This image combines two wonderful pieces of public-domain art that is vividly suggestive of the worlds that can be created by a good GM with D&D, and hence the appeal of the game, regardless of which flavor you prefer. Click on the image to view full-sized in a new tab.

This is going to be a really long article* unless I control my enthusiasms really tightly, so expect me to be a little more succinct than usual. Until I get carried away, that is….
* Actually, it was always going to be a really long article. I should have said, “incredibly long article”!

The Roots Of Gaming

D&D has four conceptual parents. Without each, the RPG as we know it would not exist.

And that, I think, is the right place to start.

Dice Games

Dice as a concept extend back into prehistory; the oldest known dice of any type were excavated as part of a backgammon-like game set at the Burnt City, an archaeological site in south-eastern Iran, estimated to be from between 2800-2500 BCE. The oldest known d20 is from Ptolmaic Egypt, part of a larger historical dice collection held by New York’s Metropolitan Museum Of Art, and the Ancient Egyptian game of Senet was played with dice.

Most of the early dice games were gambling in orientation. That changed in the late 18th or early 19th century.

Military Sims / Miniatures Combat / “Wargaming”

The great grandaddy of all these ways of describing the same thing is Chess, created as Chatarunga in ancient India as a simulation of Indian Warfare with pieces representing the different types of units. Hellwig, the Master Of Pages to the Duke Of Brunswick in 1780, took inspiration from Chess to create a battle emulation game. Somewhere between 1803 and 1809, the Prussian General Staff took that concept and developed the tactical Wargame, Staff officers would move metal pieces around on a game table, use dice rolls to emulate chance events and outcomes, and with a referee who would score the results and adjudicate the rules of the simulation, frequently overruling the roll of the dice. The Prussian victory over the Second French Empire in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 is sometimes credited, at least in part, to the benefits of this tactical training.

During the 19th century, increasingly realistic and detailed tactical simulations became a standard element of military officer training, coupled with real-life simulations and training scenarios involving all ranks. In the same period, the first non-military wargames club was started in Oxford, England; Naval enthusiast Fred T Jane came up with and published a set of rules for simulating naval encounters with model ships, around 1898 (these were reprinted in 2008), and the 1905-06 edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships included a revised edition of “The Naval War Game”.

HG Wells wrote two rulebooks in 1911 and 1913, respectively, that attempted to codify similar rules for infantry encounters into simple rules, and which championed restoring the principle of random outcomes as the ultimate authority. While Wells’ rules were self-admittedly simple, he did discuss in the second book, Little Wars, the notion of expanding the system into a more rigorous rules set.

In 1940 Fletcher Pratt’s Naval War Game was first published. Pratt’s game involved dozens of tiny wooden ships – built to a scale of about one inch to 50 feet – spread over the living room floor of his apartment. Their maneuvers and the results of their battles were calculated via a complex mathematical formula, with scale distances marked off with tape measures. Many of the grand masters of science fiction and fantasy participated, including Pratt himself, Robert A Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and – if memory serves me correctly – Fritz Lieber and L. Sprague de Camp. There were many others, as well.

These rules were respected by the US Naval War College and their popularity grew with clubs springing up all over the US. They soon evolved into grand tournements which used a ballroom for games with 60 or more players to a side.

Although available to the general public, the expense of metal models hindered the commercial growth of public wargaming until the mid 1950s, when Jack Scruby started producing models using rubber molds, making the hobby commercially viable for the first time.

Specialist book retailers dealing with Wargames were the precursors of the modern gaming store in many places, including here in Sydney – there was a time when Napoleon’s Historical Games was the only place to buy RPG materials. That’s certainly where I bought my copy of AD&D!

Tabletop Board Games

Senet, the previously-mentioned game from Ancient Egypt, is the oldest board game known to have existed. Board games were used in the early-to-mid-19th century to promote socially-virtuous behaviour, but by mid-century, Americans had begun to embrace materialism, and their games began to reflect this shift as daily life rather than eternal life became the focus of board games.

In 1860, “The Checkered Game Of Life,” rewarded players for mundane activities such as attending college, marrying, and getting rich, was the first to focus on secular virtues rather than religious virtues, and sold 40,000 copies its first year, signalling that social values had changed. From the 1880s, the premise of most published games was further refined into Algeresque rags-to-riches games. One of the first, the “Game Of The District Messenger Boy” encouraged players in the belief that the lowliest messenger boy could ascend the corporate ladder to its highest rung. This movement culminated in the first publication of Monopoly in 1935, still the most commercially-successful board game in history.

In 1952, the Wargame merged with the concept of the Tabletop Board Game with the release of “Tactics”, designed and published by Charles S. Roberts. The game was the first to use cardboard counters instead of miniatures, and even today some RPG terminogy can be traced back to that original game – “stacking limits” being the specific example that I have in mind. Nearly breaking even on Tactics despite the small-scale release, Roberts founded Avalon Hill to publish and promote games with similar structural elements, and is now known as “the father of board roleplaying”.

The time came, in 1959, for board wargames to begin exploring beyond the boundaries of tactical simulation. The game that made this important first step away from the direct representation of individual units to a more conceptual approach that focussed on the rough-and-tumble of international diplomats was – unsurprisingly – Diplomacy.

The first use of a hexagonal grid on a map board followed in 1961 with the publication of D-Day and Chancellorsville, both from Avalon Hill, as the popularity of the ‘intelligent games for grownups’ boomed. In the late 60s, a number of small magazines and new gaming companies appeared.

These were followed in the the early 70s by a boom in the number of game publishers, including two that most readers will know; Game Designer’s Workshop (or GDW) and Tactical Studies Rules – better known as TSR.

Fantasy Literature

TSR took the wargame and infused it with fantasy literature, something else that had been around just about forever in terms of human society. Classical mythology is replete with fantastic stories and characters, the best known (and perhaps the most relevant to modern fantasy) being the works of Homer (Greek) and Virgil (Roman). So deep do these roots run that even today, it is not entirely clear how much of the classical Mythological tales were actually theological doctrine and how much was allegory, fable, or fiction. This is equally true of the other famous mythology used by RPGs, the Norse.

Strangely, although fantasy literature was regularly created through subsequent eras to the Empires of ancient Greece and Rome, it was in the Renaiscance and Enlightenment that the seeds of popularity for the first great boom in fantasy literature were sown. Scientific discoveries and the age of exploration made it seem like the hitherto-impossible was just around the corner, the undreamed-of was just as possible as the commonplace. The victorian boom in fantastic fiction encompassed notable authors as diverse as Hans Christin Anderson, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll (Alice In Wonderland), Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde (The Picture Of Dorian Gray), HP Lovecraft, H Rider Haggard (King Soloman’s Mines), L Frank Baum (The Wizard Of Oz), J M Barrie (Peter Pan), and, of course, H G Wells. So popular were these works that many of them, or their authors, are still household names today. 2015 marked the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Alice In Wonderland, for example, and similar landmark events will occur right up to 2050, even as some of the pivotal works of the early 20th century are marking their 100th year of publication; arguably the most inspirational books of modern fantasy, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, included. The Hobbit was first published in 1937 and The Lord Of The Rings in 1954-55.

Until those books came along, Fantasy was not even identified as a genre distinct from horror and speculative fiction (which evolved into Sci-Fi), and it can sometimes be hard to draw the dividing lines (hence the somewhere-in-between subgenre of Space Opera).

TSR

Gary Gygax and Dave Arnerson were developing what would become D&D and needed to publish in a hurry in order to beat a number of rival products to print, so they brought in first Don kaye and, shortly thereafter, Brian Blume, as partners in Tactical Studies Rules.

“First Edition” – OD&D

TSR’s medieval era miniatures game, Chainmail (1971) included a fantasy supplement in 1974 that led to a new phenomenon that would become much bigger than its parent hobby, role-playing games (RPGs). But no-one knew how large a phenomenon it would turn out to be. Gygax “expected to sell about 50,000 copies” of what he was marketing as a Niche Product. In the first year, 1000 copies were sold; in the second, it was 3000 (aproximately).

It’s fair to describe the three-booklet product as conceptually flawed. It was cheap and amateurish in production, short on details and explanations, and long on assumptions that the reader was already familiar with all the basic concepts.

But a strange thing happened: this new melange concept of embodying and representing a discrete individual in a simulated world created within the imagination caught on, especially on college and university campuses. Distribution far out-stripped the limited production and distribution capabilities of TSR. The game was first brought to Australia as a set of photocopies of those original rules – Blair Ramage, my co-GM and occasional collaborator was one of the first players recruited by the GM responsible – and this was far from an isolated case. Photocopies of photocopies of photocopies spread far and wide, so distribution of the rules set dwarfs the official publication numbers by more than enough to render those numbers meaningless. I’ve seen estimates that range from 10,000 copies (on top of the the 4,000 reported) to 250,000 copies – I personally expect that the truth would be somewhere around the 50,000 mark, but no-one knows.

In fact, to be brutally honest, we came close to losing D&D forever in those early years. The fledgling TSR couldn’t keep up, couldn’t produce enough copies or enough content, and there were no go-to guys that could be recruited to pinch-hit in the production of new content. They needed as much time as they could get to write, to recruit and train new contributors, to work out broader distribution plans. Their prime recruiting ground was the magazine, The Dragon, launched in 1976 as a successor to their previous periodical, The Strategic Review, and their policy of welcoming submissions from readers.

That financial year, 1975-76, was a pivotal one. At it’s start, RPGs were seen as a minor subgenre of the wargames industry; by the end of it, RPGs were a seperate industry, and within a further year, were completely dominant.

Basic Set

The in-house development of the time was completely focussed on what would become AD&D when TSR was approached by outside writer and D&D enthusiast John Eric Holmes, who offered to rewrite and re-edit the original rules into an introductory version of D&D.

This offer was promptly accepted and D&D seperated into two seperate strands – a relatively rules-light basic set and the more structured, comprehensive, and rules heavy Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The basic set cleaned up the presentation of the essential rules, was designed to introduce the concepts to the general public and in particular to younger teens, and was sold as a package, ready-to-play (if you used a slightly-fuzzy definition of ‘play’ that included character and game world generation).

AD&D

But it was AD&D that was the “real” game to most people. It wasn’t percieved as an “advanced” set of rules; rather, the basic set was seen as a watered-down choice for those not yet ready for the “real thing”. It was AD&D that was the focus of 95%+ of the content within the Dragon, and this percentage would have been even higher if winning convention modules are excluded.

The first of three core books appeared in 1977, virtually simultaniously with the Basic Set. The others followed, one each, in 1978 and 79. These were the books that cemented the RPG industry with D&D as its cornerstone.

That’s not to say that the Basic sold badly; it did very well as a feeder category into the industry for players, GMs, and game writers. This two-pronged strategy would persist as the D&D publishing structure for close to twenty years; if it weren’t working, that wouldn’t be the case.

When players and old-time referees talk about old-school gaming, 90% of them are talking about the vast freedoms of the box set or the minutia-rich AD&D.

The Supplement Free-For-All

From the moment the core rulebooks were complete, work started on additional hardcovers and published adventures. LOTS of published adventures. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing; sufficient success to begin edging into the entertainment mainstream also brought with it attention from the self-imposed guardians of mainstream morality, especially certain religious figures and groups. At the same time, TSR was forced to fight legal disputes over the use of copyrighted creations without a licence, notably in 1980’s deities and demigods, which had chapters on the Cthulhu Mythos and Fritz Leiber’s “Nehwon Mythos” as well as traditional Mythological figures, new creations, and Michael Moorcock’s Melnibonéan Mythos, for which the company had obtained permission from the author.

The Cthulhu Mythos was believed to be in the public domain, so TSR assumed they could legally use it without any special permission. However, Arkham House, which claimed to hold the copyrights on a number of works by H.P. Lovecraft, had already licensed the Cthulhu property to the game company Chaosium, who had also licensed the Melnibonéan copyright from Moorcock. When Chaosium threatened legal action, the first printing was halted. Eventually, the two companies agreed on a compromise: TSR could continue to use the material but must provide a credit to Chaosium to do so. The second printing took place while the litigation was still pending, and so removed both of the disputed sections; after the deal was done, the material was restored with the agreed-upon credit.

From the fannish point of view, it’s uncertain whether or not TSR actually had a case to answer. One of the acceptable use provisions of US copyright law is the homage and arguably, that was what TSR had presented.

I have never heard anyone in a position of authority at the time suggest that this notion was part of their legal strategy, but if so, it would certainly explain the TSR position with respect to the plethora of third-party modules and supplements that were emerging though this period in time. Because these required ourchase of the core rulebooks if you didn’t have them already, each was – in effect – an advirtisment for the game, and this effect continued to boost sales of AD&D. From very early in the game’s history, TSR took no action against small publishers producing D&D-compatible material, and even licensed some (notably Judge’s Guild) to do so in a more official capacity.

But by then, the religious opposition was becoming more serious and more disruptive. For the 1985 printing of Deities and Demigods, the book was repackaged and the name changed to Legends and Lore. But the pressure was beginning to tell, and would have a substantial influence over the next editions of the game system.

On top of that, there were serious internal rifts. TSR Hobbies ran into financial problems in the spring of 1983, prompting the company to split into four independant businesses. After losing their executive positions due to the underperformance of the business, the two shareholders with the controlling numbers of shares sold their interests in TSR to TSR Vice-president Lorraine Williams, who in turn engineered the ousting of Gygax.

AD&D 2nd Ed

The mid-eighties under the Williams leadership saw a marked change in attitude by TSR, and a move toward being “commercially responsible” and away from the fan-oriented cottage-industry grown large. Williams was a financial planner who saw the potential to rebuild the debt-plagued TSR into a highly-profitable business, but was disdainful of the gaming field, viewing herself as superior to gamers. Gamers were, in other words, something to be exploited.

Under Williams, the flagship D&D titles were rewritten, removing the material that had been most heavily criticized by the religious community (Devils, Demons, and Assassins and Half-Orcs as character options) and any material that was potentially objectionable under copyright. At the same time, TSR began to actively prosecute unlicensed third party materials, another reflection of the corporate shift.

Williams diversified the company’s products, adding magazines, paperback fiction, and comic books. She continued the commercial tie-ins spearheaded before his departure by Gygax; in particular, she personally owned the licencing for Buck Rogers and encouraged TSR to produce games and novels under that licence.

I have to admit to not playing D&D in this time; I was busy with the Hero System and my interlocking superhero campaigns. Later, however, I returned to D&D with what had been intended to be an AD&D campaign, which I was persuaded to run using 2nd Ed rules. My impression was that a lot of streamlining had taken place, the rules were far more cohesive, and yet – somehow – lacking in soul. Corporately dispassionate. I never understood why until I started researching this article. But that was why, when it was released, and as soon as the opportunity presented itself, I was easily persuaded to shift my D&D campaigns into third edition.

The SSI Video Games

What I was playing during this time period were a great many of the SSI-licensed computer games, starting with Curse of the Azure Bonds, Pool Of Radiance, Secret Of The Silver Blades, and Eye Of The Beholder. These successful licenced-properties began an ongoing association between the computer and D&D that continues to this day with platforms like Roll20 and other online virtual tabletops. I’ll continue to touch on the “Computer RPG franchises” from time-t-time as this article progresses.

The Game Setting Explosion

TSR released the Forgotten Realms setting in 1987, the same year as a small number of staff members began working on the Second Edition of the rules. This campaign setting had first appeared as a series of articles in the pages of The Dragon during the early 1980s, written by its creator, Ed Greenwood. This game setting became one of the cornerstones of the D&D “universe” for much of the next decade.

In fact, over the course of the decade-plus in which 2nd Edition was “the” flavor of (A)D&D, the rules became relatively stable, and the major product lines were all game settings and adventures that took place within those settings.

Ravenloft followed in 1990; Dark Sun in 1991; Al-Qadim in 1992; and Planescape in 1994. Despite this diversity, But despite the popularity of several of these settings, TSR was again heading for rocky waters.

Player’s Option Rulebooks, Dragon Dice, and the end of TSR

By 1995, TSR had fallen behind both Games Workshop and Wizards Of The Coast in sales volume. They had become the industry heavyweight that embodied all the cliches that came with that position – sluggish, corporate, passionless, and crumbling. Sadly, the highly-dissapointing D&D movie was probably their high point of the era, just as AD&D had been the high-water mark of the Gygax-led era.

Collectible Card Games were beginning to eat into the RPG market, a sign of generational change; many of the teens who had been playing D&D gave up gaming as real life forced them to become “respectable” or imposed other priorities on their life. Only about one in ten would remain. The new generation of teenagers were into gameboys and CCGs and wanted their fantasy-gaming fix delivered in a faster-to-play, faster-to-finish format rather than the long-term slow burn that was an RPG campaign.

Seeing the writing on the wall, TSR attempted to move into the new market with Dragon Dice – expensive to produce, but initial sales were encouraging, so – despite knowing little-to-nothing about the new game industry – they went into it, boots and all, only for Dragon Dice to become an embarressing and financially disastrous flop. The various game settings were cannibalizing sales from each other in a shrinking marketplace.

In an attempt to revitalize interest in the line, TSR rewrote the core rulebooks for 2nd edition with new covers, art, layouts, and structure, full of optional rules with minimal regard for potential inconsistencies and holes in the resulting rules. On top of that, theer was a perception that the Player’s Option rules were produced cheaply (since they had softcovers instead of being hardcover books) while at the same time splitting what had been one book into three (interpreted as corporate greed). There was a sense of panic, and of throwing as many things as they could think of against the wall to see if any of them “stuck” and gave a new direction.

Despite sales in 1996 of $40 million, TSR ended the year with very little cash reserves; when Random House returned an unexpectedly high percentage of unsold stock, including the year’s inventory of unsold novels and sets of Dragon Dice, and charged a fee of several million dollars, leaving TSR unable to pay their printing and shipping bills, and the logistics company that handled TSR’s pre-press, printing, warehousing and shipping refused to do any more work. Since that company had the production plates for key products such as core D&D books, there was no means of printing or shipping core products to generate income or secure short-term financing. TSR imploded, dismissing 10% of their workforce, followed by other staff members who resigned in disagreement with the way the crisis was to be handled.

There was a certain amount of irony in that under Williams, TSR succumbed to essentially the same problems that had led her to take control of the business in the first place – the failure to recognize that diversification into multiple product lines exposed a business to the potential liabilities of each product line. While there were occasions when one good sector could prop up another that was less profitable, conditions were right for a “perfect storm” of adverse situations, and in late 1996, their number came up. In large part due to the need to refund Random House, TSR entered 1997 over $30 million in debt, and facing lawsuits over their inability to pay contributing freelancers and royalties, but survived the first half of the year on sales of existing stock even while Williams was negotiating the sale of the business to Wizards Of The Coast.

It’s fair to say that most of this was unknown to the population at large in a way that would be unthinkable in today’s era of social media and grassroots mass communications. The sale came as something of a bolt from the blue for most, and gamer speculation on the impact that it would have on both the D&D game itself and the broader industry was the hot-button issue for gamers over the next six months or so.

In retrospect, they – we – need not have worried. Wizards Of The Coast may have been making money hand-over-fist on it’s Magic CCG franchise, but it was (in essence) more akin to TSR pre-Williams – but a fan-based company that had gotten several aspects of its business model more right than TSR had done.

3rd Edition

In fact, with financial security and a business-as-usual approach moderated by the practical realities of the marketplace, there was barely a ripple. Even the TSR logo remained in place on the products. Certainly, some of the game settings were let go, including the popular Ravensloft setting, but to the fan at large, not much changed.

Behind the scenes, however, there was a great deal of activity.The two-pronged approach was abandoned during the takeover, and three writers – Monte Cook, Jonathon Tweet, and Skip Williams – were hard at work doing a complete rewrite that would unify game mechanics, shift almost everything onto a linear d20 resolution mechanic that was far simpler to handle than the 3d6 mechanic that had preceded it, and modernized the entire set of rules.

Most importantly, it also reinvented the business model so profoundly that the aftershocks are still being felt today.

The Balder’s Gate Series

But before I get into that story, let’s again step to one side and into the world of D&D and Computer-based gaming.Balder’s Gate was released in 1998, some two years before the first release of AD&D Third Edition, based on a simplified set of the AD&D Second Edition rules, and set in the Forgotten Realms setting, who many gamers had gotten to know through the SSI games discussed earlier.

Critically acclaimed, it sold by the pallet-load and was even credited with Revitalizing the computer RPG genre. Personally, I wasn’t that entranced by it; the Second edition foundations were a bit of a turn-off and the gameplay felt awkward and unpleasant to me, at least in comparison with the relative ease of gameplay of something like Diablo. It certainly had a stronger story-based interactive element than the latter, however – but that wasn’t saying much.

Part of the problem was that it was seen as signalling what WOTC were going to do with the AD&D franchise now that they had it, and in terms of signalling what was to come, it proved a particularly poor crystal ball. So strong was this response in my case that it came close to turning me off 3rd ed even before any such thing existed.

But the other part was more concerning. Characters in the game all sounded alike to me, with so little differentiation that the screen would flash up something that someone had said and I would respond “who?” Without that character identification, it was all but impossible to immerse myself in the plotline. Compared to other RPG game demos at the time, and in light of the gushing praise heaped on it by reviewers, it was a serious let-down.

Clearly, however, I was in the very small minority. And the success must have had a profound impact on the perceptions of D&D on the part of WOTC, signalling very clearly to them that there was nothing inherantly wrong with the franchise’s potential; it had simply been mismanaged. More than anything else, I credit Balder’s Gate with convincing WOTC to make 3rd Edition D&D a premium product, that it was worth investing in, and the RPG community was worth investing in.

The OGL Explosion

I consider that to be a strong contributing factor to the OGL business model that was the foundation of D&D 3rd Edition.

The official story is given by Wikipedia: “Frustrated that game supplements suffered far more diminished sales over time than the core books required to play the game, WotC’s Dungeons & Dragons brand manager Ryan Dancey introduced a policy whereby other companies could publish D&D-compatible materials under the Open Gaming License. This would spread the cost of supplementing the game and would increase sales of the core books, which could only be published by Wizards of the Coast.”

The 3rd edition core rules were a phenomenal success. As I recall, they made the New York Times best-seller list. And there was an explosion of OGL product that made D&D ubiquitous. Not only were there 3rd party supplements from dozens, if not hundreds, of game companies ranging from TSREsque in size to one-person operations, but there were many game systems based on the core mechanics – everything from Star Wars to d20 Modern to… in essence, the core D&D mechanics had transcended the genre to become a universal role-playing system.

The gaming community were the big winners, experiencing a boom the likes of which early TSR could only dream – or have nightmares about.

Forgotten Realms Revisited

It’s probably fair to say that the most popular campaign setting released for AD&D was Forgotten Realms. Many of the most popular adventure modules, most (if not all) of the SSI computer games, and Balder’s Gate, were all founded on that setting. So it was no great surprise that Forgotten Realms was one of the first campaign settings released under the new 3.0 rules set when it appeared on shelves in 2001.

Far more surprising was that supplements expanding the distinctiveness of the Forgotten Realms setting followed at what seemed like lightning speed. There were two in 2001, two in 2002, two more in 2003. When the game system updated to version 3.5, the Forgotten Realms expansions kept coming: Another one in 2003, three in 2004, four in 2005, three in 2006, and one in 2007, all in addition to the core setting book. For anyone keeping count, that’s 19 books, 150+ pages each, not counting adventure modules, and making the Forgotten Realms one of the most thoroughly-explored game settings ever published.

Version 3.5

July 2003 gave the D&D franchise another step into the marketing stratosphere with the release of the version 3.5 rules set. This revision incorporated all errata noted to date, clarified a number of confusing rules, and specifically addressed common complaints about certain areas of the game system. Nevertheless, as indicated by the version number, at it’s core this was the same game as had already been released – with additional spells and feats.

By 2004, consumers had spemt more than US$1 billion on D&D product and the rules were selling at the rate of about 750,000 copies per year. There were more than three million players spanning the globe in 1981, and that had more than doubled by 2007.

Eberron

A rival for the Forgotten Realms crown is the Eberron Campaign Setting. A competition winner in 2002 run to find the best new Game Setting for D&D, Eberron by Keith Baker was chosen from more than 11000 enties. In June 2004, this resulted in the publication of the first hard-cover in the campaign setting. Additional supplements were still being released for the 3.5 version of Eberron even after the D&D ruleset was revised into fourth edition. In total, and not counting adventures, some 16 books – again at the dizzying pace of three or four a year – were published between mid-2004 and March, 2008.

Edition Wars

At the same time as 3.0 and 3.5 were proving to be such a smash hit, exposing hundreds of thousands of people to RPGs that had never gamed before, a counter-culture started developing that lamented the seriousness of the latest iteration of the game and the loss of the sense of freedom and whimsy that had characterized earlier editions. Some pined for the quirky geekiness of AD&D, and others for the relative simplicity of the basic set. There were a number of vitriolic and passionate advocates on both sides of the debate, but for the most part, those feeling disenfranchised were seens as a vocal minority. That would soon change…

Hasbro

In September 1999, toy giant Hasbro bought Wizards Of The Coast for about US$325 million. Their primary goal was to get their hands on the enormously-successful Magic The Gathering and Pokemon CCGs, and on the patents that WOTC held over the very concept of a CCG, but they also obtained the premier RPG line, D&D. Interest in the acquisition had first been expressed as early as 1994.

At the time, Hasbro promised that nothing would change, then started changing everything. In retrospect, this was history repeating itself; the new owners were from the Williams school, caring nothing for the product or its users except as a way of making money.

But at the time, little of this was evident, and not much seemed to have changed on the surface, even though there had been a lot of personnel changes behind the scenes, and a new corporate culture was now driving the decisions. The first real indication of the new direction came just two months after the purchase, with the announcement that Gen Con would leave its traditional Milkwaukee venue after the 2002 convention.

Fourth Edition

In time, sales of D&D 3.5 began to slow, probably because everyone who wanted a copy, had a copy. It was announced in August 2007 that Fourth Edition would be released in December of that year in what was widely seen as a cynical profit-making exercise that ignored the investment that customers had made in the 3.x versions.

At first, though, there was curiosity and excitement about the prospect; there had been so many game supplements, both official and third-party released for the game that compatibility issues had arisen. While this was viewed as an acceptable and inevitable consequence when it came to third-party supplements, it was less forgivable when it came to official pubications; the one that always irritated me the most were the incompatabilities of the revised Deities and Demigods and the Epic Level Handbook. With so much material produced, there were a huge number of good ideas that could be incorporated and the whole product line “cleaned up”.

Then the bad news started coming. Minimal-to-no backwards compatibility. A far more restrictive licensing regime, massive licensing fees, and stronger enforcement. Rumors that some content would only be available to paying subscribers of a new online service Contraversial decisions about the broader philosophy underlying the game. There was a pervasive sense that the company wasnt thinking about its customers at all, just about how much cash could be gouged out of them.

And the Edition Wars really exploded.

One of the earliest decisions that we made when setting up Campain Mastery was that we weren’t going to buy into them. Our position would be that every game has its merits, that what was right for some did not have to be right for all, and that every gamer would be treated with respect. And that acknowledgment of the capacity for human error would always be a consideration. This site was to be a voice and a vehicle for everyone, no matter which edition you preferred. Johnn and I may have had our personal preferences, and reasons to back those up, but that did not undermine the validity of anyone else’s decision, even if it contradicted our own.

I gave my take on the whole situation in one early article at Campaign Mastery, “The more things change: ..”: An essay on the future of RPGs – I’ve quoted from parts of it in this section. But the biggest response to the changes was something that no-one really expected (though some of the content in the article foreshadows it).

But before that reaction, Fourth Edition would actually be published. To quote from Wikipedia, who have summed up the changes really well, “Mechanically, 4th edition saw a major overhaul of the game’s systems. Changes in spells and other per-encounter resourcing, giving all classes a similar number of at-will, per-encounter and per-day powers. Powers [had] a wide range of effects including inflicting status effects, creating zones, and forced movement, making combat very tactical for all classes but essentially requiring use of miniatures, reinforced by the use of squares to express distances. Attack rolls, skill checks and defense values all got a bonus equal to one-half level, rounded down, rather than increasing at different rates depending on class or skill point investment. [Skills are] either trained (providing a fixed bonus on skill checks, and sometimes allowing more exotic uses for the skills) or untrained, but in either case all characters also received a bonus to all skill rolls based on level. A system of ‘healing surges’ and short and long rests [were] introduced to act as resource management.

The system of prestige classes [was] replaced. Characters at 11th level choose a ‘paragon path’, a specialty based on their class, which defines some of their new powers through 20th level. At level 21, an ‘epic destiny’ is chosen in a similar manner., the paragon path and the epic destiny replace the prestige class system of 3rd edition. Core rules extend to level 30 rather than level 20, bringing ‘epic level’ play back into the core rules.”

In hindsight, there’s quite a lot to like about 4th edition. I know of at least one group still actively playing it. Sacrificing a certain level of flexibility in order to achieve a more balanced gaming environment without the character-class inequities remains a sticking-point for many, and a large amount of the angst surrounding the release can be attributed to mismanagement. There’s also a certain amount of truth to the statement that “Fourth Edition did for the Basic Set what 3.x did for AD&D”.

Fourth Edition is designed to offer more streamlined play, with reduced prep time and greater access for new players. The real mistakes that were made come down to the overly-rigid Game System License (and the huge fees demanded, and intrusive creative oversight entailed, in participating in it) and the decision to shut down the 3.x line rather than maintaining the two as seperate strands or options.

And the edition was certainly a success, if not one on the same scale as the heady days of 3.x. Even before the first rulebook was published, the first printing had sold out and a second was underway. To date, there have been 40 supplements (not counting campaign settings and adventure modules) released for this edition of D&D, and one thing is for certain: if they weren’t selling, they wouldn’t have kept producing them.

The Pathfinder Reaction

Fourth edition was never going to be as big a success as 3.x because of the reactions by those who had a massive investment in the older version, and who felt disenfranchised by the new policies and direction. In the article I linked to earlier, I wrote “Many – even most – of the third party publishers that were so much a part of the ongoing drive of 3.x have opted to take the old OGL material and published their own game systems, hewing individual paths away from a common point.”

By far the most successful of those is Pathfinder. At first glance, this system is a virtual clone of 3.x, and any supplement written for 3.x will generally translate into the newer game system fairly seamlessly and painlessly. When you dig under the hood, there are a few subtle differences, especially in terms of character power progression – Pathfinder seems geared slightly more strongly toward the power gamer – but until your character levels get into the double-digits, you would never notice these differences, and even then, most would be minor for most of a character’s gaming life.

This is the ultimate landing spot for all those who felt abandoned and betrayed by WOTC and their Hasbro masters. The proof of the strength of the public response lies in the simple fact that Pathfinder outsold D&D fourth edition.

So ubiquitous and obvuious is the association between Pathfinder and D&D that I have chosen to include it here as though it were another edition of D&D. And many of those gaming companies that were producing game supplements for 3.x have continued to produce Pathfinder-compatible products.

Fifth Edition

The growing success of Pathfinder and the ongoing rancor in parts of the gaming community toward WOTC and Fourth Edition forced the company into a serious mea culpa in January 2012 when they announced that a new edition of the game, referred to at the time by the title D&D Next.

To their credit, this wasn’t just a superficial gesture; serious efforts were made to engage the gaming community as active participants in the games mechanics and structure. WOTC wanted to try and lure the dissafected back, and undo the mistakes of the past, and were refreshingly candid about the nature of those mistakes.

It was never going to be 100% successful in that goal, but I was surprised by the vitriol used by various factions. I wrote about that in What Does ‘Old-School Gaming’ really mean, anyway? (hard to believe that it was almost five years ago!)

The article sparked a huge response, and seemed to crystalize a ‘sensible majority’ that were being lost or overwhelmed by the extremists, both pro- and anti- D&D Next.

Distance in time lends perspective; it is now possible to look back at 5th ed and give it a relatively dispassionate assessment. First, the name: it was pretentious and precious, and some marketing or management person somewhere should hang their heads in shame over it, and over the decision to back away from acknowledging it as 5th ed from day one.

In terms of the content, 5th ed unifies the things that people missed the most from 3.x with the best innovations of 4th edition, and a couple of new ideas to bind the two together, most notably the Advantage game mechanic, whih I analyzed here. From a game-mechanics perspective, that remains probably the hardest thing for GMs to get their heads around. It’s reasonably functional, but hard for GMs to judge, and is probably the least-successful element of the fifth edition game.

Did it work? The reports I’be heard are that it was partially successful, luring some gamers back, and doing better than 4th edition had – but all has been quiet for some years, so it seems to have been a qualified success. Attempt to put genies back into bottles rarely seem to come off. Pathfinder continues to sell well, and there is no longer anything that could be considered the premiere game in the RPG firmament. But at least all the shouting has died down.

If anybody’s counting…

OD&D, three editions of the basic set, two editions of AD&D, 3.0, 3.5, 4th ed, 5th ed, and Pathfinder as a ring-in – by my count, that’s 11 versions of the game. Taken collectively, D&D is the most successful RPG ever published, hands down.

Dungeons & Dragons Crystal Caverns

From the 1980s, D&D has had a flirtatious relationship with computer gaming. The latest entry into that canon is perhaps the most unlikely, attempting to fuse the RPG franchise with the world of online slot machine gaming.

When you look into it, it quickly becomes aparrant that this game is more accurately described as an attempt to infuse some of the D&D atmosphere into a slot machine simulation. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; there are so many slot machines out there that are totally lacking in atmosphere that anything done to improve them in that respect has to be commendable, and might just give the game an edge over its rivals.

What this game says, more than anything, is that D&D’s coat-tails are long enough that with sufficient creativity, anything is possible. As a first step into making slot machines more ambitious in their game-play, this hints at the possibilities to come. A plotline in which different targets become a higher priority as play progresses, with random elements that have an impact beyond a single spin, for example, ensuring that each game is different, might make an impact on a group not currently interested in electronic gambling, as well as leading a gambling afficionado into the more mainstream RPG community. So there’s a lot of potential in the concept.

Dungeons & Dragons Crystal Caverns barely taps into that well of possibilities, but if it proves popular, it will encourage progression down that creative path. If you are both a gamer and someone who plays slot machines, that’s something that’s worth encouraging. You can play Dungeons & Dragons Crystal Caverns for free at the link provided.

The (Supplement) Saga Continues

With 5th edition, a more open structure and attitude toward third party publishers prevailed, another example of WOTC learning from past mistakes. There has consequently been a slow increase in the number of game supplements available for 5th edition, mostly from small game companies publishing in PDFs. Pathfinder supplements also continue to appear, but the larger companies remain wary of being caught in the licencing wringer. Having diversified away from D&D, they see little value in boxing themselves back into a corner.

Were D&D-related game materials to once again start selling through the roof, that position would undoubtedly be revisited, but it’s more likely that new companies would spring up to fill the void.

So, if the world-beating days of 3.x are to be revisited, all that seems necessary is to reignite passions for the game. And there is one obvious mechanism by which that might be done.

Tomorrow, when the Edition Wars Begin (again), or, When Will 6th Ed happen? If Ever?

It’s been five years since the announcement of 5th edition. OD&D turns 43 this year. Lead time in the production of a new edition would be two years, at least. And everything has been conspicuously quiet lately.

Five years is a fair length of time in the RPG world. Pathfinder is that much longer in the tooth, and players may be more willing to jump ship if the product were right.

For all these confluent reasons, there are two time frames when it is reasonable to expect the announcement of a forthcoming 6th edition: this year, or two-to-three years from now in 2020.

A new release announced this year could target the 45th anniversary of the original, but that’s not a very exciting or landmark moment. And two years development for a project of this scale is cutting things fine. So, while an announcement this year is not out of the question, I rate it as a low probability.

Two-to-Three years from now is avery different story. First, the date – 2020 – is a symbolic date. It may be less than three years away, but it still feels like it symbolizes “the future”. 5th edition would be eight years old by then, and (assuming that it persisted throughout the development process), we would be talking about a once-a-decade generational update by the time a putative sixth edition was released. And, if the publishing schedule were similar to that of 5th edition, or stretched out just a little more, the first of the core rulebooks could be released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the original game. In terms of marketing, of the potential to once again make D&D the RPG game of RPG games, the ducks all seem to line up in a row around that date: a 2020 announcement, a three-year development cycle, and a multivolume publishing schedule that culminates in 2024 and the 50th anniversary of the game.

The time to start planning for this is sometime in the next two years, and the sooner the better. Time allows WOTC to make sure that they get it right, and frame the 6th edition a celebration of the history of the game.

On top of that, the popularity and acceptance of “Nerd Culture” as exemplified and demonstrated by Big Bang Theory – which has been renewed for an 11th and 12th season through 2018-2019, respectively, and growing awareness of the social and personal benfits of RPGs makes the time right for a fresh explosion of popularity into the mainstream.

Will it happen? Will it happen that way? I don’t know – but I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t.

The Variation That’s Right For You

D&D was hardly ever the only fantasy RPG system out there to choose from. There have been many others, some of which rivalled it in popular acceptance. Tunnels and Trolls, Chivalry and Sorcery, The Dark Eye (reviewed here) , GURPS Fantasy, Fantasy Hero, Rolemaster, The Fantasy Trip, Hackmaster, Runequest, and many more – D&D has outsold (and, in many cases, outlasted) almost all of them.

In addition to those, there are a growing number of ‘retro-clones‘ from which to choose.

Every game system has its strengths and its weaknesses. The trick is always identifying those and determining whether the game that you want to run will be enhanced or hindered by a particular rules set, and which rules option will provide the maximum benefit for the minimum downside.

Often, the game system is chosen first, and the campaign developed around that choice. This inherently weakens the campaign concept much of the time, though sometimes a serendipitous combination occurs.

I advocate designing the campaign first, and choosing the best available game system second. The purpose of this review of the many editions of D&D is to introduce and remind readers of the distinctiveness that makes each different – so that you can make the right choices.