Post by Falconer on Dec 13, 2009 18:13:56 GMT -6
How about ICE's Lord of the Rings Adventure Game (1991-99), with 2d6 system just a step up from the Middle-Earth Quest books?
That’s fine, but you are missing my point. It’s about timing. In 2001-2004, there was a major Tolkien craze. The movies grossed a total of $2.91 billion just at the box office. In 2003, USA Today wrote: “Ballantine sold 32 million copies of the Rings books from 1965 to 2001. But since the release of the first film two years ago, Ballantine has sold an additional 14 million — almost half as much as the entire preceding 36 years.” Quadruple that figure to take into account the major Tolkien publishers, Houghton Mifflin and HarperCollins, double it again for the years 2003-2004, and tack on some reasonable percentage for posters, toys, and other books by and about Tolkien.
Suddenly, for the first time in history, a fantasy world of elves and orcs had become truly mainstream. Books are flying off shelves. This is the fad that D&D ought to have cashed in on. Not WoW.
Anyway, ICE didn’t have the distribution power nor the marketing power nor the name brand power of D&D. Only hardcore gamers have even heard of “LOR”—that’s not the desired effect at all.
The industry can't sustain itself on simple. Simple doesn't add up to four or more books per player, or even to DMs with 10 or more (e.g., 1st ed. AD&D MM, PHB, DMG, L&L, FF, MM2, UA, OA, WSG, DSG ...). It probably doesn't get a lot of subscribers to magazines -- note the AD&D dominance in old Dragon and Dungeon -- and is not likely to get subscribers to computerized play aids.
Of course you want an “Advanced” brand that does all that. But even more so you want a Basic game that can be sold in every Target and Toys ’R’ Us, and ultimately becomes a staple of every household the way Monopoly is. And, by the way, without a doubt Basic D&D was a bigger seller than Advanced D&D all through the ’80s.
The current “Starter Set” that is merely a poor lead-in helping you transition into the full-blown “real D&D” doesn’t cut it, either. Basic D&D, in most of its iterations, was a complete game. It was real D&D.
I'll have what you're drinking! What makes you think those would be ideal for WotC? Are any of them outselling WotC's actual book lines? (Mirrorstone, or whatever the kids' imprint is called, seems to me probably a much more lucrative plan.)
I was saying that, 5/10/15 years ago, TSR/WotC had a loyal audience who would read every novel they put out, and then proceed to buy the RPG products (which were tie-ins to the novels). I was just saying I wish they would have published some literature that was of higher quality than they did—i.e. the Paizo “Planet Stories” route rather than the in-house crap. Because what happened is that D&D became inbred. D&D fans read Forgotten Realms, and Forgotten Realms fans bought D&D. They could have done a better job educating their fans on better literature, and in turn, made D&D better appeal to fans of literature outside of TSR’s own circle. Regards.