More D&D history help

[Jeff Klein]

Here's a http://members.aol.com/WoGFanClub/everytsr.html">list of D&D products up to mid '96, and man, is it huge.

[Mike Holmes]

Geomorphs! I still have some somewhere, I'm sure. Gonna get those suckers out and use em for...something...

Mike

[talysman]

heh, yeah, I remember geomorphs. these days, they would just be called "dungeon tiles" or something.

preliminary report: I've been going through Dragon magazine back issues, mainly looking at the Game Wizards column, where the discussion of plans for 2nd edition occurred.  I haven't found "first mention" just yet, but I did confirm that both Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms are pre-2e. Forgotten Realms is mentioned as a campaign setting at least as far back as Dragon #30, according to the Dragon #119 Game Wizards column, which itself is a discussion of the upcoming boxed set.

important issues so far for 2e seem to be:

#118 (Feb 1987): discussion of which character classes will be/may be removed.

#119 (Mar 1987): Forgotten Realms boxed set coming out for 1st edition, but this will be official gameworld for 2e also.

#121 (May 1987): fallout from killing of character classes. bard to be saved.

#124 (Aug 1987): 2e questionnaire, rough development time schedule announced. 2e expected to be published in Mar/Apr 1989. Kara-Tur from Oriental Adventures becomes a part of 1e/2e Forgotten Realms setting.

#130 (Feb 1988): a very interesting discussion about magic for 2e. people sent in 5,000 questionnaires, many of which suggested changing spell memorization and rules for learning spells. for some reason, this column assumes that the suggestions are really rules questions.

With respect to the magic system, the single most difficult concept in the magic system was that of spell memorization. Many players still do not realize that this word is used as a specific technical game term, and not at all as in the standard dictionary definition. Weíll explain it better in the second edition; in the meantime, the curious can read The Dying Earth by Jack Vance for inspiration.

The second complaint about the magic system was the difficulty in figuring out what spells go in a magic-user's spell book [ ... ]We occasionally go through this in "Sage Advice," so write if you want to see it again.

the column continues on to say that spell point systems (another frequent request in the questionnaire) are too difficult to balance and so won't be used in 2e.

it's clear from this that TSR saw 2e as a clean-up job and rules tweak than an actual rewrite, despite the dramatic way they phrased the plans for 2e in the beginning. I still need to look for the first mention, but it claimed that practically everything about D&D could be changed, if the players really made it clear ... but the later columns make it clear they only mean adding/removing spells, classes, races and monsters.

[greyorm]

I was not very deep into the subculture, either, but I am give to believe that Dragonlance started as a series of novels that was developed into a game world and that the first couple modules were heavily railroaded methods of "playing" the novels

Almost right: the novels and the adventures were published in tandem.

In the early eighties, TSR wanted to create a series of role-playing adventures whose events were tied closely to a series of novels. A bunch of TSR designers designed the world, borrowing heavily from a home grown campaign of Jeff Grubb.

Once the world was designed, Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis started writing the novels. At first, the novels were following the role-playing adventures that the role-playing team was designing (These adventures are known as DL1, DL2, DL3, with 14 novels in all, with titles like "Dragons of Despair", "Dragons of Light", and "Dragons of Dreams"). Eventually, though, Weis and Hickman caught up with the design team and then weren't simply following the events in the adventures (although the events in the novels were still tied closely to the events in the adventures).

I can pull the long text from "The Art of the DragonLance Saga" which also details the history if you ask. I'll need to go searching for it in my garage, however, which is why I'm not typing it up right now.

But basically TSR said, "Let's design a new campaign world. We'll write novels for it and modules for it that are interlinked!" And there they went.

[Rob MacDougall]

The Dragonlance question has been kicked around before in the Precursors to AD&D 2 thread. (Wow, I've been around here long enough to point people to earlier threads!)

This is not, however, the hard evidence Ron is looking for.

[Jack Aidley]

This fanzine's first few issues contain a rather good history of roleplaying, including quite a bit about D&D, might be of use to you?

http://ptgptb.org/issue-index.html

[greyorm]

This is not, however, the hard evidence Ron is looking for.

I'm using and referring to a source written by the main authors of the product line that details a history of the creation of that product line. If that isn't hard evidence, I don't know what would be?

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Possibly, if fact even likely. But I've noted how history gets rewritten sometimes about this sort of thing. (The Fantastic Four movie, the Star Wars Holiday Special) But it seems quite likely that in tandem novels were written with the Krynn world. I haven't read it, but my friend told me the first book, or possibly the first series, I don't know, led up to a climax that kind of fizzled because they didn't want to cancel out the game world.

One note a friend pointed out is you can tell when TSR changed hands or a different marketing philosophy became prevelant. The backs of the AD&D poducts had pictures on the back. Such as the original DM's Guide had a picture of the City of Brass on the back. Later products did not have pictures on the back. You can also spot the era if it uses 3-D perspective maps. These maps may have looked nice but the same friend notes it's difficult to run from them.

I wish I had information that wasn't second hand.

[Rob MacDougall]

This is not, however, the hard evidence Ron is looking for.

I'm using and referring to a source written by the main authors of the product line that details a history of the creation of that product line. If that isn't hard evidence, I don't know what would be?

Sorry, Greyorm. When I said "this isn't hard evidence," I was referring to my own post, and by extension to the thread I pointed to, in which I had a lot to say about Dragonlance. I wanted to point out that the historical relationship of the DL novels to the DL adventures (and the extent of railroading within the adventures) is something we've discussed before, but also to add the disclaimer that I knew what was in that older thread was not an answer to the "hard evidence" question with which Ron started this thread. I didn't mean to sound dismissive of any of the posts in this thread.

[greyorm]

Ah, sorry. That's clearer.

[Jeff Klein]

Ryan Dancey offers some info on the http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=3bd1da1891925961ac6bbdad9ab6279d&threadid=47339&perpage=20&pagenumber=8">story-over-game trend in the mid '90s:

In the early 90s, there was a widespread effort (lead by TSR) to view "stories" (shorthand for worlds & characters) as the driver for big revenue. The idea that a cool setting idea like Planescape would sell products including gmes, novels, software and possibly mass media was very strong. The licensing fees TSR was earning with Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms were huge and carried very little overhead. TSR (and other companies) wanted tap into that licensing revenue as their primary income stream, and started viewing RPG products as just one part of a constellation of categories where they would earn their revenue. They stopped seeing the dependencies between the success in the RPG category and the success in the other categories. Other companies like FASA showed that they too could take tabletop gaming brands (BattleTech) and turn them into multi-category brand franchises which had the effect of spreading what might have been a TSR-only mistake into a widespread industry practice.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

To be fair, I had always heard that FASA had it's RPG lines to support making a computer sim of Battletech. ANyone else hear this? I think it's in the FRPGB