I do not think many fans of D&D realize how lucky it is that Peter Adkinson bought TSR. If TSR went under, the various properties of TSR would have been split up and used to pay off debts to various creditors. Of course, such things leads to alternate realities that we do not live in, so I am sure some will say it would not have been that bad. I just have my doubts that Random House would have resuscitated the D&D brand in the way that WotC was able to in the 2000s. Seems unlikely any other company would have come up with the OGL, which enabled many 3rd parties to use the D&D rules and creations in their own rules.
I still find "fans of D&D" something like a category error.
Back when I was more involved in the local RPG community and started dealing with the SF community, I found their choice of terminology weird. While we were talking about role-players and the hobby, their corresponding terms were fans and the fandom. To me, fans were fundamentally consumers, while role-playing was a creative activity. An RPG fan could be someone who collects games and sourcebooks and reads them without a real intention to play them. (I've known a few of those.) I also associated fans more with liking a specific artist or band rather than with an entire field or genre.
Also, I don't know if the revival of D&D was good for RPGs, except commercially. By reviving D&D, Adkison also revived concepts such as classes, levels, hit points, and XP, which gamify role-playing. That was not how we were playing RPGs at the time.
By reviving D&D, Adkison also revived concepts such as classes, levels, hit points, and XP, which gamify role-playing. That was not how we were playing RPGs at the time.
In my experience the players who love the gamified aspects of RPGs and the ones who prefer more “pure roleplaying” games are very different people, personality-wise. Without getting too much into stereotypes, I think the former folks tend to be more math-y / engineering-minded and love to “theorycraft” new characters and so on, whereas the latter tend to be more performing arts / literature / drama types.
Of course there are loads of exceptions to every rule and my point here is not to diminish or advantage either style of play, but just to highlight that these preference differences exist. This is important because I think it’s a mistake to assume there should be a one-size-fits-all form of RPGs.
I would also argue that WotC has done a lot of hard work (with several missteps) over the years but with 5E they’ve succeeded in a big way with building a system that’s easy enough to teach to beginners while offering a lot of depth for experienced players. This kind of broad spectrum game design is very difficult to achieve.
Of course the more complicated systems (designed for the mathies) are harder for beginners to learn but I’d also argue that the more open-ended, rules-light systems are hard on beginners in a different way. These games require a level of assertiveness and creativity that many beginners are unable to muster, so they often end up sitting there not participating much. In a way, these players are overwhelmed with options due to the open-endedness of the game.
D&D’s more regimented system gives each player something to do without overwhelming them, kind of like a well-designed board game. It’s a happy medium which I think is responsible for much of the game’s success in recent years.
There is more to it than a simple dichotomy into gamified RPGs with complex rules and rules-light games focusing on role-playing.
There were some rules-light games in the 90s, appealing to a different kind of people than D&D. Vampire, Werewolf, and other Storyteller games were the most prominent. But there were also games like Cyberpunk and and Shadowrun, which were kind of similar to D&D in their target audience. But different game mechanics led to different approaches to encounters and ultimately to different outcomes.
Call of Cthulhu was thematically very different. There were no expectations that the characters would grow stronger over time, and fighting was rarely the right answer. Ars Magica was kind of like an RPG for accountants. Resource management became important, when you had tens of characters living in a hidden fortress for decades.
Then there were many niche games. Fading Suns had an interesting setting that combined many genres. The rules were kind of related to the Storyteller system, but there was so much added stuff that it never really worked. Unknown Armies was another interesting game with a very different setting. It was one of the first games I remember with rules designed to support a specific style of storytelling.
The thing about D&D is that you can generally make it work for a wide swath of players. At the table I've been playing at for years, we have people who are in it for the gameplay crunch, people who are in it for roleplaying, and people who are in it to socialize. I enjoy roleplaying and storytelling to the point that I write in-character diaries and letters, but I also enjoy building a mechanically fun character and being challenged with combat. I could probably enjoy a system more focused on either one of those, but I don't think all of the people I play with would be on board.
And I 100% agree about rules-light systems being possibly harder for newcomers. I've seen it again and again.
> By reviving D&D, Adkison also revived concepts such as classes, levels, hit points, and XP, which gamify role-playing.
Post-TSR D&D might have capitalized on this, but it was inevitable either way. By that point, generations of nascent game devs had been raised on D&D, and by the time it rose from the ashes following 4E (which I say as a 3.5 baby), we had come full circle and people were sincerely looking to recapture the feeling of WoW at the tabletop, just as WoW's whole genre was born from looking to recapture D&D on the computer.
Both game designers and role-players thought that D&D-style game mechanics were obsolete.
Instead of classes and levels, popular RPG systems of the time had you develop each skill independently. Some options could only be taken at character creation. A common solution was a pool of character creation points that could be used for magic, other special abilities, status and wealth, or additional points in abilities and skills. Combat systems focused on injuries over abstract hit points and were often more deadly than in D&D. Mostly to emphasize the narrative impact of combat.
Japanese game designers, such as the creators of the Final Fantasy series, were inspired by D&D (having been avid players themselves) and they leaned pretty hard into the class-based, experience-based, level-based, and HP-based mechanical systems. While western RPG designers might have abandoned such ideas in the late 80s / early 90s the arrival of JRPGs for Nintendo consoles, translated into English, brought up a whole new generation of players who loved these more mechanically rich systems.
By the late 90s D&D experienced a major revival with the release of Baldur’s Gate. I believe the popularity of JRPGs among western gamers went a long way to prove that there was a market for these D&D-style games. So it may have been the case, as you said, that game designers and players (in the west) lost interest in these games but it was only a temporary dip.
Even if TSR had disappeared without fanfare the JRPG market had already been established, so this style of gameplay was not in any danger of disappearing.
Non-level systems showed up in JRPGs and CRPGs, too. Just like in tabletop, they carved out a decent foothold without ever completely defeating level systems. If anything, you'd think that more flexible systems would be more attractive on a computer, but people just seem to like levels and classes.
I think the issue with computer (and console) RPGs is that they tend to have a very rigid goal state which leads players to want to optimize. Game systems that are more open-ended on the character development front can then suffer from “first order optimal” strategies: players experiment a bit until they find one thing that works well and then never deviate from it.
Class-based systems, on the other hand, at least break up the FOO strategies into a few separate lanes which give players multiple opportunities to try different things.
I think in general, open-ended systems suffer when they present the player with too many options all at once and it’s hard to design an open-ended system which doesn’t do this. When players are overwhelmed with options they tend to go into “analysis paralysis” mode which can be a frustrating enough experience that they prefer to use a FOO strategy over revisiting that zone of complexity and confusion.
And yet classes and levels and HP have endured, far beyond D&D. Skill point systems and injury systems have their own shortcomings. One form of gameplay isn't superior to or more advanced than another. I'd argue that the concept of "obsolete" gameplay is itself archaic.
Peter Adkinson’s fondness for _Dungeons and dragons_ and his Internet savvy was mentioned but not really expanded upon. In fact the first product that Wizards of the Coast produced was not _Magic: the gathering_ but a supplement for role-playing games, _The primal order_, rules for playing deities and demigods. He had done the TSR rules but wanted the broadest base possible, so he solicited advice from Usenet’s rec.games.frp.* hierarchy (and rec.games.rpg?) for conversion to other systems. I made suggestions for GURPS.
> “But why not just let TSR go bankrupt, and then buy it without assuming all that debt?” Adkison asked.
That would have saved Adkinson $30 million of a $55 million purchase; it seems that must have been significant money to his tabletop gaming company.
The answer in the OP is that Adkinson might lose the Dungeons & Dragons trademark, which had been pledged to Random House as collateral. I expect Random House would have been happy to sell it to Adkinson - in return for paying off TSR's debt, though maybe Adkinson could get a discount. The question is, how much was that trademark worth on the market?
Still, I wonder if Adkinson made that decision with head or heart.
> Peter Adkison held an all-hands meeting with the understandably nervous remaining staff of TSR on June 3. At it, he told them that he had bought the company for two things: for Dungeons & Dragons, yes, but also for the very people who were gathered in that room, the ones who made the game. TSR’s Lake Geneva offices would be closed, marking the end of Wisconsin’s unlikely tenure as the center of the tabletop-RPG universe, but most employees would receive an offer to move to Seattle and work in Wizard’s headquarters. With Magic doing such gangbusters business, Wizards of the Coast had the time and money to rebuild the Dungeons & Dragons brand carefully and methodically, even if it took years. They would soon begin work on a third edition of the rules, the most sweeping revision ever, intended to make the game understandable and appealing to a whole new generation of players without losing the core of what had made it such a sensation in the first place. The future of Dungeons & Dragons was bright, Adkison insisted.
Most acquisitions seem to begin with these assurances and then a year later it's all forgotten. Adkison seems to have actually meant it, at least somewhat. Did almost everyone get job offers in Seattle?
> The answer in the OP is that Adkinson might lose the Dungeons & Dragons trademark, which had been pledged to Random House as collateral. I expect Random House would have been happy to sell it to Adkinson - in return for paying off TSR's debt, though maybe Adkinson could get a discount. The question is, how much was that trademark worth on the market?
Responding to myself, I missed the obvious when I posted above ...
Random House's extension of debt to TSR is a bit mysterious - why did they let a seemingly poorly managed, fading company run up a growing, already unpayable bill?
Possibly, Random House wanted the D&D IP all along and if TSR wouldn't sell, it was RH's way of acquiring it. Effectively RH would acquire the IP for $30 million - less than Adkison's $55 million.
OTOH, RH could have bid against Adkison. Maybe TSR never gave them the chance; maybe Adkison required an immediate decision; but I'd expect the shareholders to look for better offers.
> ”In the past, it had been promoted as a game of free-flowing imagination, primarily a system for making up your own worlds and stories. In the future, the core rules would be marketed as a foundation that you built upon not so much with your own creativity as with other, more targeted TSR product”
I saw this happening with Lego as well. The free-flowing possibilities of buckets full of Lego bricks to created whatever you could imagine are now mostly gone. Kids and adults alike now buy Lego boxes with very specific bricks and a huge manual with a very exact step-by-step instruction. If you skip even one step the whole project is unfinishable. Those boxes actually punish creativity.
There's nothing stopping you from still building random stuff from Legos. In fact there are Lego Classic boxes that are intended just for that.
I think it comes down to personality and interest. One of my kids just buys the occasional Lego and builds it exactly per spec. The other will do that too, but also will dig into our buckets of extra legos from abandonded sets of the past to build cool stuff (a mech, a Magic card stand, a Minecraft sign for his room) or mod his sets by incorporating other Legos to add weapons or decorations, make the limbs longer, etc.
I think the analogy holds quite well for D&D: there are people who just want to run a pre-written adventure, and other people who are crafting their own worlds and scenarios, but will happily mine published materials for ideas.
There is nothing stopping anyone. I am just saying that there is a clear change in behavior of playing with Lego from two decades ago to now. A look at the assortment of a Lego store should make that clear.
I got into a routine of buying a (small) set every weekend with my child, when he was about five years old.
The moment he first built a model from scratch, following the instructions and without needing me to help, was magical.
But every set eventually gets torn down and all the parts mixed together into our lego-bin. I think there are probably people who only follow the instructions, but most people probably build the expected thing and then later go on to play alone.
I have a lego tattoo, so I'm biased, but I think lego is still an amazing thing, even with the very expensive niche sets. 99% of the time my child plays with it, alone, with me, or with his friends, it's very random constructions purely from the imagination.
I have always done both. Both as a child and now with my children. We buy the sets and build them when they are new. They stay intact for a while, but eventually they get extended, rebuilt and eventually join entropy in a big box. Then from the entropy box we build completely new stuff: space ships, air planes, castles and cars. I love stuff with moving parts. Secret doors, robotic arms, escape pods…
This is what my brother and I did too. (My sister was young enough to mostly experience the "entropy box.") If I had to guess, I'd imagine a plurality of lego players do it that way, if not a majority, with smaller groups of people exclusively building from instructions or rarely building from instructions.
Buckets of bricks are much more usable now than they used to be - because of the wealth of different shapes now available. You can still build crude blocky houses, but you don't have to stop there. There are still some incoming overly specialized parts but not all that many these days - and perhaps we have gotten more creative in how to use them.
The current manuals assemble models with complex assembly methods (with the human kind of just a tool in the process). One things that's lacking from the current manuals is an isolation or demonstration of which parts are these clever sub-assemblies and how they can be used in more general situations. That is a problem. You end up with clever constructions methods that are explained on youtube videos and 3rd party books - rather than in the manuals. Missed opportunity.
Another thing that's likely is that with "shelf models" like the botanicals or some Star Wars kits, the kits are bought and gifted to people who have no inclination to be endlessly disassembling and rebuidling different things with them. That's okay - eventually these bricks will end up in our buckets.
I came of age in the early- to mid-90's, when AD&D 2ed was on the rise, and Forgotten Realms was a huge, new, and exciting world. It seems like a frozen moment in time, those few years when I was obsessed with playing as much D&D as I could, riding my bike to wherever my friends' parents would let us use their dining room or garage, devouring rulebooks and novels, and eagerly awaiting the monthly delivery of Dragon magazine. I'm far removed from it now, and when I browse the RPG section in the bookstore or read the occasional article, it seems so different from back then.
I probably owned 50 Dragonlance books by the time I graduated high school in 1999. Didn't get my first PC until 1994, but my search for Champions of Krynn led me down the classic CRPG rabbit hole so I had a chance to enjoy the classics before the "new" generation appeared with Diablo, Fallout, and Baldur's Gate.
The deal between TSR and Random House was interesting. Williams literally got to print money and get paid for whatever she delivered, but at the cost of building up a loan balance that would eventually come due. I know we make fun of MBA culture and bean counters but it takes a lot of discipline to run a company, and I wonder how the "blank check" influenced planning and production. Was it hubris that drove up an $12M loan? Was it poor communication from Random House to TSR about sales and forecasts?
It's also wild that if the TSR had lasted one more year it could have repaid its loan with the Baldur's Gate royalties and padded its war chest from the sequel and Neverwinter Nights. Business is a fickle beast.
BioWare acquired the license in 1995, before the acquisition. Wizard's role was to collect the royalty check. I believe they were otherwise at work on D&D 3rd Edition. Outside of the debt load it looks like the three games more or less recouped the acquisition cost in the first five years.
While knowing either meaning of the abbreviation is dating oneself, it's weird that people remember the very obscure and short-lived meaning it to refer to a technique to allow fake multitasking on DOS such as in Borland's Sidekick.
My MS-DOS times were clearly very different from yours.
There were nothing obscure about TSR, we've had dozens of them back in MS-DOS era. You'd trade good ones with friends. Screen savers / boss keys, mouse drivers, network drivers, keyboard layout switchers, better fonts, CD-ROM drivers (yep, many of were real TSRs loaded from autoexec.bat, rather than real "drivers" loaded from config.sys). And jokes, don't forget jokes.
And of course once you actually tried to run the DOS games, you'd find out they want a _lot_ of memory. You'd move all your drivers to himem, but that would not be enough, so some TSRs have to go. But not all of them of course, maybe your game still needs CD-ROM or mouse driver - which leads to many ways to start up the system and eventually a boot menu in DOS 6.
Is there a point to this story? It appears to be a description of a sequence of events remarkably devoid of any conclusion, climax, conflict, struggle, character development or whatever we usually see in stories.
The author likes articles about historically significant games to be mostly about the games, meaning that there is occasionally a chapter like this about background stuff, so he can dedicate the next one to the game itself.
The title is:
> The CRPG Renaissance, Part 3: TSR is Dead…
And the last sentence is:
> What Adkison couldn’t have envisioned on that day was that the resuscitation of Dungeons & Dragons would begin in the digital rather than the tabletop realm, courtesy of one of the most iconic CRPGs of all time — a Pool of Radiance for this new decade.
What he is coy about, and what most of the people reading this know, is that the first D&D CRPG released under Adkinson's care was Baldur's Gate. Which is one of the most influential games ever released. Not only was it very good (it still frequently features on lists of best games ever made) and a massive sales success, but it was also different, in a way that redefined its genre to this day. Many elements that people expect there to be in modern CRPGs became expected because they were there in Baldur's Gate. And its influence wasn't limited to CRPGs, because it sold millions of copies to people who had never even considered playing D&D, and acted as a gateway into the hobby for them.
But if you have no idea about what the next chapter will be, I admit that this one seems a bit weird.
Erm, what? It's about the decline, fall and resurrection of an iconic company in the history of hobby gaming. The story arc seems pretty clear to me.
The wider context is the series of articles on the resurgence of CRPGs in the mid/late-90s ("The CRPG Renaissance"), with this installment serving to set the stage for the arrival of Baldur's Gate (1998), in the last line:
> What Adkison couldn’t have envisioned on that day was that the resuscitation of Dungeons & Dragons would begin in the digital rather than the tabletop realm, courtesy of one of the most iconic CRPGs of all time — a Pool of Radiance for this new decade.
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