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In the 1980s, you could buy the red box D&D straight out of the Sears catalog for a couple of years, and it was also in basically every bookstore.  $8.99 in 1983 is about $25.68 in today's dollars.  I can't overstate how impactful the sears catalog was for kid's christmas presents. Every household had one and every kid flipped through the toy section. It was priced exactly right, it was an obvious starting thing for parents to buy kids, and there was a D&D cartoon on TV from 83 to 85 (red box came out '83). It was popular as gently caress. I've never seen actual sales figures but that may have been the peak market penetration for D&D for the next 30 years. I'd believe it. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Mar 27, 2022 |
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Mar 27, 2022 00:00
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LMAO at Star Fleet Battles being sold out of a Sears catalog.
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Mar 27, 2022 00:16
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Christ that crossbows and catapults game looks like poo poo
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Mar 27, 2022 00:28
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I had it and it was awesome because it's a dexterity game where you just smash plastic walls with toy catapults.
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Mar 27, 2022 00:32
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Yeah, a friend of mine had it and it was great. The plastic discs had a proper heft to them.
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Mar 27, 2022 00:37
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Fine uh, the Dark Riders game looks like poo poo, are you happy?  Noticing the Traveller Mini set comes with paints and a brush and matches the price of TSR's offering which only comes with the same amount of Miniatures....
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Mar 27, 2022 00:43
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I mean, you can buy 5e in some form in every Target and Wal-Mart in the country.
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Mar 27, 2022 00:45
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This might have gotten posted about earlier and lost in the talk about MAR Barker's nazi proclivities (which, yknow, understandable), but Aziz Hasan, Kickstarter's CEO, has stepped down. There's a blog post from him here making the announcement on the 22nd. The official party line is this has nothing to do with their blockchain announcements, but that rings about as true as a politician who decides to retire to "spend more time with their family."
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Mar 27, 2022 02:29
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Kai Tave posted:This might have gotten posted about earlier and lost in the talk about MAR Barker's nazi proclivities (which, yknow, understandable), but Aziz Hasan, Kickstarter's CEO, has stepped down. There's a blog post from him here making the announcement on the 22nd. The official party line is this has nothing to do with their blockchain announcements, but that rings about as true as a politician who decides to retire to "spend more time with their family." Or, in this case, "spend more time with their blockchain."
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Mar 27, 2022 02:32
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FMguru posted:LMAO at Star Fleet Battles being sold out of a Sears catalog. It works like coal. If you were a good kid you got yourself some D&D. If you were a bad kid you got Star Fleet Battles.
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Mar 27, 2022 10:38
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Or, in this case, "spend more time with their blockchain."
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Mar 27, 2022 10:44
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Crossbows and Catapults is getting a reboot from Restoration Games who have brought back other 80s faves like Fireball Island as 'Fireball Island: The Curse of Vul-Kar' and Dark Tower as 'Return to Dark Tower'. Though arguably, they have had greater success (critically, if not financially) with Downforce and Unmatched.
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Mar 27, 2022 10:59
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Kai Tave posted:This might have gotten posted about earlier and lost in the talk about MAR Barker's nazi proclivities (which, yknow, understandable), but Aziz Hasan, Kickstarter's CEO, has stepped down. There's a blog post from him here making the announcement on the 22nd. The official party line is this has nothing to do with their blockchain announcements, but that rings about as true as a politician who decides to retire to "spend more time with their family." Notably, the article states that KS still has plans in place to “move onto the blockchain” so we’ll see if that changes once his advisory period ends and they get a new CEO. I’m still not touching KS for now, but it feels less inevitable now.
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Mar 27, 2022 13:25
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Christ that crossbows and catapults game looks like poo poo moths posted:I had it and it was awesome because it's a dexterity game where you just smash plastic walls with toy catapults. potatocubed posted:Yeah, a friend of mine had it and it was great. The plastic discs had a proper heft to them. I never played C&C, but I have a similar game called weapons and warriors by Milton Bradley (which I think is out of print. I got it from goodwill.) and it's pretty rad, with cannons and catapults you can fire. The set I have is a deluxe set with a castle and a pirate ship, though some of the bits are pretty fiddly to get together (perticuarly the ship's targets that explode when you hit them).
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Mar 28, 2022 01:03
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Me and my friend used to set up the people and the walls as well as books at opposite ends of my friends living room and just lob the discs ourselves. We had series of houserules about how well dudes could be hidden (you were allowed one where you just had to push a book using the force of your throw - there was no way to get an angle otherwise) Edit: in hindsight its frankly insane that we never broke anything in that room
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Mar 28, 2022 01:10
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Chakan posted:Notably, the article states that KS still has plans in place to “move onto the blockchain” so we’ll see if that changes once his advisory period ends and they get a new CEO. I’m still not touching KS for now, but it feels less inevitable now. My guess is that the decision to push blockchain poo poo wasn't in and of itself what resulted in this "stepping down" per se, I doubt anyone went "oh no, not blockchain!" and made a move to put pressure on Hasan, but probably a combination of mounting internal dissent from the company's workers (who definitely weren't consulted over these pivots) and a failure to manage the optics once the inevitable fallout ensued made him seem like more of a liability than an asset. "Kickstarter says they're gonna do blockchain stuff and everyone hates them" was in the public eye for weeks and KS notably never got ahead of it in any fashion, all their press releases were weak tea and various high-profile creators had nothing but negative things to say about it, you had tech site articles writing about it, etc. That sort of thing can't engender confidence, even among the tech-optimist set.
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Mar 28, 2022 01:44
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dwarf74 posted:Yeah - as it stood, Paizo relied on the OGL to stay in business. WotC was moving away from the OGL for their own, totally understandable, business reasons - and yeah was kinda shady about licensing until pretty drat late in the game. yea the whole 'we're REAL D&D' poo poo was pretty insufferable but the original start of it feels less like 'yea fuuuuuck your fake rear end D&D I bet it'll be for casuals and women' and more like 'welp, we've been nothing but a good partner until now and you seem to be doing away with a major thing, guess we'll do it ourselves'. Like you said some form of Pathfinder was inevitable if D&D was moving away from OGL stuff, Paizo just were the guys best equipped to pounce first.
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Mar 28, 2022 03:16
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MockingQuantum posted:It's the idea that there's two approaches when it's raining money, make one big bucket to catch as much as you can, or waste time making a bunch of smaller buckets. The argument that's usually leveled at Williams is that she squandered TSR's golden opportunity by trying to cast too wide a net with AD&D 2e, mostly through all of the extra campaign settings like Planescape, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, etc. instead of focusing solely on straight-up fantasy, I guess? Because it's not like those are adored by a subsection of D&D fan or anything. i mean even if it's true that's loving vile and the death knell of creativity unless you're a stockholder who doesn't care about anything past quarterly earnings, why would you ever want 80s(?) TSR to act like modern-day Disney
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Mar 28, 2022 05:51
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Christ that crossbows and catapults game looks like poo poo i had that as a kid! never learned to play it, i'm not sure now if it was because the rules were too complicated or they just got lost. enjoyed chucking marbles at things out of the catapults while they lasted but i don't think they were really designed for the rigors of use by small children lol
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Mar 28, 2022 06:04
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i had that as a kid! never learned to play it, i'm not sure now if it was because the rules were too complicated or they just got lost. enjoyed chucking marbles at things out of the catapults while they lasted but i don't think they were really designed for the rigors of use by small children lol I'm pretty sure much like MouseTrap this is the most valid way to play with it.
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Mar 28, 2022 11:12
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MockingQuantum posted:It's the idea that there's two approaches when it's raining money, make one big bucket to catch as much as you can, or waste time making a bunch of smaller buckets. The argument that's usually leveled at Williams is that she squandered TSR's golden opportunity by trying to cast too wide a net with AD&D 2e, mostly through all of the extra campaign settings like Planescape, Dark Sun, Ravenloft, etc. instead of focusing solely on straight-up fantasy, I guess? Because it's not like those are adored by a subsection of D&D fan or anything. It's not so much that they were publishing too many things (though that was definitely part of it, but you listed some of the better selling products, there were some way, way more fringe books). It's that they didn't have any effective BAs or PMs managing this. And in particular the print runs. So fringe campaign setting A was getting an xK print run, leading to them having 17k copies unsold y years later by the time they got bought by WotC. And then because of the lack of anyone looking at the numbers on some products even with larger print runs and economy of scale they were still losing money on every product sold. A counter to this on a different level of 'getting the numbers wrong' might be FFG (both pre and post Asmodee purchase) who were notorious for underprinting RPG books, to the point some people spent years waiting to get x/y/z supplement because every time there was a reprint it immediately went out of stock. Which on the one hand meant their quarterly costs were good but meant lower actual profit. Similar problem came up in the 3.0 boom-bust where there was just so much stuff being released that stores couldn't keep up, and smaller publishers, even if they were making some great products, got dropped because of the poo poo that was clogging up the market. Especially not helped by some more established publishers getting into d20/ogl and, well, putting out crap. PST fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Mar 29, 2022 |
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Mar 28, 2022 23:31
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:i had that as a kid! never learned to play it, i'm not sure now if it was because the rules were too complicated or they just got lost. enjoyed chucking marbles at things out of the catapults while they lasted but i don't think they were really designed for the rigors of use by small children lol Crossbows and Catapults had battle carroms, not marbles. The catapults had little X's on them to set them on, they weren't really conducive to marbles. Weapons and Warriors had the marbles to fire. I have like four sets of the orig C&C, and two sets of the later version where it was all green and blue, and then a Weapons and Warriors starter set, the battlefield/forest/castle one. Just sitting in boxes in my basement, I still play them with my kids every now and then.
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Mar 29, 2022 16:19
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Possibly relevant to people in this thread, Gamefound have now opened their crowdfunding doors to everyone. I might spin up a small campaign to get some extra art for See Issue X to see how it works.
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Mar 29, 2022 18:55
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Interesting development in the D&D-adjacent sphere: Paizo's porting one of their Pathfinder 2E Adventure Paths to 5E.
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Mar 31, 2022 17:25
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Not very surprising given how big 5E has gotten. I haven't sold a PF book in a long time and the 5E ones keep going fast even though I can't compete with their awful official Amazon store at all. Of course part of that is that I run 5E in store and not PF, but that's also because that's where the demand is, so.
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Mar 31, 2022 18:58
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5e also hasn’t published a dungeon crawl in a while, I think?
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Mar 31, 2022 19:16
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I kind of want to buy the 5E version just to side-by-side it with the original to see what their conversion is like.
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Mar 31, 2022 19:19
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Are there 5e products that try to fix the whole system, in the same way that games like True Rose, Mutants & Masterminds, and Spycraft completely overhauled D20 to make it work for them? The only thing in this vein I'm aware of is 5AE Legacy.
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Mar 31, 2022 19:21
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Halloween Jack posted:Are there 5e products that try to fix the whole system, in the same way that games like True Rose, Mutants & Masterminds, and Spycraft completely overhauled D20 to make it work for them? The only thing in this vein I'm aware of is 5AE Legacy. Level Up 5E?
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Mar 31, 2022 19:25
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I'll have to play it to see how good it is, but it has a Warlord/Marshall class, a spell-less Ranger, and Fighters and other martial types have their own chapter of Maneuvers divided up into different schools. Seems like it's pushing 5e in a much better direction than the official stuff is.
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Mar 31, 2022 20:39
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I could be wrong but I got a definite Pathfinder style, 'The original system isn't complicated enough! It needs more rules and options' vibe from it.
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Mar 31, 2022 20:45
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hyphz posted:5e also hasn’t published a dungeon crawl in a while, I think? Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage was a megadungeon. 4 years old now though.
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Mar 31, 2022 20:47
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I didn't say it was good or that I liked it! Also notable is the now out of print Adventures in Middle Earth 5E which basically revamped the whole system to essentially make it The One Ring 1E with d20s.
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Mar 31, 2022 20:58
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Deptfordx posted:I could be wrong but I got a definite Pathfinder style, 'The original system isn't complicated enough! It needs more rules and options' vibe from it. TBF, that's an accurate statement.
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Mar 31, 2022 21:06
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Str/Con split, garbage.
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Mar 31, 2022 21:44
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moths posted:TBF, that's an accurate statement. I can't face complicated rule sets any more. I've gone back to Old School Essentials for that sort of game. Although, LOL at myself. I added some homebrew feats and a few weapon traits to add a little more options. You know how that goes. Next thing you know, I'll be writing my own B/X fantasy heartbreaker. Anyone taken The Emerald Hack yet? 
Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Mar 31, 2022 |
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Mar 31, 2022 21:47
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Dungeons and Dragons is getting its severalth attempt at a wargame.
TheDiceMustRoll fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Apr 1, 2022 |
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Mar 31, 2022 23:50
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Always a good sign to have your game compared to a competing brand in the title.
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Apr 1, 2022 00:28
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Kai Tave posted:This might have gotten posted about earlier and lost in the talk about MAR Barker's nazi proclivities (which, yknow, understandable), but Aziz Hasan, Kickstarter's CEO, has stepped down. There's a blog post from him here making the announcement on the 22nd. The official party line is this has nothing to do with their blockchain announcements, but that rings about as true as a politician who decides to retire to "spend more time with their family." Sean Leow is the interim CEO, and is also the gentleman who gave this uninformed interview about the whole project. In retrospect, perhaps it’s interesting that Aziz Hasan wasn’t out defending the blockchain.
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Apr 1, 2022 02:45
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Deptfordx posted:I could be wrong but I got a definite Pathfinder style, 'The original system isn't complicated enough! It needs more rules and options' vibe from it. As a pretty harsh critic of Pathfinder, I’d actually give this to them. Their market was people who already loved 3.blah and wanted more, so monkeying around and bolting new stuff on was a great decision : the target audience already has a background level of knowledge/interest, so taking that as a given and adding new stuff on that chassis is only gonna add longevity. Of course I hated it, but I was sick to death of 3.5 at that point anyway so I would be.
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