What's the difference between D20 Fantasy and D&D?

[teitan]

I think it is unfair to say that 2e halved the AD&D community and isn't true by any stretch of the imagination. I'm sure, like any other game, that many people did not jump to the new system. In my experience that is true of any game outside of when they launched 3e and it's revitalization of the game. 2e never outsold 1e but it also didn't have the media craze that surrounded 1e. ANd my comments about media exposure didn't mean anything about the year when 2e came out but to the earlier period when the game received its notoriety. By the time 1989 rolled around I would say a LARGE chunk of the people who had bought the game were gone by then as the fad died and the reputation of the game continued to fester in the background so by the time 2e came out, the damage was done.

 

[Thurbane]

Thank you, Thurbane. Succinct, accurate, non-confrontational.

No problemo.

Will you be my friend?

Sure, but only if we can be best friends!

Actually, when it comes to 2E, I have to fly in the face of popular opinion. I really quite liked 2E. Well, core 2E anyway, a lot of the expansions were a bit OTT, especially the "players option" stuff...

 

[BroccoliRage]

No problemo.
Sure, but only if we can be best friends!

Actually, when it comes to 2E, I have to fly in the face of popular opinion. I really quite liked 2E. Well, core 2E anyway, a lot of the expansions were a bit OTT, especially the "players option" stuff...

BESTEST.


I like all D&D, and I like the non-fantasy d20 stuff as well. 2e is a perfectly fine system. In some ways, it surpasses 1e. I agree, though, much of the Player's Option stuff is way outthere and potentially game breaking. The psionics combat system is fantastic, however, for 2e. Mental THAC0 is awesome.

I allow all versions of (A)D&D at my table, including variants and close kin like Hackmaster, The Arcanum, and Dragonfist. That's because all of these systems can be run simultaneously. If d20 were compatible, I would run that too. I like giving my players a large amount of options.

 

[WayneLigon]

BECMI

It took me a good 15 minutes with Google to figure out what that meant. Never heard that, before.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

It took me a good 15 minutes with Google to figure out what that meant. Never heard that, before.

Oh, sorry. For anyone who is unfamiliar with the abbreviations, here's the variant I use:

OD&D = original 1974 edition
Holmes = "blue book" basic edition edited by Holmes.
B/X or Moldvay/Cook = basic & expert sets edited by Molday/Cook/Marsh
BECMI or Mentzer = basic/expert/companion/master/immortals sets edited by Mentzer
RC = Rules Cyclopedia - a compilation of the BECM sets.
OAD&D or AD&D1 or 1E = Original AD&D
2E or AD&D2 = AD&D 2nd edition
3E or 3.X = 3rd edition in general

 

[Melan]

Who was stating it?

The context I have seen it used in both typically and lately is by Dragonsfoot natives, as their stand of defiance and getting in a "zing" on Dungeons & Dragons 3e, because they believe that it's not worthy of the name "Dungeons & Dragons".

Yeah. A lame derogatory term for "It is not D&D, kids, now get off my lawn." Pretty useless for normal discourse - and IMHO just as insulting as the "rose coloured glasses! Nostalgia!" and the "outdated technology!" arguments. We would be better off these three died a horrible death.

 

[MerricB]

I'm rather suspicious of the "2e came out, D&D sales halved" theory. That 2e sales were half of what 1e sales were at their peak - sure. Absolutely. But that 2e caused the desertion? That I'm not so sure of.

I personally think D&D was at its best from 1981-1983. That's when most of the real classic adventures came out. The collected G1-3 is 1981. I3: Pharoah is 1982. I6: Ravenloft is 1983. With Ravenloft, you really end the vein of classic adventures. Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure came out in 1984, but I don't think it's ever really captured the public imagination (well, possibly not until its reissue in Dungeon Magazine). Temple of Elemental Evil is very late (1985) and somewhat disappointing.

I started playing about 1981-2. A slightly older boy in the same street I was friends with also played, and had more of the books (and introduced me to Top Secret, etc.) However, by 1984, he'd stopped playing. I don't think he was alone.

I don't think 1984-9 were good years for D&D. I think they were D&D on the downward path.

Not to say that there weren't good things that happened in there, but the classic era had ended. I don't think 2e arrested the slide much, either.

Cheers!

 

[Umbran]

I'm rather suspicious of the "2e came out, D&D sales halved" theory. That 2e sales were half of what 1e sales were at their peak - sure. Absolutely. But that 2e caused the desertion? That I'm not so sure of.

Me neither. I think the "2e killed D&D" theory rather neglects history.

Second Edition AD&D came out in 1989, and in 8 or 9 months, sold a quarter-million copies. That's doing pretty well.

But, GURPS won at Origins in 1988. Shadowrun was first published in 1989. White Wolf Games opened its doors with Vampire: the Masqerade in 1991.

So, the big dogs of competition simply weren't on the scene before 2nd Ed. AD&D. It is only in the 1990s that we see serious competition for gamer time and dollars. While it is not my thesis that many folks stopped playing D&D entirely, I expect a great many gamers spent some time with other systems too. And if the amount of time they spent playing D&D dropped, sales would similarly drop. And it is only in this time were we start seeing new gamers who started with something other than D&D.

Add on the growth of the internet as a time sink. Add in the change in demographic, with the guys who started in teh 70s and early 80s getting jobs and having babies...

Gaming does not happen in a vacuum, and the market doesn't operate in a vacuum.

 

[Desdichado]

Eh, I'd have to question that as well. The media exposure is what made D&D/AD&D popular; it was free advertising on a massive scale. Gygax makes this point in one of his quotes, that sales went up over 1000% (one thousand, not one hundred) from that. But that was in the early to mid-80's. By the time 2E came out, all that had mostly died down into the background.

Exactly--all that made D&D "faddish", not popular. The fad was over; the market had predictably shrunk. If anyone thinks that the peak numbers were sustainable based on the "superiority" of the system or something like that, I think they're smoking something very illegal. If they're claiming that 2e halved the audience for D&D, I'd suspect that they're chronology is a few years off. By the time 2e came out, the fad had been over for some time and the big guns competitors were up and running.

IMO claiming that 2e halved D&D's audience is a case of misplaced causality. I have no doubt that D&D's audience could very well have been at that time half of what it was previously, but I think 2e salvaged that from being much lower than it otherwise would have been had 1e been continued at that time.

 

[RFisher]

For me, it's "when in Rome". At DF I used "TETSNBN" because it is recognized there, it recognizes that (despite what I might be saying at that moment) DF isn't the place to discuss 3e, & because it's funny. As someone else said, it can also be seen as recognizing 3e as an edition of D&D.

I don't say "TETSNBN" here & very seldom use "d20 Fantasy" because that would contribute to obscuring my point rather than making it.

Have you seen OD&D? I don't mean Basic, the BX series stuff, but the OCE and back? Ability scores give a max +1 bonus, you have Fighting Man, Cleric and Magic User. Monsters were very, very simple, an AC, hit die and damage plus some FX. Elves could flip flop between Fighting Man and Magic User between sessions. Three Alignments. There are HUGE differences even when you add the later supplements of Greyhawk, Blackmoor and Eldritch Wizardry it is still a huge difference from AD&D and B/X.

() B/X & oD&D are closer to each other than either is to the Holmes Basic.

I'm sorry, but I just don't see late oD&D as that much different than early oAD&D. The latter is more detailed but the core isn't so different.

I might even argue that a lot of people--even those who had never seen oD&D--played oD&D using the oAD&D books. But not today.

his thread had nothing to do with older editions of the game -- there wasn't any critcism of those games to defend against initially, yet many people weighed in almost immediately to attack the current edition of D&D by saying that it wasn't worthy of the name.

Well, I weighed in because the 2nd post offer the "not worthy" theory about the use of the term by people other than that poster.

Don't you know about the new D&D honey?
All you need are minis and a whole lotta money.
It's the next phase, new wave, variant craze, anyways
It's still Dungeons & Dragons to me.

(^_^) I love that song.