Why D&D is slowly cutting its own throat.

[Alzrius]

I think Celebrim has a good point. Ultimately, what people remember, enjoy, and in many cases come back to, is the fluff of the game...and 3E has put a lot of that to the axe. When Third Edition first came out, I found it bitterly ironic that they fixed the mechanics of the game, and threw out the many worlds and settings that went with it.

That said, I don't think that the valuable IPs are necessarily found only in modules, or that they need to be part of an established world. Rather, the fluff is valuable for how well it's presented, and for the shared experience it generates across many diverse players. Rappan Athuk or The World's Largest Dungeon all have proportionally more flavor text than The Tomb of Horrors ever did. The fact that the Tomb was referenced and remembered in other products is secondary to the fact that so many people enjoyed and experienced the module.

It's for reasons like this that the old worlds won't ever die, and why I think we'll eventually see them all republished in some format or another, if they haven't already been. It may divide the fanbase, but ultimately people will go to where the fluff is, and if 3E isn't providing enough, the outcry will last long enough, and grow loud enough, that eventually WotC will hear it. D&D will never "cut its own throat" because like everything in a market, it responds to the consumer demands.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Hmmm, looking at my group as an example - I have 6 players, and I am the DM.

Most of the players bought at least one of the 3.0 splat books each, some bought more. I bought all of them. So that is 10 splats plus.

We all have the PHP and I have a spare, 3 of us have the DMG, 2 have the MM - 13 core rule books.

Third party stuff... going with Iron Kingdoms - 6 of us have bought the fluff book, three of us have bought the crunch book. The fluff book was bought by players of WARMACHINE as well as the RPG. They bought it as much for the wargame as for the RPG. The crunch book is less useful to them since it is only for the RPG.

If I am running a premade adventure I will buy 1 copy. But most of my stuff is homebrew. I have bought six 3.x adventures total, and am the only one in the group to have done so. To stay with Iron Kingdoms I have the Witchfire Trilogy.

The money ain't in the adventures!

Back in the day of the modules that Cerebrim mentioned there really was not a lot of widely available competion for TSR, you could go to a bookstore and find D&D, but you had to find a specialist game store to buy Runequest. Where I lived visiting the game store meant travelling sixty miles... TSR outsold their competition because most people didn't even know that there was competition. It was the mid 80s that I started seeng other games than D&D on the bookstore shelves. Even then it was limited, FASA was the one that I remember seeing the most, and then Chaosium's Thieves World boxed set. After that the store finally started carrying Call of Cthulhu, which had been around for quite some time. For anything else I had to take the sixty mile trip, an hour travel each way.

Now WotC has competition, and because they are trying to make their adventures palatable to the widest possible range of customer the adventures are a bit bland, offending few, delighting few, sort of RPG McDonald's. This is my opinion of why WotC has no 'great modules' - they are avoiding anything that is really earthshaking or controversial. But earthshaking and controversial does not make for a best seller.

WotC does realize that adventures help raise interest in a setting, so we will begin seeing more adventures in both Eberron and Forgotten Realms, but they also realize that adventures sell to a limited cross section of their audience, so we will not see very many.

The Auld Grump

 

[Melkor]

Are you kidding? 1e D&D was all crunch - there was virtually no "fluff" anywhere. No settings, no novels, the rule books didn't even have any fluff to speak of. And yet it sold like gangbusters.

Actually, it sold a lot better than Gangbusters. TSR's 1920s RPG didn't do nearly as well on the market as AD&D.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Actually, it sold a lot better than Gangbusters. TSR's 1920s RPG didn't do nearly as well on the market as AD&D.

Heh, Top Secret, Gamma World, and Boot Hill sold better than Gangbusters...

I have finally read the Hate of d02 thread... My, my, my...

The Auld Grump

*EDIT* I have carefully changed the spelling of Gama World to Gamma World, and will now pretend that it never happened... Or that there is a game manufacturer's RPG out there somewhere... GAMA World does have a ring to it...

 

[Celebrim]

Heh, Top Secret, Gama World, and Boot Hill sold better than Gangbusters...

Gamma World was pretty cool in a wierd sort of way... and it had solid module support.

I never played Top Secret, but the group that introduced me to D&D did play Top Secret.

Boot Hill was fun to think about, and I even ran it once back in high school, but I never could figure out what sort of adventures I was actually supposed to send people on. I mean, once you've fought off a stage coach robbery, had a gunfight at high noon, chased down the cattle rustlers, and fought of the hostile indians... then what?

 

[Umbran]

I don't think there's much to the idea that writing good fluff is particularly difficult. Every single homebrew GM worth his Cheetos writes good fluff. And there's lots of those homebrewers out there.

What is difficult is writing fluff that is useful to the gaming public at large. Fluff, by it's nature, tends to be setting specific, so it is difficult to make it useful to someone outside a given setting. How good it is doesn't matter much if it doesn't fit what I'm doing.

However, it isn't so easy to write crunch that's really useful, either. I've got a foot and a half foot tall stack of gaming books next to my chair. Mostly crunch. And I use maybe one little tidbit out of each of the books, if that much. Most of the crunch simply isn't useful to my game of the moment, much as fluff books would be largely useless. So it looks like a draw to me.

 

[Crothian]

I don't think there's much to the idea that writing good fluff is particularly difficult. Every single homebrew GM worth his Cheetos writes good fluff. And there's lots of those homebrewers out there.

But most don't write it. They have scattered ideas and biots and pices, but rarely the talent and drive to make a book or equivilant out of it. I think it would be very hard to take my homebrew and write the fluff in an interesting an informative way.

 

[buzz]

Gamma World was pretty cool in a wierd sort of way... and it had solid module support.

Google says...

1st ed. GW had two modules. 1981 and 1982; GW 1e came out in 1978.
2nd ed. GW had two modules. Both 1983.
3rd ed. GW had five modules, one in 1986, the others in 1987.
4th ed. GW had three modules, one in 1992, the others in 1993.

Over the 15-year printing history of those editions, that's less than one a year. Does that qualify as solid support? Thought GW was never incredibly successful, so maybe that supports your claim.

 

[Felon]

As I posted in the ongoing Iron Lore thread:

That's what's really disappointing with the driection D&D is going. D&D continues to become morre and more inbred. Rather than designing a game that will appeal to newcomers who come in with visions of the LotR films or Conan comics in their head, they opt for this completely self-contained magic-intensive system that doesn't bear any resemblence to any kind of heroic fantasy that anyone might be familiar with. When you reach a point where Conan is flying around on winged boots or the Fellowship of the Ring can teleport to Sauron's tower the blink of an eye, and death is just an expensive pit-stop, maybe--just maybe--it's time to back up a step or two.

Ryan Dancey used to repeatedly mention D&D's 90% name recognition as if were a valuable asset. D&D should be branching out into movies and TV, but instead the designers seem to think it should be nothing more than a slow-paced video game. Really, how can D&D be adapted for mainstream audiences in any way that they would find pallatable yet remain at all faithful to the source material? Somewhere there has been a conscious decision that this game should not be oriented around daunting challenges for high stakes, but merely around prudent resource management. There are no stakes. When someone dies in D&D, it's not an emotionally-wrenching experience. It's crossing several thousand gold pieces off a character sheet.

Take a look at room 6 from WotC's series of Undermountain web articles. This is pretty representative of a typical D&D encounter these days. They call it a "puzzle", but take a look at the "solution":

Trying to lasso the chest won't work; the traps destroy the rope. Spells such as knock, open/close, and telekinesis might prove very useful in moving the chest. However, the spiked chain is the real treasure, and it is firmly bound by a ring set in the pillar that the PCs can't see from the door. PCs might also try to get rid of the traps in the room. They could attack the spikes and scythes or dispel each fire and electricity trap. This should swiftly prove too dangerous and time consuming to be a good solution. Disabling each of them is an even poorer option since a PC may get hit by one of the traps, thus disrupting his concentration on the task. Buffing up one PC with spells and sending her in or sending in a summoned monster is probably the best option.

So, ultimately is this really all that clever or engaging? Nope. It's what Monte Cook calls a spell-bleeder. I'm surprised this style of gaming doesn't alienate more people than it does.

 

[Celebrim]

Google says...3rd ed. GW had five modules, one in 1986, the others in 1987.

I played 3rd ed. GW (the one with a resolution system similar to Marvel Superheroes), so from my perspective it was 5 modules in a year.

Over the 15-year printing history of those editions, that's less than one a year.

No. Each edition was only in print a relatively short time, so you can't really call it one a year. Generally speaking, each edition was actually a different game from each previous edition - which was probably off putting to people who had played previous editions. When they were in print though, they were supported by several modules a year.

Does that qualify as solid support? Thought GW was never incredibly successful, so maybe that supports your claim.

Five modules in a year was more than sufficient in terms of quanity. Although to be honest the modules were far from perfect in terms of quality, they did have a compelling story arc, good maps, and they did present some idea of how the game should be played and what the Gamma World was like. I suspect that GW's real problem was that its campy setting didn't tie in well with most peoples notions of what a post-apocalyptic world should be like, compounded by the fact that the fluff writers never could seem to actually decide what GW was about and changed it from edition to edition. Anthromorphic bunnies and talking plants could be very off putting to people expecting a gritty Mad Max style world. I suspect that if GW had been more in fluff like Fallout, that it would have been much more successful.