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

[Desdichado]

and you must have also realized just how bad they were screwing up the game. at least i did. and that's why i got back into it.

yerself, diaglo! It was 1e that turned me off of D&D for the better part of 15 years, it was 3e that brought me back.

 

[Kestrel]

Played Shadowrun

 

[johnsemlak]

yerself, diaglo! It was 1e that turned me off of D&D for the better part of 15 years, it was 3e that brought me back.

Just asking Joshua

How exactly was it 1e that turned you off of D&D? I mean, which edition did you start playing in the first place? Did you start playing 1e and immediately dislike it, or did you start with Basic D&D, OD&D, or something else?

 

[Orius]

Inspired by MerricB's thread "TSR's Comics and the Buyout by WotC", I started thinking about the dark days of 1997 when TSR was floundering and stopped printing new products for a period of roughly 7 months. Even if you had a subscription to Dragon or Dungeon, nothing came for months.

At any rate, I know that there's a lot of folks here that are D&D fans from way back, and I'm wondering what happened in those days for you. How did you get your D&D fix? Did you just keep playing the game, unphased by the lack of new material? Did you use it as an opportunity to check out some of the other games on the market?
[snip]
And I remember when rumors of the WotC buy out were announced, being worried that they were just going to put a nail in D&D's coffin. That seems silly now, but at the time, with Magic: The Gathering leading the CCG craze that was commonly blamed for the downfall of RPGs, it seemed reasonable

Yeah, I remember thinking roughly the same thing. I was waiting for a couple of new products, especially the various volumes of the Wizard's Spell Compendium. But they didn't come out. They didn't show up at any of the local bookstores that sold D&D stuff, and I kept asking the owner of a local comic shop who would put game products on special order, but he kept saying they were unavailable. Then in the summer, I read about WotC's buyout.

Now, I didn't know anything about the state of the industry at that point. I didn't have Internet access back then either, so I didn't read anything about the tactics of They $ue Regularly. And yeah, it was sort of a fear that CCGs were destroying the RPG industry, when in fact the real problem was fragmentation of the RPG market. What the CCGs did do, in retrospect, was kill off the weaker companies, and it would seem the stronger ones survived. As for the CCGs, they were fragmented too, maybe even worse than RPGs, and a lot of them died afterwards.

But now I know better. T$R got itself into its own mess by fragmenting the market. And while WW managed to prosper with the goth subculture for example, a lot of companies tanked. Computer and console games probably played their part as well, and most RPG publishers didn't cope very well with that either. I thought that WotC would destroy D&D, because after all they started the whole CCG fad.

But now, I'm glad they did it. The products released after the WotC showed a marked improvement. The d20 concept has really breathed new life into the industry; instead of trying to compete with the juggernaut that is D&D, small companies can now publish stuff compatible with it and prosper if they have a good idea. WotC isn't saturating the market, instead D&D releases are once again anticipated like they were long ago (or so I understand).

 

[Orius]

How could this have been "news" to anyone? WotC started out making supplements for roleplaying games, supplements that were very obviously originally developed for D&D and later genericized.

Yeah, but WotC was a small, new company. They were overshadowed by the big companies, TSR, WW, and so on. And even when the did become better known, it was for CCGs, not RPGs. They did make a few early attempts to get into the RPG market but failed until they bought TSR.

 

[Orius]

TSR had pretty much wasted their resources on that Buck Rogers game and all the supplements that went with that, as well as production of the massive Birthright line. They just didn't have a clue what gamers wanted

Yeah, it would seem from that comics article that the whole family wanted to milk Buck Rogers dry.

As for Birthright, I think the biggest problem there was that once again they released yet another world. Not that Cerilia sucked, although I never really got into Birthright, the various articles that popped up in Dragon were always a good read. It seemed like a good setting that actually had focus, unlike, say the Realms which crammed everything imaginable into itself. And I was always intrigued by the concept of bloodlines; TSR may have been better off releaing those rules as a sort of generic add-on that could be used with any campaign instead of tying it so tightly with Birthright. I remember 2 Dragon articles which adapted the bloodline idea to Al-Qadim; if it could work there, it could probably work elsewhere.

 

[Benben]

I was deep, deep into the White Wolf's World of Darkness at the time.

Around late 99 and till about September of 2000 I was out of RPGs altogether.

Then came 3E and I my geek life was reborn.

 

[der_kluge]

Like Crothian, I was deep in gaming bliss. I was single, had a roommate who gamed, and had nothing on my mind except role-playing, and playing computer games (often with my roommate).

I DM'd a year-long campaign that took the PCs from low level to like 9th or so. My friend DM'd some Masque of the Red Death, we played some Planescape, and some Al-Qadim, and there was even some Star Wars and Battletech in there, too.

Ah, those were the days.

 

[Desdichado]

My first few games were Basic, but 1e was out at the time, and we fairly quickly moved up to that. My frustration with the system was gradual -- I loved the concept of fantasy roleplaying as an avenue to explore fantasy stories without simply reading them, and it was certainly easier than writing them, and had some other, interesting attributes to boot, which is of course what we all know and love about RPGs.

However, since I came from a fantasy novel and story tradition, and that's always been what I want FRPGs to emulate, I became disillusioned with the implied setting of D&D and the assumptions inherent in that game, to the point that I lost interest in it before 2e was even released.

3e corrected many of those problems by making the game not only much more playable, but much more flexible. However, to be honest with you, many of the same things that I initially didn't like about D&D still remain. At the moment, I consider myself a d20 player rather than a D&D player, to be completely honest. I've used all kinds of houserules, 3rd party rules, etc. to the point where the classes, magic system, XP system, advancement, etc. all diverge from D&D standard in one way or another.

 

[hunter1828]

At that time I and the folks I gamed with were in a self-imposed D&D ban and were heavily involved in a four-year old Star Wars d6 campaign. I didn't start playing D&D again until early 2000.

hunter1828