What did you do during TSR's dark days of '97

[MerricB]

I left RPG's for the CCG craze (got really big into Star Wars CCG).

I played a lot of the Star Wars CCG as well. Strangely enough, though I rarely tried to get sets of Magic (which I played even more), I did with Star Wars - had every card through Endor, but when they brought out the Ultra-Rares in Death Star II, I just couldn't be bothered any more.

I still regard Decipher as a company that makes interesting games, but then fails to develop them in a sustainable manner. WotC are exceptional in their ability to sustain successful games.

Cheers!

 

[DMauricio]

rofl

At least you didnt become a LARP'er or run around wearing black clothes pissed drunk thinking you where Robert Smith... or something else cliche'd and emminently worrisome.

Not that I'd know anything about the above... *cough*

Its ok, I got better.
Besides, I had my psych eval prior to leaving, and they told me I was SANE.

Mind you, at one stage I did run around in black clothes (hell I still do for the most part) but only cause I joined a ninjitsu mcdojo.
And well there's that leather wearing punk phase I'm apparently going through.(not taking into account that I wear leather for practical reasons - mainly that I ride a motorcycle) -shrug-

Not that there's anything wrong with being an ex-army ninja/LARP'er/goth/punk.

Besides which, its not like I actually got sent anywhere... just missed out on duty in Timor and the Sydney Olympics for that matter.



D.

 

[Orius]

I played a lot of the Star Wars CCG as well. Strangely enough, though I rarely tried to get sets of Magic (which I played even more), I did with Star Wars - had every card through Endor, but when they brought out the Ultra-Rares in Death Star II, I just couldn't be bothered any more.

I still regard Decipher as a company that makes interesting games, but then fails to develop them in a sustainable manner. WotC are exceptional in their ability to sustain successful games.

Star Wars, along with Middle Earth: The Wizards were my cardboard crack addictions. Decipher's biggest problem IMO is that they focused too much on Collectible to the detriment of Game. They wanted to create super duper powerful rare cards that would be like their equivalents of a Black Lotus -- very hard to find cards that were ultimately overrated. The original Star Wars release was stupid in that the starter decks were completely randomized, yet the game was supposed to be played with two seperate decks. That was later fixed, I started out with a starter game that had two preconstructed decks, one Light Side, on Dark, and that formed the backbone of my collection. And later, the Special Edition set had seperate Light/Dark decks.

I think it was shame that ICE went broke, because they took one of the best games in the market when they went under. MEtW was pretty complex, and had a lot of non-canonical stuff ICE made up, but it was still a pretty cool game. However, some of their card sets were ridiculously large.

I was into Decipher's Star Trek game as well, but in the early days it was even wore than Star Wars. I gave up on that game after a whle, because it sucked horribly. I heard the game later improved, but by that time, I'd weaned myself of the nasty CCG habit.

 

[BOZ]

one nice thing about that time is that i actually got to save all that money that i would have spent on all the products that would have come out - i had just moved out of my parents' house, so god knows i needed all the money i could get.

 

[D+1]

Continued to play and discuss pointless details about the game online. Most of my comments of the time were on TSR's boards on AOL. Unfortunately, as far as I know there's no archive of those boards so I can't refresh my memory about what I said or was doing in particular.

I do remember that I was quite confident that the game would not "die" because either SOMEBODY would buy the rights (probably the only thing of value TSR had left aside from personnel) or if it went without a publisher it would effectively (although not legally) become public domain. There'd be nobody to prevent other publishers from simply picking up where TSR had left off. It wasn't as if there wasn't money to be made, just that TSR had been mismanaged into oblivion and the game was therefore in limbo for a time.

The hiatus itself didn't much affect me anyway because I was between games for about a year at around that time and a lot of my time went to computer games since I had no D&D campaign to run or play in.

 

[HellHound]

97?

Played Vampire religiously.

Played and wrote fan material for CyberPunk 2020 slavishly.

Occasionally ran my classic D&D campaign. None of this AD&D or 2e stuff.

 

[Henry]

Your article about what you found there resides permanently on my hard drive. As a love letter to gaming, it has no equal.

Nice to know I'm not the only one.

Let me also say "Thank you."

Ryan's not one strong on repeat posts, but let me say "ditto."

 

[Henry]

Your article about what you found there resides permanently on my hard drive. As a love letter to gaming, it has no equal.

Nice to know I'm not the only one.

Let me also say "Thank you."

Ryan's not one strong on repeat posts, but let me say "ditto."

 

[diaglo]

15 minutes between double posts.

is that a record August one?

 

[seankreynolds]

Hey Sean, wasn't this around the time when you were TSR's webmaster? I still remember that old "beholder" intro page, where each eye was a link to something.

Yep, that's the timeframe. You neglected to mention the infamous statement on the main page for the first 4 months of that year: "Due to a problem with the printers, we have been unable to release any new products or magazines since December...."

The "problem" of course being that TSR was unable to _pay_ the printer....