Agent Cooper wrote:See, that's the thing.  The sales figures for one gamestore in one neighborhood don't constitute any hard evidence of nationwide marketing trends for D&D.  Neither does just arbitratily guessing that 50% of people stopped playing when x edition was released.  Somebody would have to do some serious involved research to find out what's really going on.  I'd be very interested to know if Hasbro has done this, and what they found out.  I mean, they must have done SOME checking around before deciding to do a big product release like 4E.  That's a big step to take blind, and nobody in the corporate world twitches a finger without doing market research first in this day and age.

That's a big problem with this subject.  So much of it is anecdotal due to the lack of hard facts/sales figures. What is indisputable is that Williams et al ran TSR into the ground in the late 90s with horrific business decisions (Dragon Dice? Spellfire cards? A Buck Rogers RPG? the Encyclopedia Magica set that was so well put together and nice it LOST money? etc etc).  

The crew that ran out EGG deserves to be hammered, and a lot of the product was so willy nilly it could only lead to disaster.  It seemed even to me, who was a know-nothing brand new internet warrior in the early 90s, that they didn't have a clue (I didn't ask for Spellfire cards...none of my RPG buddies asked for Spellfire cards....no one I talked to across the world via the internet asked for Spellfire cards...I could go on...).  Their contempt for the consumer is well known, from the top down, and I seriously doubt if any attempt at marketing was ever made besides "Let's release some crap and these morons will probably buy it".

I won't go as far as to bash the product. As everyone probably realizes by now I'm an unabashed 2E supporter and it is still my game of choice to this day.  There were a lot of really excellent products produced in the 1987-1994 heydey that get a lot of short shrift (or NO shrift) by the public at large.  IMO some of the best D&D products period were released at this time. Love him, hate him, hate Elminster, hate the Realms, whatever, Ed Greenwood was a force that only EGG matched in terms of creativity and creation while at TSR.  You may grudgingly give him props, but in retrospect the man was a creative dynamo.  His creation changed the face of the entire hobby and especially it's flagship line, and even pulling out a supplement almost 20 years old and going through it, it has a touch of brilliance. Read the orignal FR boxed set by he and Jeff Grubb, before the Realms became indexed and examined and poked and prodded ad nauseum, and there is really something there.  The first few supplements are great.  Ruins of Undermountain is just starting to finally get the massive props it deserves.  

The fact the company was sqaundering and wasting tons of money shouldn't take away from the fact it was undoubtedly making money hand over fist...better upper management and money people could have made the company survive and thrive without the eventual WOTC bailout.  Hell, the fiction division alone had to be raking in the cash (how many printings have Salvatore's books gone through by now???)....which by itself shows you the level of mismanagement at every step.

In the end it's all how you look at the thing.  As I was saying about anecdotal, here's why it's hard for me to personally believe the claim that half the gamers left TSR after 2E:  In the years of 86-87, at lot of the casual D&Ders I knew dropped the game to move on.  A lot of the releases at the time were frankly poor, or Dragonlance stuff, and really didn't catch a lot of interest.  WOG had been gutted and EGG was gone.  Dragon magazine sucked. The best thing coming out at the time might have been Frank's redo of the basic D&D game. None of the "classic" modules of the scope of, say, the S series or U series had been released in awhile (Day of Al Akbar??? Bloodstone series???)

The local game stores at the time had "gamers books" which were looseleaf pages in a plastic holder, you filled out a short description if you needed aplayer or DM and what type of game you played. In these years the book was woefully empty and forlorn, with the same 2-3 names miserably sitting there week to week.  At the time my original group since 1978 or so had temporarily broken up, everyone heading off to school or work or whatever life threw at them.  The wind seemed out of everyone's sails.....it was hard to find a decent prospect for a new group.  

After the release of the Forgotten Realms in the summer of 1987, suddenly interest perked up.  The gamers book had a few more names.  I was able to recruit FIVE new players in the fall of 1987 in a campaign based on the newly released Moonshae Isles sourcebook for the Realms.  Interest continued to grow through the next year with the release of more gaming supplements for the realms, and the very good GAZ series for basic D&D, and I had to rebuff some efforts to join my new core group, since I didn't want to DM more than 5 at a time (actually both my brothers were back in the fold so it was almost unmanageable by my standards).  

I noticed at the time a new generation of players who had no clue what the "World of Greyhawk" was (excepting the laughable Greyhawk Adventures hardback, the last product had been the 1985 Isle of the Ape release, and it would be four more years until City of Greyhawk came out in 1989, having the look and feel of something that was already in development and tossed out without the fanfare it deserved).  Everyone I met that was new to gaming or had only come in on the tail end of EGG's departure wanted to game in the realms...it was getting the new push and support, and seems to have caught people's imagination, you saw a lot of copies of Douglas Niles Moonshae trilogy and Salvatore's Icewind Dales trilogy popping up here and there as reading material.  Most WOG fans I knew either switched entirely, or held on with only the occassional humiliation like Castle Greyhawk to rub salt in their wounds...

Anyway, the big boom came after 2E was released. Suddenly, the once empty gamers book at the local chain store was bulging with both players and DMs.  The Moonshae group was high level by now and we decided to start a second group...we literally had to go through AUDITIONS because of the amount of people answering inquiries for our group.  My phone rang off the wall, at this time I worked odd hours and also ended up running a very enjoyable FR campaign with just myself and my two brothers every Monday night from about 6 pm until midnight.  A note here, my youngest brother had played D&D with us sporadically but really wasn't a total convert until the Forgotten Realms was released...he never liked the WOG and wasn't a big fan of 1st edition, I guess you could say he really started seriously D&Ding with the release of FR in 1987..he was (and still is) a detail freak, he enjoyed all the tidbits and such in the FR boxed set which really piqued his interest in the game.

After Ruins of Undermountain was released in 1991, I wanted to run a Waterdeep/Ruins of Undermountain campaign. Once again, we ran auditions of players with myself, my middle brother, and another friend of ours. In the end over 20 gamers had run through the Ruins at different times, including some of my original group that had come back into the fold, and I was running about 3-4 seperate campaigns in Waterdeep at the time because I didn't want any one group to be too large (BTW, all the groups were living in the city and running in the ruins at the same time, and often there was crossover between groups.  I had a huge notebook where I detailed the actions of each group..if Group A got to the Blue Dragon's lair before Group B, and killed the dragon, it wasn't there for Group B...but they had better have cleaned out the treasure horde, or Group B would help themselves before  Group A returned!  A logistical nightmare...but loads of fun.  But I digress...).  We had to turn away or reject many more gamers...the response had been overwhelming.  We ended up running about three distinct groups through Undermountain for the next few years, until only my brother's group remained (and they eventually conquered the 3rd level and set up a stronghold there, effectively retiring themselves after a hard fought nearly 3 year campaign!).

Ok, the long digression was just to prove a point...anecdotally, with only my evidence to go on, the interest in D&D in my area shot up to levels I had never seen since the early days of 1979-1981 when everyone seemingly had a PHB tucked into their school lockers.  In my case, interest in D&D didn't drop off by 50% at the advent of the Forgotten Realms and 2E...hell, it INCREASED some several hundred percent to levels I had personally never seen in all my years of gaming.  It was all anyone talked about.  The books flew off the shelves of the local game stores. I have never had before or since to TURN AWAY players clamoring to get into our regular campaigns, nor had to have "auditions" where we had a gamer bring his or her character to a session and run a short scenario with the regulars to see if the player fit into our style.  It was a really enjoyable time for us and probably why to the day we still use 2E (that, and the presence of the core rules CD rom which I love).  

Anyway, as I said, this is all anectdotal.  EGG says half the people dropped out after 2E.  I know that in my area the amounts of people gaming rose to levels only seen in the heydey of the early 80s.  So that is the crux of why I find it hard to believe without cold hard facts, as personal experience has been the opposite of what was claimed.  

Mike B.

So, Badmike were you in the Dallas-Fort Worth area when this was happening? I was born in the D.C. area and frequented many game stores in NOVA, D.C. and Baltimore and my experiences are similar.
I'm curious what other people from large urban areas have to say about this...

More anecdotal musings ...

IIRC, I started playing with the basic boxed set around 80' and started DMing AD&D in '81. I played in several groups (D&D and AD&D) and DMed 3 AD&D games for about three or four years, all Greyhawk stuff and old modules. I eventually stopped playing regularly to focus on the DMing, and would only play once in a blue moon. I also remember a gradual drop-off of players in my games from around 84-85 and on as guys left the hobby because of girlfriends or parents or whatever. Eventually I was down to a single group of 2 regulars by 1987-88.

When 2nd edition came out, I suddenly had no trouble finding players. And these were new guys that I had never played with before. Up until about 1993-94 I played in and ran many more games with many more people than I ever did under 1st edition.

And when 3rd edition came out. Yikes was it easy to find players!

So, anyway, I'm not convinced of this "half the gamers quitting" stuff surrounding 2nd edition either. At least not in my experience.

Steve

JohnGaunt wrote:Tangentially related to the Mark-Mike-Deimos-et.al. discussion, here's a link to a webcomic that has been using the announcement of 4E as a subject for the past week.

UserFriendly is an online comic that depicts life at an ISP.  The humor is computer-oriented, but the past week has had D&D as a subject.  Sunday's strip is always unrelated to the rest of the week's strips, so pay no attention to it.

. . . http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070824

Creepy.  Give that guy a ponytail and you're looking at my workstation.  And I work for an ISP.  (Well, an internet registrar that used to be an ISP, anyway.)

Remember that the premise is not that 2nd Edition ruined the fan base.  The premise is that 2nd Edition was a cash grab that reduced the overall fan base.

Draw a distinction in your mind between the health of the rules and the profitability of the game.

One thing to remember when discussing the switch between editions of D&D:

The goal of the switch is to sell books.

So, if 50% of the old players drop out...and you replace them with 40% of new players...then you have sold one hell of a lot of books.

The total base of the game is 10% smaller...but the pop in book sales is tastey indeed.

The numbers are theoretical, but the concept is not.

It is the book sales...not the overall state of the game...that are at the heart of an edition change.

If you read Gygax's interview...cited above...you will note how much TSR was depending on booksale pops from bestsellers like Oriental Adventures and Unearthed Arcana (the book that mortally wounded the AD&D rules).

Factor into Gygax's comments a natural and understandable tendency to see his own contributions as important....and you still have a hefty reliance on book sales.  

That would explain the willingness of TSR to publish the stupid and damaging books like Dungeoneer's Survival Guide and Wilderness Survival Guide. The motivation was cash, not game quality.

sauromatian wrote:
I read half-way through your post expecting you to say you began playing around 1988, not 1978. It's not that I don't believe you about 1e players who continued on to 2e, it's just that I'm racking my brains trying to remember the same & drawing nothing but blanks. What area are you talking about, DFW or elsewhere?

This is for the DFW area only...I wasn't familiar with any sort of gaming communities anywhere else in the state, much less elsewhere in the US (well, except for South Texas, see below), so as stated the report is merely firsthand info based on what I saw and did during this period.

You also have to understand the dynamics of the Dallas/Fort Worth area...I know you are outside of Austin, right Sauro?  I don't know the dynamics there, but typically in Texas (generally), all trends in the US start at either the west or east coast and slowly extend to the middle of the US as time goes by.  We are on the butt-end of every developing social, entertainment, economic, and other trends that occur in the US.
Despite being a fantasy nut and comic book dude since I was a kid, I had heard or seen nothing of D&D until a neighbor from Maryland moved here in 1977 and told us about this really cool game they had been playing for years up in the NE.  It was awhile before we even found a store that sold D&D...the old Hobbies for Dad and Lad tht had just opened up at the newly minted Northeast Mall in Hurst.  They had a very small selection of stuff, generally they carried everything published by TSR, but very little third party stuff (maybe a Judge's Guild module or two, nothing more).  There was literally, maybe, 2-3 other spots in the entire of the Dallas Fort Worth area where you might purchase D&D stuff back then, and none of them had the games prominently displayed.

Well, apropos of nothing, it took a long time for D&D to catch on in the Texas heartland, and it never actually caught fire like in some parts of the country.  We didn't have D&D or gaming clubs in any schools I knew of, nor elsewhere (I seem to remember there being a pretty active wargame/miniature wargamers society based in Dallas at the time, but they were outright hostile to the new fangled RPGers in town and a lot of the stores selling minis barely even did a trade in anything beyond the 1st edition rulebooks).  Most stores didn't even carry Dragon mag until the 30s, and it was "off in it's own section" near the back with all the other crap they didn't want to admit they sold.  Basically  you might find a lot of people who might play D&D, but it was not accepted, definitely underground, and hard to network among groups that played (you almost had to stumble upon another group at a public library or hear from a friend of a friend about another group that played).  Hell the local colleges didn't even have gaming clubs.  

Anyway just setting the table here.  Basically, my theory on why 2E did so well here was that by the time it was released (1987-1989 era) D&D had finally worked itself into the Dallas/Fort Worth conciousness to an extent where it wasn't automatically a stigma to carry around books, or it suddenly was easier to network (the gaming book at the local stores), and easier to find materials (Waldens was carrying most D&D stuff by then).  So what other states/areas experienced in the early 80s, the North Texans finally got a piece of later than usual, which was standard in this area.  Like always we are a few years behind the trend. Plus since there was such an influx of "newbies" into gaming, a lot of groups simply switched from 1st to 2nd edition in order to take advantage of the new blood coming in the hobby.

Interestingly, in 1981 my younger brothers moved briefly to south texas for a few years, where there was zero, none, nada, zippo gaming outlets. There wasn't a person in the entire high school where they went who had ever even heard of D&D, much less played it.  When my little brother scored above average in a vocabulary placement test (he remembers he was correctly able to identify the word "Harpy" due to his D&D connections), he was asked why, when involvement in D&D came up, the counselor immediately agitated to have him placed in psychological evaluation, with sternly worded missives sent home that he might have been "damaged" by exposure to that "satanic game".  Such was the atmosphere in Texas when in other parts of the country D&D was riding a crest of popularity....!

Now not speaking for Austin or Houston, which seems to have fostered a better gaming crowd during this era, plus more places to purchase the stuff.

During the period when 2E was released, it became almost impossible to find anyone left still gaming either 1st ED, or the WOG.  I know because at the time, I scored a lot of free gaming goodies from people who literally dumped their entire collection at the time  as they "made the switch" to 2E (I didn't really start openly soliciting D&D stuff for resale until the early 90s, but still got a lot of dump offs before that...)

Mike B.

However, 2nd Edition was the kiddy version of AD&D. It was always the nerd at the ballgame, the stooge at the card table, the ugly girl at the party.

Tacky artwork, blue ink Barbie Playhouse graphics, silly hats, one million illogical splatbooks and all...yuk!

2nd Edition was like having an ugly sister. She's still a part of the family, but you don't expect her to be prom queen.

If by "kiddy version" you meant dramatically better organized then yes, it was. I've never really understood the hate for 2nd because it was hardly any different than 1st. It always seemed to take all the good ideas from the expansion books and Dragon magazine and put them into a new edition. Thaco was an improvement, the monk was virtually unplayable, proficiencies seemed like a good idea, and thank Wotan for improved artwork. Without DAT and Sutherland it looked like some 8th grade art class was doing all the illustrations. The handbooks were excessive but they seem remarkably timid compared to the roided munchkin splat books of 3/3.5...

and I'm one of those people that really liked 1st edition

LOL!  I was just talking smack about 2nd Edition.  

Don't take it seriously.

The giants and dragons in 2E were much improved over their AD&D cousins.

Lots of other things were pretty good.

The art was terrible....usually a contest over who could wear the silliest hat.  One dwarf is wearing a bar stool upside down on his head.

I called it the kiddy version because it had that effeminate blue ink clip art that filled in every extra nook...some of it seemed to come right from a pre-teen girl's Barbie playset.  ("Clip art" is small drawings that can be added to anything to fill up space or add visual content.  It is called clip art because it used to be sold in sheets that could be cut out and glued...or used as a coloring template.  2nd Edition was full of blue ink clip art that spoiled the effect of the publications.)

The thing about the AD&D art was that people like me did and do like the amateur feel of the old products...exactly like an 8th grade art class drew it all!  

But, I seriously have never met a Forgotten Realms player and I wonder if anyone played Spell Jammer.  A couple people I knew liked to read Dragonlance, but I don't know anyone who played it.

I have a couple of players who have read all the R.A. Salvatore drow books...and I sometimes wish I could erase their memories and start fresh. The drow are not very cool in my campaigns.  (Maybe they played in the Forgotten Realms...I'll have to ask.)

My campaign was set in a corner of the Greyhawk world...but seldom interacted with the Greyhawk...what would you call it....storyline?

Greyhawk was really just the bones of a medieval fantasy world...the quality was uneven and the realism was marginal.  Still...it was a shared world that my players knew.

And, you're totally right, Mike.  The gender-switching pronouns in the 3.0/3.5 books makes them difficult to understand.  It was a mis-guided (or should I say mr-guided?), politically correct, grammatically incorrect thing to do.

And the index thing...totally true.  One of the things that drives me nuts about 3.0/3.5 is how often the rules for a given action are modified by rules printed elsewhere...and the index often ommits these crucial items, or leaves out subjects altogether.

I'm actually not married to any of the D&D editions...which is why the 4.0 thing does not really bother me.

Badmike wrote:honestly though almost anythng published during this time period sucks just as long and hard (GA series, for example)

Speaking of the GA series, what the hell is up with the cover to GA1?  It's like someone told the artist "Okay, we want you to draw Mike Grell's Warlord character on a horse.  Yeah, just like that, but could you place it underwater and turn the horse into an aquatic creature?  Some sort of 'sea horse', if you will."

I'm particularly amused by the coral/rock in the foreground that covers where a horse's rear legs should be.  It's as if even the artist couldn't figure out exactly how the horse is supposed to transition to fish.