Board games and war games are a much, much, much larger market than pen & paper. Traditional games as a market is surprisingly big and growing, but the money is in expandable games, collectibles, and miniature based games. Games like D&D are in a super small market, but D&D itself was still well over half the market at its smallest (unless you really want to say Pathfinder isn’t functionally D&D). It’s dominated for decades for no tangible reason.
If you look at other long running series like Traveler or RuneQuest, Frank Chadwick or Steve Perrin are distinctly less interesting names. I wonder if “Gygax” fed into the Satanic Panic surrounding the game.
Maybe but i think that there would have been a panic surrounding the game regardless. It seems to me that the natural evolution of D&D would have been more or less the same. And to those outside looking in would always be confused and weirded out over a younger generation playing these fantasy settings.
Similarly there’s been generational “panics” over the centuries. Easier access to books because of the press caused a panic, newspapers, coffee (yes really), comics, d&d, videogames, etc.
I distinctly recall most MSM articles at the time D&D became a “phenomenon” commenting on his unusual name, whether or not the Satanic scare was being discussed.
Hard to say but both franchises started almost exactly the same time and have endured changing markets and publishers both. All the more surprising since both franchises are as much about the rules as gameplay.
T&T was a whole lotta fun, but battle outcomes were pretty much a foregone conclusion due to the game mechanics. Loved all those solo adventures, though.
A few weeks ago the DM took pity on me, because i’m the squishiest out of the party and i’m notorious for failing every single important roll to help the party. I bravely decided to come along two other people into a large and dangerous enemy gnoll encampment, i had 3 casts of invisibility and we all went in. I got pissed on a gnoll relieving himself from a cliff, i crushed a mole by accident and almost got mauled by a suspicious gnoll, almost caught a sword to the face, and got peed on a second time on the foot.
I also had less than 5 minutes of invisibility when the DM told me if i could get to any edge of the map he’d let me retreat to our camp. I proceeded to almost get found again for the 10th time, critted a voice throw to a innocent prisoner and got him horribly murdered in cold blood (who i was trying to save), and when i left the area i failed my roll and got lost in the forest for 4 hours.
My character is a lizardfolk who is constantly walking around enveloped by a bush, kept alive by his druidcraft cantrip, because he thinks it makes him more stealthy. I also seem to be pocketing a lot of dead birds and small animals, so far it’s come in pretty handy to get out of my shitty bad rolls through some quick thinking. He’s also proficient at playing drums so my character is constantly playing the bongos.
He’s a sorcerer/warlock, you’d never know by the way i play him.
I used to freelance for Fantasy Games Unlimited. Scot Bizar’s parents owned a game store in Stony Brook, and on Saturday nights he’d be substitute proprietor and host board games, RPG sessions, and miniatures games.
Around, ahhhhh, I’ll say early 80s, Scot had Gygax out. He had just moved back from California after working on the D&D cartoon, and was “out” at TSR. (That could help date this.) I was pretty-un-impressed by the guy due to his braggyness. Mentioned having wild parties, with pot mentioned, at his LA place. Scot did introduce me as a possible contributor to new ventures. This might have been around the time Gygax introduced his strange cyborg-soldier RPG game, which didn’t sound like my thing.
It was probably this that got me the convention-driver gig. The one fun bit I recall from that was driving Gygax & some convention officers back to the hotel, in a big towncar, and half-rolling, half-floating down this scary-flooding winding roadway. Gygax got a big kick out of that.
