Monday, October 13, 2008

Answering Ike

New Gameblog reader RPG Ike asked a couple of interesting questions in the comments to the earlier post where I suggest that Hasbro should put out a 'vintage edition' of old school D&D. (An idea I possibly unconsciously stole from T. Foster, it seems.)

So, if it isn't nostalgia, why not just crack the AD&D or older books open and fire up a game, rather than buy them again in a vintage package?

I've got more editions and variations of My Favorite Game* than I'll ever need. Sure, I plan on buying at least two more (Swords & Wizardry and Hackmaster Basic), but that's really besides the point. For me the idea of "Hasbro Presents Classic Dungeons & Dragons" is a larger issue. If we're going to have faceless corporate oversight of the biggest franchise in the hobby, why not leverage that corporate muscle to re-position D&D as a mainstream game? I still don't believe D&D will ever recapture the faddishness of the 80's, but then I doubt Monopoly will ever be the national passion again either. But like Monopoly or Risk, I believe D&D has what it takes to occupy a 'classic games' niche. In short, I don't need a copy for nostalgia purposes, I still have the now-tattered Basic rules I got as a birthday present one summer long ago. But how many of the millions of D&D players of that era can still say that? There's your primary audience for such a product.

And your secondary audience are the kids the primary audience can initiate into our weird mysteries. To go back to Monopoly for a second, consider that back when my parents and uncle taught me how to play back in the late seventies, it was already a nostalgia game for them. And now I've played it with my daughter and nephew (albeit haltingly and with difficulty, they're still pretty young for a landlord simulation). Over the years my sister and I wore out our folks' first Monopoly set, so they bought another. And I own at least two sets and my sister has at least one. I've heard people who know more about the business of RPGs call the Players Handbook 'evergreen' because WotC can consistently sell copies over a few measly years. Meanwhile, Monopoly has sold copies for the better part of a century now. (And it sure as hell didn't get that way by rolling out a new version of the rules every five years. Maybe that's a fine approach for hobbyists like us but family games with multi-generational appeal generally seem to have much more stable rules.)

Now I know a major objection here is that splitting a brand is bad business sense and will confuse the customers. But D&D did alright for itself back when half the products were Advanced and half were not. I'm not even asking for that level of bifurcation. I'm asking for a single family-friendly ready-to-run Basic set for sale alongside the rest of Hasbro's classic games. Something I could give my nephew for his birthday or maybe use an excuse to round up some old players. Labyrinth Lord nicely fills that niche for people still neck-deep in this crazy hobby, but the department store visibility and brandpower of a Hasbro Basic release would easily dwarf LL in potential effect.

I've known about your blog for some time, but just recently started visiting it, so forgive me if this is clear to your regulars. How do you feel about 3E?

My 3E campaign ended abruptly due primarily to me not understanding what a different game the new edition was. I had a horrible grip on how Encounter Levels and CRs worked and when Pat's sixth level cleric started cranking out magic items I freaked out. But my 3.5 campaign was rollicking fun, eventually ending in a party of 23rd or so level uber-PCs fighting Ragnarok in Greyhawk. Good times. Some days when I'm feeling particularly idiotic I waste time wondering if what I was running was "really" D&D, but we had a crapload of fun. I don't think I'd run 3.x again, but I still have a few books from the line.


*Some days Encounter Critical shares that title, but calling D&D One of My Co-Favorite Games sounds a little silly.

12 comments:

  1. Some days when I'm feeling particularly idiotic I waste time wondering if what I was running was "really" D&D, but we had a crapload of fun.

    That's what it's all about, in the end. I'm a self-styled Grognard, but now I realize I can replicate the same feel with plenty of systems, whether it's OD&D, Moldvay, LL, 1e, M&M, T&T, et al.

    As to whether it was 'D&D', if there were classes, levels, hit points, d20 to hit and six stats...it's pretty much D&D. In a nutshell, and all that.

    ~Sham

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  2. Cool. I understand what you're saying now quite a bit better. It occurs to me that not only would I buy your vintage edition for myself, but it would make a great gift for some of my gamer friends, especially for my father-in-law who got me started on D&D over a decade ago.

    I also sometimes share the sentiment of whether a game in question--it's 4E for me--is *really* D&D, but that's hardly worth thinking about.

    Good stuff, Jeff, and thanks for your patience and for the 'feature' response.

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  3. Anonymous7:19 PM

    You should do a series of posts on the 3.5 campaign. Wait, unless you have already..

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  4. Your idea mades perfect sense. I would buy one, for sure. And I think is an excellent idea for keeping the brand current and in the public eye.

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  5. Ever since I bought my copy of Labyrinth Lord from Amazon I feel like LL could be taking that position. The only thing it lacks is the brand.

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  6. Anonymous9:31 AM

    Actually I wouldn't mind a reprint of the old vintage books. My copies of some of those books have become brittle over time and I hate using them due to that fact. It would be nice to have a set that I can play with and a set that can stay put up.

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  7. Anonymous11:50 AM

    It would be great to see the classics back in print. Then more people could be exposed to them, and (like anonymous said) then I could use new copies instead of endangering my precious vintage copies.

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  8. An ancient game completely undeserving of its reputation and status as a beloved and continuously re-released "classic," which no socially adapted and mentally sound adult person can enjoy except in the company of friends good enough to ignore almost all the rules, which themselves do nothing to support any generally recognized concept of "fun," being as they were cobbled together by a shockingly ignorant nobody with no knowledge or care for the science of inducing enjoyment in other human beings, who apparently longed to inflict indirect abuse onto his "players" by showering them with arbitrary rewards and punishments like the caresses and blows of a misanthropic, drunken father that they never asked for except by accidentally spending far too much money on a the worthless accoutrement of this non-pastime.

    I refer, of course, to Monopoly.

    Q: Have you ever heard of the speed rules for Monopoly?
    A: No, what are they?
    Q: Everyone punches the arm of the person to their left until whoever gives up last wins.

    I never got to play D&D, and I don't think it's my game any more, but I know that I got into RPGs because of how much I wanted to play it. That counts for a lot. My gaming-lust is focused by the crystalline shape of what I imagined D&D to be like.

    I suspect that makes me not the target audience of this hypothetical vintage edition (nor of this post, but too bad! I read what I like!), but if the price (or alternately, the list of included features) was right, I'd definitely buy it.

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  9. Nick, you ever played Monopoly as written? Just curious.

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  10. Some of the first edition books (including the original Chainmail rules) are available at Paizo.

    The scans are not great, but at least the prices are cheap!

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  11. Anonymous12:09 PM

    8 months late to the party, but I thought it was worth putting in that selling a "retro" edition of D&D wouldn't be brand-splitting, if, as many people have suggested, older D&D editions (I'll say everything before 3E) and the most recent incarnation have different design philosophies.

    Different design goals means they are fundamentally different games.

    You might have to re-name your old D&D variant to avoid market confusion (like parents buying one product thinking it was compatible; back when I played Battletech, my parents bought me the Robotech RPG thinking it was connected, so I can see this going awry), but I think there's a real potential for it.

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  12. I agree whole-heartedly. I mentioned this post on my blog when explaining why I chose to publish using such a "dated" system as D6.

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