NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8880703" data-attributes="member: 18">I mean, but how remarkable is the question? How close did White Wolf get? I heard similar "White Wolf outsold AD&D some months" claims at the time, but I dunno what the basis was for them.It seems to me like we have different phases of D&D.Early '80s - D&D craze and Satanic Panic (which we are informed increased sales in the short term). D&D basically created the RPG industry and outsold everything.Late '80s through late '90s - D&D falls increasingly out of favour, other RPGs, particular WoD, come into favour. It is alleged WoD outsold D&D a bunch in the '90s, but we have no figures.'00s - 3E is a big success but what kicks it into the stratosphere is absolutely undeniably the OGL and d20 revolution. The d20 era was unavoidable. It profoundly changed what was in FLGSes, and when it went away, so did some FLGSes which had leaned into it too hard. This was something you could see just walking into an FLGS. The RPG section used to have dozens of RPGs, and D&D would have a small portion of it. With d20, yeah 3E didn't even really have a much larger portion than 2E had, but the d20 books? God they sure did! That was like half or more of the RPG section of a store. It probably helped that a lot of other RPGs made major missteps in or just before this era, especially WW.'08-'14 - 4E was NOT the same kind of success as 3E, and d20 stuff started to like, curl up and die. In fact I'd say the big d20 boom actually started to fail by maybe '05, leaving behind a smaller number of better-adapted games. Pathfinder was one of the better-adapted ones, because Paizo's APs had already got a shelf or more to themselves, and it expanded from there.I'll be honest I haven't been in an FLGS since like 2017, so I will refrain from commenting much on 5E.One thing I know from archaeology is that sometimes even "the best data we have" is basically worthless, and it can be a serious error to rely on it (as filthy historians love to do).</blockquote>

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