[smascrns]

Originally Posted by StevenC

What you say is certainly true now but it wasn't true [/b]then[/b]. Back in the day, TSR wasn't this huge mega marketing corporation, they were just average joes like the rest of us that came up with an idea for a game. If you go back and look at the original D&D books, they're amazingly amateurish. What's more than that, Gary and friends didn't have a marketing budget, nor did they have the Internet to spread word of mouth about small Indie games. How did D&D spread as a phenomenon across the country from its roots in Lake Geneva Wisconsin of all places?

Maybe because they started with a great game. No, not ADD1, original DD. Now, roleplaying was different at that time, DD reflected this. It was connected to minis wargaming; boardgames (at least in concept, if not in execution); logical games; etc. DD tapped from all these entertainment fields and it helped it a lot in getting players. Being the creator of the whole rpg thing, TSR had developped a critical skill: how to market the game to people who have no idea about what is a role playing game. The followers of TSR went after people that were already familiar with rpgs, and that limited their reach.

Furthermore, TSR made several other things that helped spreading DD a lot: The modular nature of DD; modules; and allowing other people to sell extensions to DD. A lot of companies of the time that ended proposing their own systems, Chaosium included, started by selling stuff for DD. In other words, they were promoters of DD even before they had their own game.

TSR had another unexpected boost that really put basic DD in front of everybodys eyes. It was called ET. Just look at the next example, Portugal, my country. It was a place where no one other than a handlful of "geeks" heard something about rpgs. But when ET come out even the largest and more influential newspaper - Expresso - inserted a long article on DD. It did nothing for the hobby, hellas.

I would make the argument that it was because of the fact that the kind of people who were the initial audience for gaming back in the day were looking for what it was serving up, and saw it as a focus for their own creativity and vision.

True. No matter how basic, incomplete or poorly designed DD might be, it was what was there. There was no option for a couple of years. Rpg was DD and DD was rpg. When DD is all you have to use as a focus for you own creativity and vision, you don't consider alternatives that just are not there. And when you got used to it, why learn anything else?

I think the very reason why Runequest and similar games with more fluff to them didn't take off is largely because the market didn't want that kind of product back then.

This would make sense if, as I said, there were other games in the market from day one. They just were not there. You used what you had and what you had was DD.

Or more specifically, only a fraction of the market wanted it. You can run a game that is very much like Runequest with D&D/AD&D. You can also run a hundred other types and varieties of game with it that as well. I think that is what was responsible for the initial success for D&D.

This was some years latter, when there were alternatives to DD. And this a different issue alltogether. It is not about game system, it is about the for what purposes that game system is used. TSR and a company such as Chaosium (but the same applies to the producers of C&S, for instance) took two very different paths: TSR focused on dungeons, Chaosium focused on game world. Now, it is much easier to develop products for dungeons than toward detailed game worlds; it is much easier to play dungeons than detailed game worlds; and it is much easier to sell dungeons than detailed game worlds. This also explains why TSR got a much larger market share than Chaosium.

But none of this issues relates to rules quality. Of course, one can use DD to play an heavily contextualised rpg, and one can use RQ to play dungeon bashing. Which one is better at each of these tasks? Which rules system works better? That's the issue Lev raises in his reviews of ADD. If I read him correctly, his contention is that dungeon bashing is a subset of roleplaying. But there are a lot more ways of roleplaying. From his perspective, the quality of a rpg book is related to how encompassing it is, how much the book provides for players with different styles and approaches. If a book only catters to a very limited set and does not provide stuff for roleplayers that want in a different style, the book is low of content. It might not be low on content when it was published since at the time there were a lot less variants of roleplay, but it is low now. There's nothing wrong with this. Just as there is nothing wrong with someone that may come and say, "I'm going to look at MM, not from the perspective of how well it covers the many ways we can roleplay, but from the strict perspective of a particular type of roleplay, dungeon bashing". It's a different type of review, that's all.

PS I have nothing against dungeon bashing. It's a perfectly legitimate gaming experience that I enjoy, be it with rpgs, boardgames or minis games.