Quote from: Sacrificial Lamb;685571And then there was Lorraine Williams who ran a gaming company (TSR), but whom loathed gamers, considering them her intellectual and social inferiors. It's a miracle that 2e lasted as long as it did, considering that it's pretty damn hard to create games without being an actual gamer. From what I've read, her arrogance and idiocy drastically increased the company's debt. That's never a good thing.

I'd not be so sure about her idiocy playing the part here. Considering her investment in Buck Rogers games as they'd ensure her personal profit, I'd rather suspect something more foul and casual at play here. TSR at the time fits perfectly the bill for a company that you'd ride  into the ground, while collecting as much paycheck/premiums/siphoning as possible. A profitable company with decent credit rating, actually producing something, that was, at the same time, away from most of the public's eye.

Quote from: Rincewind1;685581I'd not be so sure about her idiocy playing the part here. Considering her investment in Buck Rogers games as they'd ensure her personal profit, I'd rather suspect something more foul and casual at play here. TSR at the time fits perfectly the bill for a company that you'd ride  into the ground, while collecting as much paycheck/premiums/siphoning as possible. A profitable company with decent credit rating, actually producing something, that was, at the same time, away from most of the public's eye.

Given her general opinion of gaming and RPGs, this isn't too unreasonable an assumption.  Everything she did was for her own personal profit, kind of like the Dotts with Avalon Hill.

Quote from: Haffrung;685553So what were they playing instead? Remember, a lot of people who play D&D never play another game, and have no interest in playing another game. When they stop playing D&D they stop playing RPGs.

By the middle of the 2E era the D&D and RPG wave had crested. That huge cohort of players who had started playing as adolescents in the early 80s had grown up and most had left RPGs behind. That had nothing to do with 2E and everything to do with demographics. Just as the timing and initial success of 3E had a lot to do with demographics.

Quote from: JonWake;6855542e's rep was pretty damaged by the time WotC took over.  On the one hand they were losing market share to Magic the Gathering and White Wolf (whose fans made it a hobby to mock TSR), on the other TSR's management was in financial free fall. It might have weathered the first if it weren't for the second, and vice versa. Together, it was doomed, and no new rules or updates would have helped one way or the other.

Both of these are also very true.  I know this is anecdotal, but I was in the military in the 90s, and when Magic took over, it took over like gangbusters.  Not because people disliked 2e or anything, but because magic was a lot more portable and easy to carry with you.   Something important to the military, which has a ton of gamers.

And this drop off wasn't just D&D either.  RIFTS and Paladium games also became scarce.  I personally never saw a big rise in Vampire, but I admit it's probably due to the reason I mentioned earlier regarding portability.  Seeing as how the 90s brought the whole Goth phase in, it wouldn't surprise me to see that be one of the only RPGs to start taking off.

My impression is that Vampire grew with a different demographic than D&D. It wasn't as though people hated the system in D&D and then decided to play Vampire instead. I'm from that huge boom cohort of D&D players and I didn't meet anyone who played Vampire until a guy I worked with a few years ago admitted he used to play. And he was six years younger than me.

The broader point is that there isn't a fixed group of people who play D&D and go from one edition to another (or not) as suits their system preferences. People are leaving and joining the hobby all the time, with D&D typically their entry point. Most new players will play whatever edition is most recent.

Where WotC went wrong with 4E wasn't only in alienating a lot of existing players, but in not attracting enough new gamers. If they really had been able to tap into the WoW fanbase the way they had hoped, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But, unsurprisingly to a lot of us, WoW players proved uninterested in a table-top tactical skirmish game, and 4E proved less accessible to completely new gamers than WotC expected. It's not an especially difficult game by the standards of veteran 3.x or Pathfinder players. However, WotC has finally come to its senses that those aren't the standards it should be using when designing a new edition meant to grow the game (hence the comments about listening too much to what existing customers wanted for the last 10 years instead of what potential customers needed).

Mearls keeps hammering home the point that there are more people out there familiar or curious about D&D, who aren't actually playing, than there are people playing the game. Getting those people into the game is the point of Next, not just uniting fans of AD&D, 3.x, and Pathfinder.

I was in highshool in the early 90s and at the time we definitely lost regular D&D players to vampire (and then magic the gathering).

Something to not forget is the culpability of distributors during the initial explosion of CCGs on to the market. Many times, since they could make more dollars per pound with CCGs, distributors would ship cases of Magic the Gathering instead of RPG books that were expected. Anecdotes from former GDW staff during that period say that this was a significant factor in ending their business since customers were told that books which should have been shipped to FLGS were not because they had not been made and sent to the distributor. Without the Internet, most gamers had little access to news from publishers and thought that some had gone out of business long before it actually happened.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;685512TSR failed not because of 2e, but because of horrible business decisions around other products.

Also, that doesn't make a lot of sense about a "hail mary" driving people away further.  2.5 is a clear precursor to 3e, and you see a lot of 3e's mechanics in 2.5.  Also the same people who did 2.5 wrote 3e.  So how can 3e be a beloved system while 2.5 was a last gasp failure?

I was actually referring to "skills and powers".

Quote from: RPGPundit;685976I was actually referring to "skills and powers".

So was I.  S&P and C&T came out roughly together.  3e was clearly based off of C&T, almost exactly as the core combat system.  S&P was also the influence on 3e from the character customization standpoint.  Skip Williams wrote both 2.5 and 3e.

That's why I find it odd that you're saying so many people would hate 2.5, but then fall in love with 3e.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;686050So was I.  S&P and C&T came out roughly together.  3e was clearly based off of C&T, almost exactly as the core combat system.  S&P was also the influence on 3e from the character customization standpoint.  Skip Williams wrote both 2.5 and 3e.

That's why I find it odd that you're saying so many people would hate 2.5, but then fall in love with 3e.

Player's Option was a lot more complicated, and modular in what you could include.  The DM picks some things, the players pick others. That could lead to some serious issues, mainly just silly complications.

That's why we didn't like 2.5.

3e is more codified as to what mechanics were presented and used as standard.  My group loves 2.0 and 3.0, but dislikes 2.5 and 3.5.  Both of those are for essentially the same reasons.

YMMV.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;686050So was I.  S&P and C&T came out roughly together.  3e was clearly based off of C&T, almost exactly as the core combat system.  S&P was also the influence on 3e from the character customization standpoint.  Skip Williams wrote both 2.5 and 3e.

That's why I find it odd that you're saying so many people would hate 2.5, but then fall in love with 3e.

Skills and Powers was okay for me.

Combat and Tactics was disgusting. All those pictures of miniatures and squares. Yuck.

Oddly, I liked C&T better than S&P - more modular and much more easily used together with older 2e material like "[Class]'s Handbook" books! I loved the changes to weapons and armor, that kinda stuff (for one thing it meant everyone wasn't using longswords, for a change!). The miniatures kinda stuff we didn't use. But the combat maneuver rules were better than the ones in Fighter's Handbook imo.

Quote from: 1989;686109Skills and Powers was okay for me.

Combat and Tactics was disgusting. All those pictures of miniatures and squares. Yuck.

I agree. I am fine with the oft maligned S&P because I keep it as GM Option, not leave it unsupervised in the hands of players. CP is quite debatable, but I've yet to find a point-buy system with adv/disadv that was so well balanced that did not require oversight.

However I HATED C&T. Stalled out games to a crawl. Decided to give 3.x/PF a fair shake because maybe they cleaned things up for gridded combat. It most decisively did not. I cannot stand that book; I can't bring myself to buy it for completion sake at all.

S&P was a great idea incredibly badly implemented.
Encouraging DMs to tailor classes to suit their own settings and providing those classes with enough options to allow different flavours to be viable is a great plan. Giving players free rein to min max the crap out of everything was never going to be viable as a long term plan so long as you wanted to go on selling game books and the actual balance in teh S&P book was atrocious.

MTG wiped the table with RPGs because at its core its a totally awesome and incredibly well constructed game. And one that requires little prep time and no referee.
Whatever the OSR may think a GM as well as being an enabler for RPGs is also a brake because most kids are lazy, and want to be participants in adventure rather than creators of settings etc. With Magic you had a game that had a lot of the trappings of D&D and other fantasy but with an easy entry point, fast game play, no ref, can be played with 2 players not 4 etc etc. You can go to a game store crack open your magic cards and play a few games with a complete stranger for an hour then leave D&D could never do that. Combine that with the geeks affinity to collect and it was always bound to be huge, just how huge it was to come suprised everyone.

WW's growth was more about the popularity of Anne Rice than the decay of 2e. Mind's Eye Theatre called on a totally different demographic than D&D ever had and it was these gothy drama kids (who included a few girls shock horror) who lifted WW from just another RPG like RIFTS, or runequest, or Traveller and gave it more attraction and that extra quantum leap. The table top game then caried with it a different perspective from outside the hobby than D&D had at the time. The reality, that the whole WW line was just a trad RPG system with some thespy trappings and a pretentious writing style was not immediately obvious to the new influx of players who knew nothing of D&D but just knew this was a cool game about vampires. It is not suprising that trad players migrated to it as it was a Route to Acceptance like dyeing your hair black and wearing a leather duster coat.

Quote from: 1989;6823424e is bad. Really bad. Worst D&D ever. Complete failure. Publisher recanted it. That's how bad.

i imagine 'corporate overlords regretted it, mearls got skittish about 4e' is closer to the truth, but it doesn't matter. it's a great little game ill suited to its brand name, and has its share of avid players. its online detractors don't mean anything.

Quote from: stuffis;686276i imagine 'corporate overlords regretted it, mearls got skittish about 4e' is closer to the truth, but it doesn't matter. it's a great little game ill suited to its brand name, and has its share of avid players. its online detractors don't mean anything.

All I know is that among the gamers I interact with, Pathfinder and 4E dnd are by far the dominant games represented.

Obviously that is not a reliable scientific analysis.