Story before: the real culprits?

[Moreno R.]

Hello!

In a email to Ron, I wrote something about his selecting Shadowrun as the cause of all evil (as in "story before" evil) in the thread Setting and emergent stories, and he asked me to post in the Forge. I am posting it in a new thread because it's rather tangent to Frank's thread.

This is the relevant part of the email: I added some details and clarification for the public post

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I am reading your latest forum post about the article at the Forge. I can't talk about DeGenesis or the German or American scene, but I was surprised by the importance you gave to Shadowrun. I don't know the impact it had on the american market (that was the time before I brought this infernal machine that allow me to talk with people living at the other part of the planet) but in Italy I think it was negligible (only one edition, in 1996, very few supplements, closing of the line for lack of sales) and we got a lot of "story before" crap anyway.

I thought that the shifting point were:
1) the first AD&D modules written by Tracy Hickman, more "stories" than dungeons, start to sell well in the early '80s. I am thinking about the cycle of adventures in the "desert of desolation" series, and Ravenloft. When I first began playing (1986) they were considered the very best AD&D adventures ever written, while the old Gygax dungeons were openly mocked.

(some more details: you can find the list of Hickman modules here: http://www.trhickman.com/my-works/tracy-laura-games/tsr-role-playing-adventures/
I don't know if there were others that produced similar "story-modules" like him at the time, I am singling him out not because I have any reason to believe he was the first or the worst, but because he was the most successful and that success changed the hobby.
He went to work for TSR in 1982, after having self-published a couple of modules in 1979 (it seems that every revolution in rpgs is from self-publisher, for better or worse...). TSR republished his modules (one was the first of the Desert of Desolation series, "Pharaoh"). In 1983 concluded his Desert of Desolation series with "I5: The lost tomb of Martek". It will be reprinted in an updated form in 1987, I am familiar with (and played) that version.  The following book in the "I" series is from him, as well: "Ravenloft" (1983)
Every one of these modules was more successful than the previous one, but the big success was Dragonlace in 1984...)

2) TSR was searching for anything that could sell. Gygax was on the way out of TSR, the TSR was on the verge of bankrupt a few years before and was saved by publishing a hastly-written mishups of new rules and characters for AD&D (Unearthed Arcana) and increasing the rate of publication of new books and modules (I counted some times ago the number of books published by TSR in the early eighties, and the increase is really noticeable. When D&D was selling millions and millions of copies everywhere, TSR published a handful of slim booklets with dungeons every year. Almost nothing. When D&D sales started dropping, AD&D goes in a few years from a set of 3+some oddmwents volumes - the basic 3, Legend and Lore, and some other - to a half-shelf long line of books about every AD&D "universe", monsters, new rules, etc., with very long adventures published every month or more often.

(I did check more details about this, too.
A history of TSR http://www.wizards.com/dnd/DnDArchives_History.asp
1984 is the year D&D sales plummet and TSR gets in trouble: http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/articles/539/539197p4.html :
and Gygax leave in 1985:  http://uk.pc.gamespy.com/articles/539/539197p5.html
The date of Lorraine Williams "reign" is important because she is the one that start the "no playing at work" policy. From that moment D&D products are in practice only read, not playtested. TSR become the biggest producer of unplaytested crap on the market. That level of crappyness become the norm. The idea that the GM should make the adventure works anyway because "rules doesn't matter" is fueled by this
This list of D&D products from Grognardia is not the one I remember reading, but it will do. These are the numbers:
- 1980:  1 hardback (deities and demigods), 5 accessories (geomorphs, logs, etc), 5 adventures (slim booklets of 32 pages each). Less than 200 pages of adventures. In a year.
- 1981: 1 hardback (fiend foglio), 2 boxed sets (Basic and Expert D&D), 10 adventures. 2 adventures are reprints and collections of older booklet, and they are the only long ones. Only 7 new adventures. No rules added in 3 years. No new setting.
- 1982:  no hardback, no boxed sets,  9 adventures. This means that there was an average of 40 days between any new offer from TSR and they were thin booklets that sold for $6.95. And this is most successful D&D year in history, with million of copies sold of the corebooks.
- 1983: the sales begin to slow down.  TSR hastly print another Monster Manual (II), produce a new edition of the Basic and Expert set (Mentzer) and the Greyhawk boxed set.  And 16 adventures.
- 1984, the year of the crisis, 75% layoffs, TSR print a new boxed set (companion D&D) and 29 adventures. 5 of them are Dragonlance.
I don't think that the Dragonlance series was caused by the crisis. It was two years in development. They simply saw that "story-modules" sold well and they thought of tying together novels and adventure modules. But right at the time the corebooks sell less and less and there is risk of bankrupt, this series (and the tied novels) are best-sellers and bring a lot of money... It doesn't take much to add two and two and understand what they had to produce to make more money...
- 1985: TWO hardbacks (Oriental Adventures and Unearthed arcana), the Battlesystem Rules, TWO boxed sets (expert D&D and Lankhmar) 21 adventures (6 of them are Dragonlance) . Unearthed Arcana most of all is a big change: a "must have" corebooks with the rules that change the game. The first one in SIX YEARS. until that, there was the idea that AD&D was "definitive" and all the added rules in the Dragon were not-official. The first one in six years. And it was a list of unbalancing overpowered new character class and new game rules and spells that clearly were not very well thought off, let alone playtested (Gygax later admitted that he had to publish SOMETHING , anything, in an hurry, to save the company)
The number of adventures is lower, but don't be deceived: the page count is higher. TSR begin to print new adventures (not reprint) with more than 100 pages.
- 1986: 2 hardbacks (the survival guides) , a boxed set (Immortal D&D), 3 accessories (creature catalog and Book of lairs and character sheets) , and 23 adventures. (3 are dragonlance)
- 1987: 2 hardbacks (manual of the planes and Dragonlance) , 2 boxed sets (kara-tur and Forgotten Realms), 9 accessories (6 of them are setting modules, 2 for Forgotten Realms and 4 for the D&D world), 22 adventures.
The number of adventures is becoming stable, but I would like to point out that in this single year, TSR publish corebooks for THREE "new D&D worlds": Dragonlance (that goes from the setting of an adventure to a general D&D setting for a lot of adventures), Forgotten Realms and Kara-tur, + 2 expansions for Forgotten Realms (one of them, Moonshae, was originally a new celtic setting, that was added to the Forgotten realm patchwork like Kara-tur), + 4 new "nation setting" fo D&D.  9 new products that are simply settings books.
- 1988: 1 hardback (Greyhawk) , 1 boxed set (waterdeep), 12 accessories (10 are geographic modules, 1 is a GM design kit and one is Lord of Darkness, a compilation of adventures), and 8 adventures.

It's clear the transition from a corebook-based business model to a inflation of adventures, and then (seeing that adventures are "optional" by nature) to a inflation of "accessories", and "geographic modules" and "new universes", that most fan consider (at least at this time) must-have items.

It's interesting to see these changes seen by a old-school point-of-view:
http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/09/thoughts-on-d-chronology-part-i.html
http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2009/09/thoughts-on-d-chronology-part-ii.html
Very different point-of-view (I can't stand the most of the OSR, the only value I give them is the increased interest n the hobby's true root and not in propaganda), but most of the same conclusion.

The supplement treadmill was not a business model for sustained business. It was, from the start, the desperate move of a failing company to get more money by squeezing its fans with quickly-written inferior products. 

And the industry followed this "grasping at people's money in desperation" business model for twenty years...  it's any wonder that less and less people continued to buy role-playing products? Even I, with my newbye faith in "the quality of D&D", by 1989 was seeing the evident drop in quality and by 1991 stopped buying anything by TSR...)

3) To fill thousand of pages of "must-buy" material to sell to the fans, TSR goes for Universe Inflation (Forgotten Realms -  the idea of a "fantasy game world" that a 8-years old could have - and in fact Ed Greenwood was 8 when he created it, I think, and TSR got the rights for some potato chips or something like that) and even before that, stories sold as gaming product. Hickman & Weis sells? Why don't make them write a set of 16 gaming "modules", and novels, and then calendars, merchandising, etc? And Dragonlance is born, and dragonlance sells even better.  Teaching people in the industry that rules don't mean shit against "stories", and that a fan of some fantasy character can spend really a lot of dough for anything with that character on it.

4) TSR goes bonkers with AD&D 2nd edition, with shit rules. Really, I noticed at the time that they were completely broken from a first read. And I was a hardcore D&D fan at the time!  I played them anywhere with some  houseruled patch... and then after a couple of years they published a lot of these patches on Dragon Magazines.  Did it took them years to note that the Druid spell list was insane? Did they ever played the game?   The answer, I did learn a few years ago, was "not". The published a long list of playtesters, but in reality AD&D 2nd edition was never playtested in a serious manner. But who cares? The book openly says to GMs "write your story, rules are for bad GMs". Because they saw that stories made more money.

5) At this time, everybody else, with very few exceptions, jump on te bandwagon and go for "story". 

I thought that Shadowrun and Vampire vere only the consequence of these commercial choices made by TSR. Did they added something that make Shadowrun in particular stand abode the rest?

By the way, I inflicted the "desert of desolation" series to my players at the time.  A railroad fest second only to Dragonlance in these years (later, the bar was raised even higher. At least in DoD the character could still die and not finish the adventure...). But even I balked at the end of the scenario: "do you remember the scene you descripted to your players at the beginning, from ancient times? If your characters succeed in the adventures, they wake up these two higher beings, that then continue their fight, and your character can see the final of the movie. Are they not happy?". No, I wasn't, I changed the ending making at least the PCs the one who save the world, not some kind of GM's uber-NPC.  But this kind if railroading was published in 1979-87, much earlier than Shadowrun.

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Another addition to my email: 

Shadowrun (1989) was derivative not only in the setting influences (cyberpunk was really banal and common in 1989, hardly a cutting-edge concept. And adding it to D&D? Please...) but even in system.  It's "innovative system"? It was directly stolen from Ars Magica (1987). It was Ars Magica the game where Jonathan Tweet used for the first time the "roll over the level of difficulty" concept.  And seeing that Vampire author Mark Rein-hagen was co-author of ars magica, I think that Ars Magica has more influence on Vampire than Dhadowrun (not in the "rule zero" sense. I checked recently, and there is no trace of rule zero in Ars Magica 1st edition. God bless Jonathan Tweet). The "rule zero" concept is directly from 2nd edition D&D (1989)
D&D 3rd edition is said to have taken most of it's innovation from "Shadowrun", first of all the "roll higher" concept, but seeing that Tweet was head designer, I think we know better, right?

So, Ron... why did you point to Shadowrun, and not AD&D?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Moreno,

You are really annoying, especially when you are being right and when we're not really disagreeing.

I agree with you fully about the origins of the phenomenon. I think you are criticizing something I am not saying, however.

I was not talking about the scholarly depths of the phenomenon, but about what brought it to others, especially publishers regarding their own games. A big part of that means getting the phenomena you've described evolving within D&D out of D&D. Because right in the middle of the 1980s, it became important to many of us to distance oneself from D&D of any kind. In fact, it was not even a within-gaming thing; people who liked role-playing but did not want to be associated with negative cultural judgments of it had to distance themselves. "You're into that D&D stuff?" "No. I do like role-playing. A lot of people don't know this, but there are a lot of games which are not D&D. Here, let me show you Champions." Or Call of Cthulhu, or some cyberpunk-heavy supplement for GURPS. And then you talked a lot about source material that would be interesting to that person, distancing yourself further and further from D&D with various details ("not like D&D, not like D&D") and hope that they would lose that look in their eye. Even going this far was the minority tactic, compared with the majority who simply closeted their gamerness. Why did we have to do this? First, not in fear of people who thought it was occult or vaguely "bad for kids," because those people could not be reached. I'm talking in terms of strict cultural coolness in the immediate, 20-year-old application of wanting to be given any social credit and/or to get laid. (Gaming could get a teenager laid by hot older women until about 1980. Not after that. Well, maybe since 2002.)

Shadowrun met that need very well because it allowed you to do all that but without actually having to distance yourself from D&D in practice. It also, and mysteriously considering it had orcs and elves, branded itself with "cyberpunk" more effectively than, for instance, the game called Cyberpunk did. And lastly - synergistically - it did all these things squarely and successfully in the context of the new, high-end, multiple-supplement, sourcebook-heavy, shelf-space oriented, distributor-pleasing publishing demands. Therefore I agree that it did not invent anything I'm talking about. It refined and applied them in a way which made it the go-to model for all RPG publishers to imitate from that point on. Even games that did not begin with that model shifted to it, usually unsuccessfully.

Another factor is that all of this writing I'm doing began as a direct application for playing DeGenesis, and my thinking at the moment is that most of the text I'm playing with (what you've seen, and more to come) may well become a DeGenesis-focused publication made available for free under Posthuman Studios' Creative Commons license. In other words, I'm thinking of the German scene, and directlyappealing to, possibly constructively challenging, its sensibilities. The German scene was exposed to D&D (mostly AD&D2), but its biggest influences were and are Der Schwarze Auge (best understood as AD&D2 in German, on steroids, with hemorrhoids) and Shadowrun. Especially very shiny, expensive, thick, detailed Shadowrun. German role-players have a love-hate relationship with these games which dwarfs anyone else's feelings about D&D, for instance. They know they're agony to play and complain about every detail. They also have every book on their shelves and cannot bear to imagine that they're not genius, somehow, in some way, if only they were played right. When I say "like Shadowrun," the German says "Oh! Like that!"

2) TSR was searching for anything that could sell. Gygax was on the way out of TSR, the TSR was on the verge of bankrupt a few years before and was saved by publishing a hastly-written mishups of new rules and characters for AD&D (Unearthed Arcana) and increasing the rate of publication of new books and modules (I counted some times ago the number of books published by TSR in the early eighties, and the increase is really noticeable. When D&D was selling millions and millions of copies everywhere, TSR published a handful of slim booklets with dungeons every year. Almost nothing. When D&D sales started dropping, AD&D goes in a few years from a set of 3+some oddmwents volumes - the basic 3, Legend and Lore, and some other - to a half-shelf long line of books about every AD&D "universe", monsters, new rules, etc., with very long adventures published every month or more often.

I love this line in your summary:

- 1982:  no hardback, no boxed sets,  9 adventures. This means that there was an average of 40 days between any new offer from TSR and they were thin booklets that sold for $6.95. And this is most successful D&D year in history, with million of copies sold of the corebooks.

That's the year I bought one of my favorite modules, Against the Cult of the Reptile God (with Tim Truman art!). It's also the year I decided never to buy any D&D again. It's nice to see that even then, I knew when it had peaked. I didn't play it again until the 3.0/3.5 game I wrote about here at the Forge, a few years ago. Uh, I did play the module again, several times, using ... another game.

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Ooooohhh ... OK, download that module here. I never did see the other modules in the "Novice" series. I believe I shall download them myself right now.

Best, Ron

[Moreno R.]

Hi Ron!

I was not criticizing, it really was a question. If my tone when I talk about these things change and become aggressive it's because when I talk about TSR swindling the D&D fans, I am talking about myself, too. It's not even the money (I got most of it back by selling my mint copies to collectors), it's the unbelievable amount of time I lost perusing that mass of garbage thinking that it would teach me how to be a "good GM"...

I was not talking about the scholarly depths of the phenomenon, but about what brought it to others, especially publishers regarding their own games. A big part of that means getting the phenomena you've described evolving within D&D out of D&D. Because right in the middle of the 1980s, it became important to many of us to distance oneself from D&D of any kind. In fact, it was not even a within-gaming thing; people who liked role-playing but did not want to be associated with negative cultural judgments of it had to distance themselves. "You're into that D&D stuff?" "No. I do like role-playing. A lot of people don't know this, but there are a lot of games which are not D&D. Here, let me show you Champions." Or Call of Cthulhu, or some cyberpunk-heavy supplement for GURPS. And then you talked a lot about source material that would be interesting to that person, distancing yourself further and further from D&D with various details ("not like D&D, not like D&D") and hope that they would lose that look in their eye. Even going this far was the minority tactic, compared with the majority who simply closeted their gamerness. Why did we have to do this? First, not in fear of people who thought it was occult or vaguely "bad for kids," because those people could not be reached. I'm talking in terms of strict cultural coolness in the immediate, 20-year-old application of wanting to be given any social credit and/or to get laid. (Gaming could get a teenager laid by hot older women until about 1980. Not after that. Well, maybe since 2002.)

You say "many of us". How many? How real was for most of them? You said it yourself: their desire to be "cool" and not associated with D&D was satisfied by "D&D, but cyberpunk" (as later was by "D&D but with fangs"). And how much of that social stigma associated with D&D was caused by the image of the game, and not by the real people who really played it? I started playing in 1986 entering in a group that started no more than 6, 7 years before, and it was already a mess of dysfunctional social relationships, social misfits using the game to impose their presence to others, and the others that used that need to bully them. It was so toxic that to get away I started a group of my own (and you know how much I like being the GM, right?) trying to learn directly from the books (with the precise intent of NOT playing like my old GM - little I did know that the books would teach me to be exactly like him).

AD&D at that time was a clanking mess, something that was way overrated and outdated at least from 1979 (Gygax calling his rambling DMG "advanced" in an hobby that already produced Runequest and Cults of Prax was simply ridiculous), but I don't think that this had any effect on the social stigma. You don't get a social stigma by playing a game, even if it's way outdated (I don't think there is any stigma on the people who play monopoly). It wasn't (directly) the game. It was the people who played it, and the kind of social toxic atmosphere it fostered (the way a guy had to work to please an entire group, and the way the group had to feed his ego in fear that he will stop doing so. The way being "in the grace" of the GM was more useful that being smart, etc)

And there was really any less social stigma on superhero comics (Champions) than for fantasy, in the early '80? Or there was any way to explain to an outsider how Runequest (fantasy) was different from D&D (fantasy)?

You said it yourself: Shadowrun was simply D&D, but with some cyberpunk trapping to make it seem "cool". So if it was successful, for a time, it's not the proof that all the "coolness" these people searched for, was false and empty? That they didn't really want to change their way of playing (and their dysfunctional atmosphere) but they simply wanted to brag how much they were "better" than all the people who still played D&D (In the same way D&D players who got by stroking the GM ego called "roll-players" the ones that really risked failure rolling dice)

And... success? How many copies were sold of Shadowrun? It's existence was ever noticed by non-players?

If Shadowrun never existed, the people who brought all these supplements would have finally broke up with that paradigm and found some different way to play, or they would simply have found another D&D-clone to continue to play in the same way feeling cooler?

At the time of Shadowrun (1989) this was the situation with other famous rpgs:

Call of Cthulu (1981): in 1989 they publish the 4th edition, and yog-sothoth.com list 41 supplements already published by 1989, with different settings (dreamland, cthulhu now, cthulhu by gaslight) and big railroaded campaign (Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, 1982 /  Fungi from Yuggoth, 1984 /   Masks of Nyarlathotep, 1984 /  Spawn of Azathoth, 1986)

Marvel Super-Heroes RPG (1984) (still TSR, but just to compare...)  in 1989 at 42 supplements (not counting the gamebooks)

Paranoia (1984) in 1989 in the 2nd edition, with 23 supplements

Middle Earth Role-Playing (1984):  63 supplements by 1989.

I wasn't able to find a list of GURPS supplements with the date of first publication, but I suppose by 1989 it would be massive.

So it seems to me like the supplement treadmill path was well-trodden by 1989, even by more "highbrow" games like CoC.

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I am playing Devil's advocate here. I got your explanation, but I want to dig deeper. What is the difference with Shadowrun? It was the production value, making rpg publishing even more costly and out-of-reach to self-publishers? They did something better (for them, not the industry) that everybody followed after that?

About getting laid by playing rpgs...  I got proof that roleplaying can get you laid less than a year after I started to play. Not I, it was another player. With another player that was the girlfriend and loved one of a third player. Oops, that campaign didn't end very well... after that I think we were rather scared of any sexual complication at the table...

But I disgress. Returning to the topic:

Shadowrun met that need very well because it allowed you to do all that but without actually having to distance yourself from D&D in practice. It also, and mysteriously considering it had orcs and elves, branded itself with "cyberpunk" more effectively than, for instance, the game called Cyberpunk did. And lastly - synergistically - it did all these things squarely and successfully in the context of the new, high-end, multiple-supplement, sourcebook-heavy, shelf-space oriented, distributor-pleasing publishing demands. Therefore I agree that it did not invent anything I'm talking about. It refined and applied them in a way which made it the go-to model for all RPG publishers to imitate from that point on. Even games that did not begin with that model shifted to it, usually unsuccessfully.

This seems the answer to my question above:  it was more successful. But I asked that the same because I wanted more details. It really sold more than GURPS or MERP? Or you mean a different kind of success?

In other words, I'm thinking of the German scene, and directlyappealing to, possibly constructively challenging, its sensibilities. The German scene was exposed to D&D (mostly AD&D2), but its biggest influences were and are Der Schwarze Auge (best understood as AD&D2 in German, on steroids, with hemorrhoids) and Shadowrun.

Der Schwarze Auge was published in Italy, too, in 1986 (with a second edition in 1989), but it was never very successful, and by 1990 it was practically dead. (we Italian seems to be immune to the shiny things that charmed Germans. By the other hand, Vampire Larps were everywhere in the '90, and still are. I assume it's the much bigger percentage of female players: larps with scantly dressed fanged females were much more attractive than playing cyberpunk D&D with the boys...)

That's the year I bought one of my favorite modules, Against the Cult of the Reptile God (with Tim Truman art!). It's also the year I decided never to buy any D&D again. It's nice to see that even then, I knew when it had peaked. I didn't play it again until the 3.0/3.5 game I wrote about here at the Forge, a few years ago.

The module I used the first time I GMed D&D, Under Illefarm, it's the 5th in the same series. As I said in the thread in gentechegioca about your essay, I was lucky the first time: that module was a good starting teacher: a little comunity, with the players characters belonging to it, with friends, suitors, loved ones, and a reason to act on every problem that I did throw at the community.
It went downhill from there. The campaign ended badly when I tricked the characters into the next "big company crossover", the abominable "war of the avatars" trilogy (my God, what I was thinking?)

Uh, I did play the module again, several times, using ... another game.

Eh, I planned to get revenge to Hickman's modules some years years ago, using ELFS to play RAVENLOFT (the original, first adventure, not the setting). at a gaming convention. It was a match made in heaven, with a villain like "Strahd von Zarovich, the cursed count, pining for his lost love..."...  but at the end it was too much work, I played Elfs, but with a much simpler adventure... (the one in the book).
Ehi, I have an idea...  are you going to play Elfs the next time you will go to Italy? Do you need a suggestion about what module to use? I think I have one...

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Moreno,

Now I see what this is about. This is about blame.

OK, I will write what you are looking for. (1) The authors, publishers, and other people responsible for the texts you're talking about bear heavy responsibility for, effectively, spraying shit-mist all over the barely decade-old hobby, and most particularly over newcomers to the texts who had little choice but to accept garbage as if it were real material. (2) The participants in the hobby itself bear an equal, if not greater responsibility for displaying degrees of intellectual cowardice, social incompetence, genuine interpersonal abuse, and lack of aesthetic standards which would make a jackal vomit.

I write this not only to provide you with what you are looking for, but because I agree with it and have felt strongly, in fact militantly about it since about 1983. I have a whole library of refutations, arguments, anecdotes, and textual quotes to quibble with you about various details. We could talk about what I said vs. what you said I said, or implied I did. We could talk about the "Shadowrun or not" for days, and find out where I agree with you or disagree ...

... but that's not what I was trying to bring forward in the essay. And I am positive that you don't really care. What matters to you right now is assigning root blame, and you can't stand seeing the culprits get the slightest hint of escaping justice by diverting attention to Shadowrun, even if the reference to Shadowrun is more relevant to and consistent with my goals in the essay. So no matter what I say, you'll say "no," even if I agree with you in the main points. The guilty must be punished; that's what you're here for.

My academic advisor for my graduate studies once said that any scientific paper with a question for a title was guaranteed not to answer it. Whereas I think your thread title is the opposite: it's not a question at all. It may have started as one when you started typing, but not afterwards.

Best, Ron

[Moreno R.]

Mmmm.....

Ron, you too are really annoying, especially when you are being right...