a lot better than 9x/ME and a pretty sharp break; otherwise, the pre-XP versions would still have significant market share).

See, that'd be a good analogy except...

...except it isn't. If Microsoft were still releasing DirectX revisions for Win9x, there'd be plenty of people still using it. Go to ntcompatible.com and read through the forums there to see the hoops people have jumped through to try and keep legacy apps and games working on XP. Vista will become preeminent because Microsoft has already stated that DirectX support for Windows 2000 and Windows XP will cease with DX9.0c; to get 10.0 (and to get hardware that is fully enabled), you'll have to run Vista.

To keep going on the Windows issue, if every advance had been a good one then explain Windows Millenium Edition. WinME was unstable, added needless things to the OS and was generally regarded as a mistake by the industry at large.

People will upgrade because Microsoft will make them upgrade. No DirectX for older editions means an end to those OS revisions as hardware manufacturers struggle to keep up with Microsoft's strictures.

No. It's just a recognition of the state of the market; when WotC was launching 3.x, the vast majority of the people they were trying to sell it to were playing 2e, 1e, and/or OD&D (me, I was in the no-game limbo I'd been in between finishing college and moving to SoCal; I picked up the 3.0 core rules, but wasn't actually playing). If they didn't think 3.0 was good enough to switch to, they wouldn't have.

Oh I don't deny that at all. However, consider that the fan-base was cut by half when 2nd Edition AD&D was released, and that Gary (prior to his departure) lobbied for a continuance of AD&D:

Well, just to step back, with the release of 2nd Edition, approximately half of their gaming audience left, refusing to buy 2nd Edition. There is still a very large original 1st Edition AD&D community going strong.
...
Had anyone with business acumen, in my estimation, been running TSR at that time, when they saw half of their market disappear instead of trying to sell twice as many books to half as many people, the intelligent thing to have done would have been to come out with new releases of original AD&D, and tell the gamers “Hey, look, you can go either way now guys, we’ll support both of these marvelous lines,” and Dungeons and Dragons, too – why not?

Of course the company was so fundamentally boned shortly thereafter that they could've given away free twenty dollar bills and been in less financial trouble...but I think we're all aware of the post-Gygax, pre-WotC lunacy.

 

[delericho]

To keep going on the Windows issue, if every advance had been a good one then explain Windows Millenium Edition. WinME was unstable, added needless things to the OS and was generally regarded as a mistake by the industry at large.

IIRC, ME was a rush-job brought about when it became apparent Windows 2000 wasn't going to be backward compatible with Windows 9x games.

Oh I don't deny that at all. However, consider that the fan-base was cut by half when 2nd Edition AD&D was released, and that Gary (prior to his departure) lobbied for a continuance of AD&D:

Had anyone with business acumen, in my estimation, been running TSR at that time, when they saw half of their market disappear instead of trying to sell twice as many books to half as many people, the intelligent thing to have done would have been to come out with new releases of original AD&D, and tell the gamers “Hey, look, you can go either way now guys, we’ll support both of these marvelous lines,” and Dungeons and Dragons, too – why not?

Gary's a smart guy, and I will forever be thankful for the game he's given us, but in this issue he's dead wrong. Trying to support two parallel lines is a really bad idea - you have to expend 200% the development effort to bring in 125% of the sales. A lot of the people who left with 2nd edition would not have been pulled back in - they would have continued to be lost.

Alas, if that analysis is correct, I'm not sure there was anything TSR could have done to rescue the situation.

 

[MerricB]

Of course the company was so fundamentally boned shortly thereafter that they could've given away free twenty dollar bills and been in less financial trouble...but I think we're all aware of the post-Gygax, pre-WotC lunacy.
[/font]

See what Ryan posted above:

I think I've posted elsewhere that at the end of 1E, the 1E PHB was selling about 50K units a year, and the first year of sales of the 2e PHB generated about 250K units of sales.

Early in its lifecycle, the 1E PHB generated several years (I want to say 5 to 7) of sales well above 200K, and the slowdown in 1E PHBs was much more gradual than the slowdown of 2E PHBs, which was pretty dramatic.

One thing that many people don't know is that the RPG category, as a whole, had dropped by nearly 50% in terms of unit & revenue between 1990 and 1993. In fact, had Magic and the CCG category not developed, the gaming industry as we know it was almost certainly doomed. RPGs would have been moved to the book chains (which had their own near death experiences as they shifted from mall-based stores to Big Box retail stores). Many of the factors that brought down TSR were affecting every RPG publisher in the market at that time. TSR's woes just continued for a long time masked by CCG sales, and some financial manipulation of their book trade accounts.

Cheers!

 

[Falstaff]

I REALLY hope that D&D doesn't head in this direction and, as it becomes more and more tied to miniature play, find myself drifting away from it in search of a system that is more roleplaying/story driven rather than being some fusion of wargaming/MMORPGs.

Castles & Crusades, warts and all, is (too me) a step in the right direction.

I agree with you completely. I DO NOT like table-top wargames, never have. It definitely appears as if D&D (and the Star Wars RPG for that matter) are becoming more and more mini-centric. I hate that that's happening.

If I want to play a minis wargame I'd play one, but when I play D&D I want to play a game of the imagination that doesn't require moving little plastic toys around the table to help my mind visualize what's happening.

Anyway...

 

[Storm Raven]

I agree with you completely. I DO NOT like table-top wargames, never have. It definitely appears as if D&D (and the Star Wars RPG for that matter) are becoming more and more mini-centric. I hate that that's happening.

The problem is that, historically, D&D has been at its most successful when it has been at its most wargamey. Look at the 1e books - they are littered with wargame style rules and assumptions, right down to listing movement in inches, and giving "drift" rules for travelling on a hexagonal map and so on.

And that version of D&D was much more popular in its day than 2e (for example) was in its day. And when 3e came out, and emphasized the table top wargame aspects again, it outsold 2e. So, based upon historical market performance, a wargame style game appears to be what the customers want, and so that is what we are likely to get.

 

[dcas]

"The biggest competitor to 3E wasn't White Wolf, or Palladium, or any other publisher's game. It was 2E, and 1E, and OD&D."

Boy this gave me pause. Is that why those systems were buried?

I had to go back and read this to make sure that Mr. Dancey actually wrote this! But it basically confirms what I've said in the past regarding why WOTC won't reprint prior editions of D&D. They don't want to compete with themselves.

 

[Falstaff]

The problem is that, historically, D&D has been at its most successful when it has been at its most wargamey. Look at the 1e books - they are littered with wargame style rules and assumptions, right down to listing movement in inches, and giving "drift" rules for travelling on a hexagonal map and so on.

And that version of D&D was much more popular in its day than 2e (for example) was in its day. And when 3e came out, and emphasized the table top wargame aspects again, it outsold 2e. So, based upon historical market performance, a wargame style game appears to be what the customers want, and so that is what we are likely to get.

Maybe.

I DM a First Edition campaign now. We never use - or ever feel the need to use - miniatures or battle mats. Even when I was younger and my older brother and his pals played AD&D, they never used miniatures.

I don't think the same can be said for the 3rd edition of D&D. From my understanding you MUST use minis if you want to play correctly. Sure, I'm certain there are groups of players out there that play 3rd edition and don't use minis, but I can't see how they adjudicate the combat rules correctly.

 

[Ourph]

Maybe.

I DM a First Edition campaign now. We never use - or ever feel the need to use - miniatures or battle mats. Even when I was younger and my older brother and his pals played AD&D, they never used miniatures.

I don't think the same can be said for the 3rd edition of D&D. From my understanding you MUST use minis if you want to play correctly. Sure, I'm certain there are groups of players out there that play 3rd edition and don't use minis, but I can't see how they adjudicate the combat rules correctly.

Honestly, I don't see how you can adjudicate the 1e combat rules correctly without miniatures and a battle mat too. I'm not saying you can't adjudicate 1e combats without minis (I almost never use minis when playing 1e or B/X D&D) but doing without requires adjudications outside the rules just as much as 3e would IMO. 1e spells, light sources, weapons, etc. all have ranges that must be adjudicated/fudged if you're not using minis and a ruler. 1e facing rules for AC are almost impossible to fully implement for combats involving more than 3-4 individuals if you're not using some type of counter to track positions. If you're not tracking those things in some concrete manner the DM is either ignoring parts of the rules or making on-the-fly adjudications based on his best estimate of where PCs and opponents are during the round.

IMO going without minis in 3e isn't any different. The rules you are adjudicating/skipping/fudging are different, but the amount of stuff you have to hand-wave is virtually the same. I think the reason the use of minis in 3e is more common isn't because they're required more by the rules, but because the rules make the implementation of minis and a battlemat easier and lots of people just prefer to use minis when the rules make it easy for them to do so.