Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joe_the_user | Hacker News Reader

A forthcoming documentary about the game characterizes D. & D.’s origins as akin to Facebook’s: “A cautionary tale of an empire built by friends and lost through betrayal, enmity, poor management, hubris and litigation

I have to object to a statement like this. While it seems about everything that America invents winds-up in the legal system, the idea that D&D could have been an "empire" is just wrong-headed. D&D expanded regardless of TSR's smooth moves or missteps because it has always been a very player-driven game, the ultimate user-generated-content-game really. Just as much and for the same reasons, D&D never had that much potential to become that much larger than it did become. Only a certain type of person would play the game and not very much would stop them from playing. Some company might make more or less money from this culture but the size of the culture pretty strictly limits the profits involved.

It's worth noting that D&D 3.5 was released with an "open gaming license" and thus the game was forked by the Paizo company who maintain their Pathfinder system closer the original game than the present D&D 4.0 released by now-Hasbro-owned Wizards Of The Coast, which just reinforces that no single company is likely to create or destroy D&D-like role-playing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinder_Roleplaying_Game

D&D 4e was suffocated inside the company by a cultural backlash against the Open Game License. Certain factions within Hasbro were apparently convinced that third parties like Paizo were raking in the fat buxx from supplementary D&D content that they rightfully deserved.

So 4e was released initially without any third-party licensing at all; when it eventually came about, it was unacceptably restrictive. By that point most of Hasbro's third parties had done what they were asked and gotten the fuck out of the business of D&D licensed content anyway.

Hasbro ended up doing a pretty shitty job providing content for 4e in the long term. They released two semi-compatible reboots of the system within a couple of years, neither of which actually fixed any meaningful issues (they tried to make character creation simpler, while 4e's biggest issue was the lack of rules for quickly resolving minor combats). Very little supplemental content was released in 4e's lifetime, including for most of the first-party settings (Dragonlance, Ravenloft, Greyhawk, Spelljammer, etc.) that D&D fans were looking forward to.

...

They even managed to fuck up Forgotten Realms!

(signed, a genuine and disappointed fan of 4th edition)

To further on your observations: it really didn't take all that much to play anyway. An imaginative and descriptive DM, a few enthusiastic players, some dice, general character info sheets, and some basic play rules. Granted the rulebooks are what the publishers made money on. But me and my group of friends really had our own rules anyway.

I participated in a multi-year campaign, sometimes for dozens of hours a week, almost always by phone. The DM would just render everything via speech, occasionally pausing to roll some dice. I still vividly remember some of the adventures. We'd read the AD&D texts, but mainly for ideas and the monstrous illustrations.

Wow. Wouldn't talking on the phone for hours in the pre-skype days become extremely expensive?

At least here in Germany we had affordable phone flatrates over ISDN way before Skype.

It was a local call, or cheap enough my parents never made a fuss about it. Outside of major cities, the US is so terribly spread-out that transit for kids is not very accessible.

> D&D never had that much potential to become that much larger than it did become.

See, for contrast, Games Workshop which is a pretty big deal in the UK with shops on many highstreets.

It's still roughly the same social niche though. And the Warhammer miniatures wargame may be semi-mainstream, but its RPG manifestation is much less popular and so only fitfully supported by GW.

That's kind of the point: the same social niche had the power to create a company with shops on many high streets playing tabletop games with little figures and lots of dice.

So for parent comment to suggest that it's obvious for D&D to have stayed so small is a bit odd. It had potential to be much bigger than it was.

I'm not sure if the not-great animation series helped or hindered D&D uptake.

My point isn't that D&D stayed small. The entire US roll playing milieu is fairly large. My point is that the size of this milieu wasn't very likely to effected by how well the owners of D&D managed a supposed budding empire (the original quote compared the Games' growth to Facebook's, remember).

Just as much, you're exaggerating a bit the size of Games Workshop. It's just a game store that also publishes some games [1]. It's got the size of both things but that's about it - it's hard the ups and downs appropriate to those two uncertain businesses. Everyone in the table top game business faces the challenge that once they successful sell a package, their customers can play for years and never pay another penny. This makes game-selling a labor of love rather than empire building, as anyone in business should be able to sell you.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Games_Workshop

> Just as much, you're exaggerating a bit the size of Games Workshop.

From the Wikipedia link you provide:

> The group reported revenues of £123.1 million in 2011.[28] This is a reduction in revenue of £3.4 million on 2010 but still translated to an operating profit of £15.3 million. In 2011 the company averaged 1,901 staff across all activities.

Not too shabby, especially when they didn't have the Pokemon juggernaut to help them out for years.

as an aside, the new edition of D&D is more role-play focused and designed less like a MMORPG

The basic rules they recently published for D&D 5 read a lot like the 3.x rules, to the point that I was referring back to the 3.5 Player's Handbook to see the differences in some areas.

"more role-play focused" is an odd way to describe it. 4e had well-designed, precise, and rich tactical combat rules. It was also as role-playing friendly as any previous edition of D&D (which unfortunately isn't saying much). I had much better role-playing experiences with 4e than I ever did with 3.5 or earlier.

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