Also, I recall some people complaining in previous threads about the extent to which Wizards chose to dial back the sexy demonism in DnD books, in response to religious concerns. But from some of the posts in this thread, it seem that move was largely good. Why embellish something that's already tricky to explain to outsiders with unnecessarily controversial trappings?
I hold a minority position on the boards. Based on past threads, the majority position has been that the 'RPG scare' was good for the game because it provided it free publicity and increased the number of people who wanted to play simply because it was something that parents didn't want you to do.
I disagree with that assessment. I believe that the 'RPG scare' and the general naivity that management at TSR had about marketting their product which greatly contributed to the scare may have in the short term boosted sales of the product, but it also directly led to the boom-bust cycle that was the early fad years of the game. Had there not been an 'RPG scare', the value of 'Dungeons and Dragons' as a brand and as intellectual property would have been many times what it was and now is. It's the RPG scare that directly led to the demise of what could have been a lucrative secondary market in toys, cartoons, movies, and so forth. Gygax wasn't completely off base in trying to capitalize on the secondary market, but because of the negative perceptions of the brand those efforts were basically doomed. Kids may have played D&D because parents forbid it, but advertisers didn't buy spot time on cartoons with negative brand perceptions and they didn't buy toys for their kids. Because of the RPG scare, parents stopped buying D&D coloring books, D&D choose you own adventure paper backs, and so forth. I know these things as fact because I've heard these stories again and again and again. Because of the D&D scare, aunts and uncles didn't give D&D books to kids for Christmas, and the market depended largely on the incomes of teenagers and college students independent of their parents larger resources. Because the secondary market failed, when massive intellectual product successes like 'Dragonlance' rolled around, this didn't immediately translate into anything but novel sales
and never will translate into anything but that.
It caused MASSIVE damage to the brand, and because the managers at TSR didn't realize that - and indeed I think naively welcomed the negative publicity - and were slow to respond to it, it's amazing the hobby survived as well as it did. Honestly, I think Tracy Hickman may have saved the hobby. He's in my opinion almost as important to the hobby as Gygax and Arneson, not only because he's one of the best module writers of all time, and not only because of his collaboration with Weiss, but because he seems to be the one figure at TSR who really got it and realized something had to be done and who was able to empathize with the criticism to some extent instead of just dismissing it.
