The Fortnite-ification of Everything

I still don't buy the idea that having different settings "fractured" the D&D player base: no one I ever knew refused to buy Forgotten Realms or Ravenloft books because they "only played Dark Sun." Yes, people may have had favorite settings that they focused on, but everyone always bought everything they could in my experience, and ran multiple games in different worlds, including homebrew which they would fill with ideas cribbed material from all the books. Just because Greyhawk was my favorite didn't mean I didn't also buy up Drow of the Underdark and Dragon Kings the moment I saw them, or consider The Code of the Harpers to be one of the best and most interesting D&D books I've ever owned and still crack open to read through today.

Producing more books than they could sell is what killed TSR, not having multiple settings.

 

[AriochQ]

TSR was just poorly managed. At first, you had gamers who knew very little about business. Then, you had business people who knew very little about gaming. Neither worked well.

 

[Todd Chambery]

The article really reads more like "The D&D-ification of Fortnite" rather than the other way around.

But for the record, I never purchased setting-specific material. The DM's first job is to create the world, and setting material gets in the way of that.

I used to play with a group that only ran DM-written (this is multiple people) campaigns, and I can say confidently, homebrew is not as good as the published material. We were the first and only beta-testers for merely-OK and always overlong "modules" (I was going to say 'wankery').

When I was a kid with no experience, lots of time, and no money, running homebrew games was great. In my old age, I appreciate professional editors.

 

[jasper]

It always nice to see a fan of a hobby try to tie their hobby to the current money making idea. It is amazing. Yes compared to Fortnite’s Epic Revenue of $2.4 Billion. That 2,400,000,000.00 to Hasbro’s 4,580,000,000.00 revenue. Um never mind. But I think the author is reaching in his some of his arguments.
Accessibility. In my XP, people either played a mixture of both basic and advanced. Or just stole certain things from basic and adapted it to their Advanced. It wasn’t till I read posters here, they people were doing it wrong in choosing basic. Um um, I mean some people preferred basic over Advance. Insert evil grin.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Funny that the title of the post suggests D&D is emulating Fortnite, but the conclusion of the post is that Fortnite is emulating D&D.

Maybe it's more fair/logical to say that the Internet has created new avenues for formerly niche hobbies to become mainstream, and across industries the companies that leverage that strategy are more likely to succeed.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

I used to play with a group that only ran DM-written (this is multiple people) campaigns, and I can say confidently, homebrew is not as good as the published material. We were the first and only beta-testers for merely-OK and always overlong "modules" (I was going to say 'wankery').

When I was a kid with no experience, lots of time, and no money, running homebrew games was great. In my old age, I appreciate professional editors.

YMMV. In my experience the worst games I have ever been in have always, consistently been with GMs running published modules, though admittedly because the GMs rarely had enough confidence/experience to go outside the scope of what the module offered. You could always tell when you hit an invisible wall in these cases, where the GM hadn't prepped or considered something because the module did not cover it....a very immersion damaging moment. My least favorite moments were when the game would abruptly end early due to the GM not having read/prepped past a certain point. Understandable but....well, as GM myself I made it a rule to always be "two sessions ahead" in the prep when using a prepublished module to avoid that risk.

That said....the quality of most modules these days is pretty good. And the same experience above sometimes happened with GMs who had brilliant homebrew concepts but still didn't know how to execute them. The problem as I see it is with the GMs, not whether the content is published or not.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Don't forget the last years of TSR was for the boom of internet and the videoconsoles.

I haven't played Fortnite: Battle Royal, but the cooperative mode "Save the world". It is a totally different gameplay, but missions, and improving traps, heroes, weapons and survivors, with a different leveling up. You don't know what are you missing with the fun Ray's phrases. Ray is a robot who talks commander (player).

There is an agreement between Hasbro and Epic Games, and this means we could see a Fortnite RPG d20.

 

[dragoner]

We played basic rules mostly and adapted the AD&D rules to it, the Holmes box basic said to do that. We encountered the idea of different worlds, and setting in Q1, that was cool. What AD&D did have was rules for making your stronghold, and there was the social aspect that seems to be what the Fortnite players are playing (I don't play that). There wasn't a dichotomy between AD&D and basic in the beginning, we just called it all D&D.

 

[Crimson Fist]

I still don't buy the idea that having different settings "fractured" the D&D player base: no one I ever knew refused to buy Forgotten Realms or Ravenloft books because they "only played Dark Sun." Yes, people may have had favorite settings that they focused on, but everyone always bought everything they could in my experience, and ran multiple games in different worlds, including homebrew which they would fill with ideas cribbed material from all the books. Just because Greyhawk was my favorite didn't mean I didn't also buy up Drow of the Underdark and Dragon Kings the moment I saw them, or consider The Code of the Harpers to be one of the best and most interesting D&D books I've ever owned and still crack open to read through today.

Producing more books than they could sell is what killed TSR, not having multiple settings.

I don't buy this either. If anything, I think having additional setting material expands your audience. I purchased and still own every iteration of D&D rule book made and I have purchased the setting material I liked to go along with them. Not every setting, just the ones I liked or the books I wanted to steal material from. With 5th I haven't bought much of Forgotten Realms because I don't care for that setting or the specific modules produced for them. Thus, I think the force to one setting is contrary to what Fortnite is doing and is more limiting to purchases. Fortnite regularly changes boards and skins allowing new ways to use the underlying game. For D&D to be like that would mean more setting books as opposed to adventure paths. I think that is the reason Curse of Strahd did better than the mash ups of stuff set in the Realms. Most DM's create their own campaigns anyway, setting books support that-modules don't necessarily. I think in this case Fortnite has figured it out ahead of WOTC.

 

[Aaron L]

Your anecdote doesn't match mine.

Not trying to dispute your personal experience, but really? Your friends would only buy books for one setting, and refuse to buy any books from any other setting?

That just seems truly bizarre to me. Among my friends each of us had a preferred setting that we would focus on (and use when that person DM'd a campaign if they didn't want to use their own homebrew world) but all of us would happily buy any book from any setting that caught our interest (we had 8 people in our core D&D group of friends and out of those 8, 1 was our primary Dungeon Master who ran our primary campaign, but 4 others also routinely ran our own long-term campaigns as well, and 1 other who also ran a short-term campaign and the occasional one-shot games when the feeling struck him. At the time I just thought that was normal for D&D groups, but from what I've heard online since then I guess it is highly unusual?) The only reason we didn't all buy up every book TSR released was simply because there were just too dang many for us to afford, and absolutely not because we didn't want books from different settings.

I suppose we could have just been a very weird group of people, but all of us had collections of books from just about every setting released; one friend focused on Dark Sun but also had plenty of Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms books, and while I focused on Greyhawk as my favorite setting I also had as many 'Realms, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Birthright, and Planescape books as I found interesting and could afford (I even had the Tales of the Lance Dragonlance boxed set despite disliked the setting; even though I had no interest in the world itself there was still plenty enough good material and interesting ideas that I could mine from the boxed set that it was worth having.) Our primary DM focused his book collection on the 'Realms, but almost exclusively used his own world for his games and had an extensive smattering of every other published setting, including Mystara and Birthright. Also, this was despite the fact that our group used 1st Edition (aside from when we played our Dark Sun campaign simply because Dark Sun was custom made for the 2E rules and so many basic rules of the setting were based on the 2E rules, especially psionics, that modifying things for 1E just seemed pointless.) And it wasn't just our lone gaming group that did this, either; every D&D player I ever personally knew did the same, owning books from multiple settings, and I seriously never heard of a player refusing to buy a D&D book just because they were labelled with a certain setting's logo. If a book caught their attention and seemed interesting they would buy it, regardless of the setting logo underneath the AD&D label.

But maybe Central Pennsylvania is just a weird outlier in D&D buying habits... it certainly is in many other areas of activity. But if you hung out in Comic Swap and Nittany Line Hobby across the street from Penn State Main Campus in the early '90s, you would routinely see people buying up piles of Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Spelljammer, and Planescape books all in the same batch as a matter of course.

 

[Morrus]

Not trying to dispute your personal experience, but really? Your friends would only buy books for one setting, and refuse to buy any books from any other setting?

No; I said “your anecdote doesn’t match mine”, not “my friends would only buy books for one setting, and refuse to buy any books from any other setting.”
I’d say we bought about a third of TSR’s stuff. Most was Dragonlance, least (as in none) was Dark Sun.