Alla fine non riesco nemmeno a rispettare i miei stessi propositi (nel caso specifico: "basta! smettila di perdere tempo a cercare link in giro ogni volta che qualcuno non ti crede! Digli "liberissimo di non credermi" e fai cose più utili"). Non vado a cercarmi di nuovo tutti i link in giro ma ti faccio un copia incolla di parte di un post (non potendoti dare il link) che ho scritto tempo fa su The Forge:
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2) TSR was searching for anything that could sell. Gygax was on the way out of TSR, the TSR was on the verge of bankrupt a few years before and was saved by publishing a hastly-written mishups of new rules and characters for AD&D (Unearthed Arcana) and increasing the rate of publication of new books and modules (I counted some times ago the number of books published by TSR in the early eighties, and the increase is really noticeable. When D&D was selling millions and millions of copies everywhere, TSR published a handful of slim booklets with dungeons every year. Almost nothing. When D&D sales started dropping, AD&D goes in a few years from a set of 3+some oddmwents volumes - the basic 3, Legend and Lore, and some other - to a half-shelf long line of books about every AD&D "universe", monsters, new rules, etc., with very long adventures published every month or more often.
(I did check more details about this, too.
A history of TSR
http://www.wizards.com/dnd/DnDArchives_History.asp
1984 is the year D&D sales plummet and TSR gets in trouble:
http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/articles/539/539197p4.html :
and Gygax leave in 1985:
http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/articles/539/539197p5.html
The date of Lorraine Williams "reign" is important because she is the one that start the "no playing at work" policy. From that moment D&D products are in practice only read, not playtested. TSR become the biggest producer of unplaytested crap on the market. That level of crappyness become the norm. The idea that the GM should make the adventure works anyway because "rules doesn't matter" is fueled by this
This list of D&D products from Grognardia is not the one I remember reading, but it will do. These are the numbers:
- 1980: 1 hardback (deities and demigods), 5 accessories (geomorphs, logs, etc), 5 adventures (slim booklets of 32 pages each). Less than 200 pages of adventures. In a year.
- 1981: 1 hardback (fiend foglio), 2 boxed sets (Basic and Expert D&D), 10 adventures. 2 adventures are reprints and collections of older booklet, and they are the only long ones. Only 7 new adventures. No rules added in 3 years. No new setting.
- 1982: no hardback, no boxed sets, 9 adventures. This means that there was an average of 40 days between any new offer from TSR and they were thin booklets that sold for $6.95. And this is most successful D&D year in history, with million of copies sold of the corebooks.
- 1983: the sales begin to slow down. TSR hastly print another Monster Manual (II), produce a new edition of the Basic and Expert set (Mentzer) and the Greyhawk boxed set. And 16 adventures.
- 1984, the year of the crisis, 75% layoffs, TSR print a new boxed set (companion D&D) and 29 adventures. 5 of them are Dragonlance.
I don't think that the Dragonlance series was caused by the crisis. It was two years in development. They simply saw that "story-modules" sold well and they thought of tying together novels and adventure modules. But right at the time the corebooks sell less and less and there is risk of bankrupt, this series (and the tied novels) are best-sellers and bring a lot of money... It doesn't take much to add two and two and understand what they had to produce to make more money...
- 1985: TWO hardbacks (Oriental Adventures and Unearthed arcana), the Battlesystem Rules, TWO boxed sets (expert D&D and Lankhmar) 21 adventures (6 of them are Dragonlance) . Unearthed Arcana most of all is a big change: a "must have" corebooks with the rules that change the game. The first one in SIX YEARS. until that, there was the idea that AD&D was "definitive" and all the added rules in the Dragon were not-official. The first one in six years. And it was a list of unbalancing overpowered new character class and new game rules and spells that clearly were not very well thought off, let alone playtested (Gygax later admitted that he had to publish SOMETHING , anything, in an hurry, to save the company)
The number of adventures is lower, but don't be deceived: the page count is higher. TSR begin to print new adventures (not reprint) with more than 100 pages.
- 1986: 2 hardbacks (the survival guides) , a boxed set (Immortal D&D), 3 accessories (creature catalog and Book of lairs and character sheets) , and 23 adventures. (3 are dragonlance)
- 1987: 2 hardbacks (manual of the planes and Dragonlance) , 2 boxed sets (kara-tur and Forgotten Realms), 9 accessories (6 of them are setting modules, 2 for Forgotten Realms and 4 for the D&D world), 22 adventures.
The number of adventures is becoming stable, but I would like to point out that in this single year, TSR publish corebooks for THREE "new D&D worlds": Dragonlance (that goes from the setting of an adventure to a general D&D setting for a lot of adventures), Forgotten Realms and Kara-tur, + 2 expansions for Forgotten Realms (one of them, Moonshae, was originally a new celtic setting, that was added to the Forgotten realm patchwork like Kara-tur), + 4 new "nation setting" fo D&D. 9 new products that are simply settings books.
- 1988: 1 hardback (Greyhawk) , 1 boxed set (waterdeep), 12 accessories (10 are geographic modules, 1 is a GM design kit and one is Lord of Darkness, a compilation of adventures), and 8 adventures.
It's clear the transition from a corebook-based business model to a inflation of adventures, and then (seeing that adventures are "optional" by nature) to a inflation of "accessories", and "geographic modules" and "new universes", that most fan consider (at least at this time) must-have items.
It's interesting to see these changes seen by a old-school point-of-view:
http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/09/ ... art-i.html
http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/09/ ... rt-ii.html
Very different point-of-view (I can't stand the most of the OSR, the only value I give them is the increased interest n the hobby's true root and not in propaganda), but most of the same conclusion.
The supplement treadmill was not a business model for sustained business. It was, from the start, the desperate move of a failing company to get more money by squeezing its fans with quickly-written inferior products.
And the industry followed this "grasping at people's money in desperation" business model for twenty years... it's any wonder that less and less people continued to buy role-playing products? Even I, with my newbye faith in "the quality of D&D", by 1989 was seeing the evident drop in quality and by 1991 stopped buying anything by TSR...)
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