Repeating the Mistakes of the Past

[Jester David]

What's unfair is you pretending that's the totality of what I said. As I said (and it was in the quote you just quoted - so you knew I said it) is you can compare it to "even the peak two years of 4e". I also said choose ANY two years of 4e.

There's really only two years to choose from: 2009 and 2010. The game released in 2008 so half the year was filler content.
You'd have to compare that with 2012 and 2013 with Paizo.

Feel free to count pages.

Yeah you making an arbitrary determination between crunch and fluff is not meaningful to me in any way and is massively moving the goal posts here. We're not talking about that topic, we're talking about glut of material, not how crunchy that material is to someone (and even what is and is not crunch or fluff is debatable and often subjective, as things like campaign material is crunch to some DMs and fluff to others, and sometimes dependent on whether the DM feels the need to be familiar with it to run a published adventure and things like that, while sometimes powers contain a large amount of fluff in them, etc..).

Regardless, we're not talking about which particular content, as that's not what glut means.

First, I wasn't moving the goalposts, I just opted to count only the generic RPG content, the must-buy stuff, omitting campaign specific content and adventures.

Crunch and fluff is also not arbitrary,
You don't need to test fluff. Fluff does not need to be balanced. A glut of fluff doesn't result in power creep, option creep, or option paralysis.

Crunch is different. If you release crunch faster than you can test you have problems. It's bad for the game.

Think of it this way: because of the crunch glut the 4e books were devalued, as you didn't know if a particular power was errata-ed. And there was little other reason to buy the books but the crunch, so it was easier to get DDI which cut into sales.
If 4e had a more balanced crunch:fluff ratio allowing better balancing, the edition might have lasted longer. But WotC opted for quantity over quality. Ditto most of the books during 3e. Slowing the release schedule would have extended that edition as well.
Plus a slower schedule focusing on fewer must buy books is better for sales: everyone gets the same book rather than every second book.

 

[Echohawk]

You do exclude novels which would jump up TSR's number dramatically. Question? Did you include Dragon and Dungeon in the count?

Let's not forget that Paizo is banging out its share of novels as well. Although, to be fair, probably considerably less than TSR did.

I didn't count issues of Dragon or Dungeon in TSR's count for 1995. TSR is still way ahead of Paizo when it comes to novels. In 1995, TSR published 25 D&D novels and gamebooks (although three were paperback reprints of the previous year's hardcovers, so only 22 new novels. Paizo hasn't yet reached 22 novels in total for the Tales series, and seems to have been struggling slightly to meet deadlines for six novels per year for the last three years. But they do have a Pathfinder comic line, a Pathfinder card game and more than one line of Pathfinder miniatures, some of which involve licences with other companies. I haven't carefully checked the licences TSR had running in 1995, but I suspect that there were actually more distinct Pathfinder-branded products released in 2013 in total than there were distinct D&D branded products in any one of the TSR years.

 

[MJS]

I don't think the OP is right.
I'll tell you what turned me off to TSR in mid-late 2E. Content was tepid, but what lost me as a customer was frequent typos. Absolutely no excuse for that in publishing.
I hear no such negative feedback on the later 4E releases. Further, WotC, like early TSR, is very responsive to its customers, I think even to a fault, sacrificing vision for trying to please everyone.

I think WotC has great, creative people working there doing their best, and even if I don't like one of their games, they have embraced the totality of D&D. The era of only supporting the current edition is over, and the true Golden Age of the RPG is here. The future looks great.

 

[Mistwell]

First, I wasn't moving the goalposts, I just opted to count only the generic RPG content, the must-buy stuff, omitting campaign specific content and adventures.

That's just what the phrase "moving the goalposts" means. When someone says "This is X", and after a lengthy series of back and for replies, they suddenly say "Oh X doesn't mean X, it means X except for A, B, G, F, and L!", that's moving the goalposts.

You don't get to subtract content. ANY content. None of this has to do with must-buy anything, or campaign stuff, or anything like that. All you've done, by eliminating certain things that Paizo specializes is, is try to re-define glut to exclude Paizo.

The discussion was about who was publishing a glut OF MATERIAL. ANY material is the topic, not just what you choose to cherry pick.

Crunch and fluff is also not arbitrary,
You don't need to test fluff. Fluff does not need to be balanced. A glut of fluff doesn't result in power creep, option creep, or option paralysis.

None of which is the topic at hand. We're not talking about balance or option creep or paralysis or any of that. It's like you went to a different thread, saw those things discussed, and just put them on top of this thread and pretended they were the same threads. For the purpose of this debate, none of that has anything to do with the topic. Glut of materials means just glut of materials. Not "glut of materials which meets Jester's personal definition of what should or should not count based on some obscure criteria he just came up with".

Crunch is different. If you release crunch faster than you can test you have problems. It's bad for the game.

Again, who cares? We're not talking about what is good or bad or any sort of judgement, at least I am not. Someone said 4e had a glut of material relative to Pathfinder. He's wrong. His qualifications, which he also created from thin air, have no relationship to yours (his hangup is the bindings used for the book).

Think of it this way: because of the crunch glut the 4e books were devalued, as you didn't know if a particular power was errata-ed. And there was little other reason to buy the books but the crunch, so it was easier to get DDI which cut into sales.
If 4e had a more balanced crunch:fluff ratio allowing better balancing, the edition might have lasted longer. But WotC opted for quantity over quality. Ditto most of the books during 3e. Slowing the release schedule would have extended that edition as well.

Ah, I get it now. You want to edition war. That's what this is about for you, bashing quality of the 4e books and WOTC. Awesome...find another thread for that please (or don't, as it's against the message board rules). It has nothing to do with this topic. We're talking about who published more material, not what you personally thought of that material and the company that made it.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

We have had the largest playtest and surveying during game design we've ever seen, running for a year and more, but you hear folks complain that WotC gives them no voice.

I question whether those complaints are well-founded.

In the study of science, one comes across something called "selection bias".

The internet has a way of magnifying the views of the fringe. There are people who are not listened to because their opinions are presented in a manner that is demonstrable of their unreasonableness. The internet loves these people.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

Here is their most recent, public, official chart.

Thanks for that. It's nice to see some numbers in context. (And, what blew me away and you pointed out later, those numbers don't even include Christmas.)

 

[Jester David]

That's just what the phrase "moving the goalposts" means. When someone says "This is X", and after a lengthy series of back and for replies, they suddenly say "Oh X doesn't mean X, it means X except for A, B, G, F, and L!", that's moving the goalposts.

You don't get to subtract content. ANY content. None of this has to do with must-buy anything, or campaign stuff, or anything like that. All you've done, by eliminating certain things that Paizo specializes is, is try to re-define glut to exclude Paizo.

The discussion was about who was publishing a glut OF MATERIAL. ANY material is the topic, not just what you choose to cherry pick.

I chose to exclude content to make it easier on both companies. If I included Paizo's campaign setting books I would need to include WotC's much larger campaign setting books. And the magazines, which were often larger than APs and Player Companions.

Again, who cares? We're not talking about what is good or bad or any sort of judgement, at least I am not. Someone said 4e had a glut of material relative to Pathfinder. He's wrong. His qualifications, which he also created from thin air, have no relationship to yours (his hangup is the bindings used for the book).

That's the point of the thread!
Glut killed TSR.
Glut arguably ended 3e and 4e earlier than necessary.
Glut is bad. They need to stop or it will end 5e earlier as well. And the RPG.

Ah, I get it now. You want to edition war. That's what this is about for you, bashing quality of the 4e books and WOTC. Awesome...find another thread for that please (or don't, as it's against the message board rules). It has nothing to do with this topic. We're talking about who published more material, not what you personally thought of that material and the company that made it.

No I don't.
I'm not edition warring.
I am bashing the quality of WotC's books. Which affected both editions. Because it's hurting the hobby I'm invested in.
That' style point if the topic. There are parallels between what TSR was doing at the end of their time and what WotC was doing. Glut was one.

 

[Umbran]

Ah, I get it now. You want to edition war. That's what this is about for you...

Don't make it personal.

It is a very simple thing. We've said it a bazillion times, and we'll say it more. Address the logic of the post, not the person of the poster.

If you make it personal, you make it about your respective egos, rather than about the subject under discussion. The temptation is great, but avoid it in the future, please.

 

[MichaelSomething]

When i go to my FLGS on Friday I'll take a picture of the RPG shelf and we can all see the number of books on it...

 

[Zardnaar]

Glut that doesn't sell= bad, glut that sells = good. Doesn't really matter I suppose.