Were the 80s really the Golden Age of D&D?

[AllisterH]

What about GURPS, Traveller, Runequest and Call of Cthulhu?

None of those came close to matching the market share of D&D. Both RIFTS and White wolf in the 90s were able to actually take market share away from D&D.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Actually, GURPS did make a serious stab at the top for gross sales, but it was mainly because of a combo of licensed settings and their marvelous "quasi-historical" supplements. The actual core rulebooks, though...

 

[billd91]

None of those came close to matching the market share of D&D. Both RIFTS and White wolf in the 90s were able to actually take market share away from D&D.

They don't have to come close to matching the market share of D&D. They just have to take some of it away.

In the case of CoC and Traveller, I'd doubt they did much to take market share away. Most gamers I knew played a variety of games, particularly ones in different genres. Runequest competed pretty much directly and would have taken some marketshare away, same with Warhammer Fantasy RP.

 

[Ariosto]

WoD games greatly de-emphasized the math and mechanics typical of earlier games.

If you say so. I can only report that I choked on their math and mechanics every time I tried to swallow enough just to get through character generation. I put White Wolf in the same box as later Palladium Books, and sealed it with the Elder Sign. <shudder>

Amber (1991) even brought us diceless gaming.

Sure, although as Erick Wujcik himself pointed out, that was just a little step from the old-school RPGs (which tended, to degrees varying by GM, to go diceless for most things other than combat anyway). Obviously, that has nothing to do with WoD -- which went just the other way!

These games were less about the combat and more about "storytelling"...or so it was claimed by their players.

From what I have seen of WoD, and at closer hand of Amber, they were more about both combat and storytelling than D&D at least had been prior to AD&D 2nd Edition.

Thus, the advent of these stripped-down games also started or greatly inflamed the whole "roll-play"/"role-play" discussion.

Stripped down compared with what? Aftermath? Fringeworthy? Rolemaster? Space Opera? Spawn of Fashan? Are you roll-playing instead of Role-playing? an ad asked back in 1980, proclaiming, Tunnels & Trolls is the answer!

All of that doesn't mean that it wasn't possible to play evil PCs and anti-heroes before 1/1/91, but merely that the games themselves did not favor playing such PCs.

Gygax for one seems to have favored playing "anti-heroes" (mostly of Neutral alignment), from what I gather -- but evil PCs indeed were not favored. It is far from apparent to me how in fact favoring the evil extreme, positively wallowing in it, is any less "black and white", how it introduces "shades of gray" that were not present before. Vampires and Amberites seem simply to go as a routine to excesses of selfishness -- and self-absorption -- that would stand out as part of the varied palette in most other RPG campaigns.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

If you say so. I can only report that I choked on their math and mechanics every time I tried to swallow enough just to get through character generation. I put White Wolf in the same box as later Palladium Books, and sealed it with the Elder Sign. <shudder>

How much AD&D did you play? It featured

1. Character classes with different advancement rates
2. A Str stat that had different progressions for warriors and all other classes
3. "Plusses" to your magical armor that actually reduced your nominal AC, as in "my +3 shield gets me to a -5AC, but this +5 shield will drop it to -7!"
4. 3rd level PCs who couldn't cast 3rd level spells, but only 2nd level ones (something not corrected until 4Ed)

And other counterintuitive mathematical quirks. At least WoD was straightforward.

From what I have seen of WoD, and at closer hand of Amber, they were more about both combat and storytelling than D&D at least had been prior to AD&D 2nd Edition.

I don't know- I can't say I've seen a campaign in either of those that matched the "hack n slash" of a typical AD&D game.

Of course, that is one of those things where, as the saying goes, YMMV.

Stripped down compared with what? Aftermath? Fringeworthy? Rolemaster? Space Opera? Spawn of Fashan? Are you roll-playing instead of Role-playing? an ad asked back in 1980, proclaiming, Tunnels & Trolls is the answer!

T&T was one that escaped me, I must confess.

However, I did play one of the simplest quality RPGs I've ever seen, though: In the Labyrinth, the 1980 "rpg-ized" version of the fantasy wargames, Wizardry and Melee. Its 3 stats meant you'd take 5 minutes max to generate a PC. It also presaged many of GURPS' mechanics.

But the 1980s also featured the rise of Champions/HERO and the oft-aforementioned Traveller.

Between D&D, HERO, Traveller and other luminaries of the 1980s RPG scene, you found a LOT of complexity. Trav used hexadecimal for stats, and there are few games "crunchier" than HERO.

Honestly, I'm hard pressed to think of more than a few games published in any other 10 year period that matched the complexity of the games of the 1980s.

 

[Ariosto]

How much AD&D did you play? It featured

I have played a lot of AD&D. None of those things ever tripped me up. I really don't see how #1 is an issue at all, or how #2 matches your description -- much less being a "mathematical quirk". With #3 and #4, we're dealing really with quibbles over "flavor" rather than problems in arithmetic.

YMMV, of course, and if you prefer 3e and 4e then your "stripped down" assessment is understandable (if anachronistic).

Trav used hexadecimal for stats ...

Not really, but to save space (and for "futuristic" flavor), values above 9 were often represented with alphabetic characters. <shrug> I guess it's about as nifty or off-putting as a lot of stuff "Trekkies" dig. Sort of like some folks thinking "Vancian" spell names (or the ... whatever they are ... power names in 4e) are neater than bland stuff like "fire ball".

So, little things like that really yank your chain. Not lengthy "stat blocks", though. Not huge volumes of rules, mostly dedicated to making any fight scene take about an hour to work out.

Theoretically, if WW and WotC baroque confections are easy enough for you to manage then "classic" Traveller should be a piece of cake. Weird that you should be so confounded by having so much Original D&D material at your fingertips in the Advanced books -- but the Basic ones present the same essential mechanisms. I don't know whether a 10-year-old can open a White Wolf book and get to running a game right away, but with Moldvay Basic yes indeed. The later Mentzer edition even puts you through a solo adventure (or two?) so you can learn by playing even if there's no experienced DM handy.

Of course, I have at least gotten through character generation with game systems that were in sum even more involved than WW's. I don't prefer any of them (RuneQuest II or, say, Villains & Vigilantes being pretty much my usual "crunch" limit) these days, but I can appreciate them. The "new school" Super Heavy Nights, though, really do give me a headache if my eyes don't glaze over first -- and White Wolf or 4e more than 3e.

Different strokes for different brains, eh?

Old D&D and Traveller are the ones stripped for easy action, from my perspective. The challenge for a GM is in creating an interesting environment to explore; for the players, in exploring it.

 

[Ariosto]

a curiosity:

UK Games Day Awards -- 1980

Best Wargame
1st -- Squad Leader
2nd -- Diplomacy
3rd -- Kingmaker

Best Boardgame (Any Period)
1st -- Diplomacy
2nd -- Kingmaker
3rd -- Squad Leader

Best Game (Any Type)
1st -- Dungeons & Dragons
2nd -- Traveller
3rd -- Diplomacy

Best SF/F Game
1st -- Dungeons & Dragons
2nd -- Traveller
3rd -- Diplomacy



Best Role-Playing Game
1st -- Dungeons & Dragons
2nd -- Traveller
3rd -- RuneQuest

Huzzah for RuneQuest! Otherwise, I'm afraid Diplomacy would have placed again ...

One category in which it of course could not:

Best New Game of 1980
1st -- Top Secret
2nd -- Air War '80
3rd -- Bushido

 

[Mercurius]

As the publishers lose interest, the RP communities in general seem to make the conversion from players to "diehards that will keep the system alive" for each system as part of the sub-culture from that peer group. I submit that is the likely cause for the birth of "Golden Age" mentality among gamers - the first stages of that status at any rate. The highly popular systems could thrive in theory after the loss of their primary publishers. So, it would be possible to see systems that are "living" through the "golden age".

*Keep in mind, the birth of the golden age mindset does not indicate the actual "date" of the start for the Golden Age - only the mentality. The actual "date" can start at any point that peer review dictates. The actual evolution of the mindset is independent of the real time game life.

I really think that RPGs are a mature industry/hobby...

...Historical wargamer dudes abide. Half a century ago, they didn't have much besides a tiny but growing hobby. Now, they have a hobby and industry of apparently sustainable size, like the model railroaders and others before them.

If D&D is on a roughly 40-year arc like that of board wargames, then we're in the final decade before final shakeout to stability. I am inclined to think that the RPG hobby as a whole has already settled into its long-term state -- except that we might expect to see more transferred from paper and pencil to electronics.

I do not expect the existing computer-games industry to turn much more in the direction of role-playing than it has already.

You both bring up some interesting points here that fit well together. RPGs may very well be stabilizing into a sustainable size which will likely be toned down from the heydays of the mid-80s and the early 00s, and will also probably gradually dwindle (just as wargames apparently have) as Gen-Xers age and more and more stop playing or eventually die (eek!). We are seeing this already: While there is a very strong core of perennial RPGers, it still seems that the community is losing more than it is gaining. I could be wrong, though.

But what may happen is that, as Kafen implies, we enter a (new) Golden Age as the cycle comes full circle. And it is partially because of the fact that it stabilizes into a smaller, sustainable size that this could happen. I think this has something to do with finances--that when money (and profit) become too deterministic you invariably end up crashing. A sign of this might be if Hasbro eventually decides to sell the D&D IP and a group of fans/designers get together to buy it and reinvigorate D&D "for the people." Don't know if this could or would happen, but one does wonder what Hasbro would do with D&D if they decided it was not worth the trouble of publishing a 5th edition. They could just put it away in cold storage (which might benefit a company like Paizo enormously if they stick around long enough).

Eventually what I think may happen is that the industry will dwindle to the point where it is held aloft by a relatively small, although still strong, core of diehards. The interesting thing is that there will still be new players, just not that many. But I remember meeting a guy in his 20s that was into Big Band music; one of my current high school students is really into Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movies, while the vast majority of students don't even know who those two guys are. My point being, RPGs will probably be "relegated" to that sort of cult classic status. I say "cult classic" rather than "classic" because they'll never be accepted by the bulk of the mainstream or even the academic world as classic in the way that a violin or bebop jazz or oil painting is; but they will be cult classics in the mould of 1950s scifi or 1970s fusion or 80s alt rock.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Not quite true. The MM came out in 77, the PHB in 78, the DMG in 79, and Deities & Demigods in 1980. Fiend Folio came out the following year. So, as far as hardcovers were concerned, the rate was one every year in the beginning. This, of course, discounts modules.

[Edit: NM, I see Mistwell beat me to it.]

Not only that, but this was planned. When the DMG was prepping to be released, Gary Gygax already mentioned a monster book from Great Britain and a MM2 in The Dragon.

(I recently re-read it!)


RC

 

[TerraDave]

I believe the '80's where The Golden Age.

My reasoning is based on the following:

1) D&D had real mainstream reach, where as in the mainstream now it plays second fiddle to World of Warcraft.
2) D&D's mainstream reach could be felt in the fact that it had a toy line, and a cartoon on a major network, and it could be purchased along side boardgames in from pretty much every toy retailer for K'Bee to Toys R Us. Today, D&D doesn't even have a print magazine devoted to it.
3) Everything that has happened since then has always been a revival of legendary content and fluff from that golden age. There is 'Return to the Tomb of Horrors' or 'Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil'. For any other 'golden age' you could name, there would be what? When people talk about experiences in classic encounters, what could you name for anything outside of The Golden Age encounters that could be anything like a shared experience or for that matter 'classic'? Nothing since then has been nearly as iconic.
4) If you took a survey of the sort of people that hang out at EnWorld, I think you'd find a disproportionate number are of the age to have been forged in the '80's.

I am going with Celebrim this one time.

# 3 here really points at the golden age. There has been refining of concepts and mechanics, but the creation of new elements that have really stuck has been very slow over the last 20 years. And backward looking products definately harken back to this era.

There is an exception: references to campaing settings from the "silver age". However these silver age references are seen more as extensions then part of the "core" experience. I don't think I am going out on a limb to say that Tomb of Horrors will resonate with more D&Ders then Athas or Sigil, as popular or cool as those may be.