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In spite of some truly fantastic content the first half of this week on Fortress:At, I've opted to barge this onto the front page as a blog post instead of as a reply to the current 5th Edition D&D thread. If you're not interested in Dungeons & Dragons in particular, the final three paragraphs call the question for the concept as a whole and I'd be curious to hear people's responses to what I think is a fundamental disconnect between the publishing and purchasing halves of the industry. [quote="Death and Taxis" post=112480]I have a lot of nostalgia for Dungeons & Dragons (played AD&D 1 and 2) but I'm not sure I'd ever go back to role-playing at this point in my life.[/quote] One of my fellow players from years back has a 15yo son that is playing the new version. It was so visually different from our AD&D days of paper sheets and mismatched dice that he didn't recognize his son was playing the same game. We had never used miniatures, relying on verbal communication to remember positions in the room. When I DM'd I deluxed the experience -- my material included room descriptions and I had (have) my maps in a hard-bound graph-paper notebook. So at playtime there was a lot prepped and ready to go. It sounds like a lot of work but I was punching out an hour or two a week between my sophomore year in High School and about age 30. So it added up to about a man-year of effort. I ran multiple groups through most of my stuff I wrote so it paid off. For much of that time I was pretty much playing AD&D exclusively so there wasn't a lot of other gaming pulling time away from it. Traveller and Gamma World and Top Secret worked their way in now and again and I had a buddy I played some AH stuff, but it always came back to AD&D because its advancement system allowed for a real emotional investment into your character. You could remember his past and envision his future. You could set realistic goals for the coming weeks. Traveller, GW and TS all failed at that. The characters were flat in other systems in spite of rich settings and materials. So now D&D is on version 5 and you need to buy minis and you need to worry about line of sight or closing speed or whatever the hell it is I see the guys doing at the shop it becomes kind of hard to visualize how to get the players to recognize that all the people attacking them have the same tattoo on their shoulder, and that it's an important part of the plot line. That kind of detail can't come through unless the physical action of the game is secondary to the verbal action, and each newer version seems to be reversing that relationship. Focus now is on piece-count, and tactical play that doesn't require prep-time. This lowers the entry barrier.
Gary Gygax failed. He failed to create a product that could grow or even sustain itself when owned by a publicly-traded company. That sounds like a stupid thing to say, but had he continued to own the company until his death and continued to shoestring publish it with its campy (though charming) art I think he would have focused on content and been happy with the smaller revenues split among just a few people. Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro cannot do that. The have a "fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders" to kind of be jerks about it. They need to obsolesce the product every few years so that they don't have to compete with their own material in the aftermarket. That's the business half of the game. So I'll say it again. Why buy new? If you want to focus on the combat aspect buy Chainmail. If you want to focus on story and narrative buy the original Dungeons & Dragons white box or move up to AD&D. Short of shiny-and-new there is no reason to purchase anything after 2nd edition, and there's some pretty solid arguments to hold off on 2nd ed. Given the street price on the original books, you could have your kids up and playing for $25, a full-blown fantasy role-play for the cost of Carcassonne. This is my fundamental argument made to most gamers. Why are you buying newest when bestest is available? When new games come out my first questions are "does it improve?" and "Is it best-of-breed?" Invariably the answers are "I don't know" or "it's kind of different" and both of those aren't compelling reasons to purchase at the top of the market as far as I'm concerned. Pre-ordering saves you 25%, post-ordering saves you 50%. What's the big goddam rush about? S.
Piece count. Entry barrier. Do these sound like role-playing terms to you?
