The Gaming Den

The biggest debacle,

what is it?

I'm not so knowledgable about "20th (21st?) century RPG history", but I'll start the bidding at either all of D&D4 or the whole sordid affair surrounding CGL and Coleman's finances.

Probably D&D4e to be honest. In terms of sheer scale it's the largest number of hemorrhaged fans in RPG history. Other game systems don't have that many fans to lose in the first place.

FASA sold their digital properties separately from their table top licenses and to this day Battletech and Shadowrun haven't been able to integrate the books and digital services. Oops.

TSR bought the rights to Buck Rogers for way more than it was worth on the grounds that the head of the company was like the grand daughter or something of the Buck Rogers creator and she thought it was a much bigger deal than it had been for a decade or more. Between that and setting budgets for books based on criteria other than how much money they were expected to take in (such that they were literally producing some kinds of book for a loss and skimping on the budget for books that could be big sellers), the biggest name in the business straight up went bankrupt in 1997.

Embezzlement is a constant problem in medium sized game companies. Palladium Books had about a million dollars embezzled in 2006, Catalyst Game Labs had about a million dollars embezzled in 2009.

White Wolf destroyed their entire popular world line and replaced it with a reboot world no one gives a fuck about. They sell about half a million less books per year than before they did that.

RaHoWa. Just RaHoWa. It exists. That is terrible.

Guardians of Order leased the license to more properties than they could actually write material for, causing them to be unable to pay their employees after paying for all their licenses, which made them even less able to put out material. They had the license to fucking Game of Thrones and couldn't make a game because they couldn't afford writers and artists.

-Username17

The fact that nWoD failed to even tread water long enough to eventually piggy back onto the teen paranormal romance boom hits me as the most pathetic if not the biggest failure.

What the hell is RaHoWa?

Maxus wrote:What the hell is RaHoWa?

You Asked. [pdf, NSFW, Not Acceptable Anywhere]

-Username17

Racial Holy War.

The title is not a joke.

I see.

I'm glad I'm innoculated by reading shit like this on Rationalwiki, for kicks.

Holy shit. I could not even make it to page 2, and I managed to get halfway through the character generation rules in FATAL before turning away. Fuck.

Yeah, 4E without a doubt, but White Wolf is right behind them in the way they fucked up their franchise. Fucking Justin Achilli.

Franks basically got it. As far as I can see it's
1: 4E. A disaster so titanic it has caused the entire TTRPG industry to collapse around it. There is really no comparison. It would be like if someone made a car so ugly, terrible, unsafe and environmentally damaging that people largely abandoned the car industry as a whole and started riding boats everywhere.
2: nWod. A complete failing to update ones product. It managed to make its product have worse fluff and crunch AND to drastically misunderstand what people seemed to be playing Vampire for in the first place. So new WoD gets a strong F- sure but 4E is like a paper so offensively bad it got you kicked out of school and sent to juvey.
3: That Buck Rogers story is pretty famous, that's a good number three. If I can't pick 4E's treatment of the greyhawk setting which really deserves an entry all its own I would go with Buck Rogers.
Honorable Mention: "Dawizard"

I'd probably argue the d20 boom-and-bust was a bigger debacle than 4e - as terrible as 4e was, I'm not aware of 4e leading directly to the closing of brick-and-mortar stores.

Special mentions have to include Wizard's Attic, the Chaosium online retailer that vanished into limbo with everyone's money - or fuck, the MYTHOS CCG which caused Chaosium to bust.

What do you mean by "the d20 boom-and-bust?"

When WotC released the Open Gaming License, the market was flooded with d20 products from publishers big and small - that was the boom. The bubble broke because nobody bought those vast mounds of hastily-churned-out still-slightly-warm piles of monkey poo; all the little publishers ceased to exist, and game shops were left with piles of d20 RPG crap that they couldn't move and several of those went bust too. It was like CCGs and the Death of Superman speculation era all over again.

Winnah wrote:Holy shit. I could not even make it to page 2, and I managed to get halfway through the character generation rules in FATAL before turning away. Fuck.

It's amazing in its stupidity. All the white women were lured away by ethnics in the first place (this is the "backstory" to the game). In other words, those ethnic foreigners have something to offer that makes them a better choice than White Guy (who presumably has some innate advantages in living nearby and sharing a cultural history of some kind).

Then you get to gameplay and find out that although foreigners are all stereotyped (all Jews are rich, etc), they have special abilities at all. The White Guys don't! I could forgive someone for looking between the lines and assuming it's actually a parody, a satirical attempt at showing how stupid racists are. The fact that it's not, and the designers just missed all this and committed the crime of bad game design...

Anyway, just going by the size of the damage done, it would have to be some part of the D&D4E thing. Whether it's "releasing 4E itself" or "ending the days of the OGL/SRD" or "Oops I just turned our loyal material-creators into our rival!"

The federal raid on Steve Jackson Games should rate highly as a debacle. It spawned the creation of the EFF!

Ancient History wrote:When WotC released the Open Gaming License, the market was flooded with d20 products from publishers big and small - that was the boom. The bubble broke because nobody bought those vast mounds of hastily-churned-out still-slightly-warm piles of monkey poo; all the little publishers ceased to exist, and game shops were left with piles of d20 RPG crap that they couldn't move and several of those went bust too. It was like CCGs and the Death of Superman speculation era all over again.

If you pool all those 3rd party products together, then yes, if you look at each single product individually, then no.

Honorable Mention for GURPS not letting Fallout use the GURPS Rule-Set, because it was too much sex and violence for them to want to be brought into association with it . .

OgreBattle wrote:The biggest debacle,

what is it?

This is not a particularly interesting question, since D&D has usually dwarfed its competitors in terms of scale and thus the award would have to go with TSR's implosion after 2E or the problems with splitting D&D into Pathfinder vs. 4E.

My sentimental favourite flop is the Fuzion version of Champions that quietly died, never to be heard of again.

Without doubt the biggest debacle is purchase of SPI by TSR (and subsequent collapse of SPI).

No mentions of essentials?

Took the remnants of the 4efan base and split them in thirds. The only essentials minority, the ignore essentials majority, and the "it's totally comparable just like pathfinder" middle ground.

To me that was the final nail in the dnd coffin that just shut down anything but pathfinder to almost every rpg player I have met. They took a shitty product with a smallish fan base and cut it in thirds. Just think about that. At least prior to 4ee they had some sort of market share and a sizable fan base just due to the name alone. Now people have no idea what to buy, even if they wanted to.

I think that White Wolf completely destroying their Franchise is pretty much right up there.

Though I get the feeling that Shadowrun 5E and D&D5E might be new contenders for the crown.

Certainly. Really, the key differentiating factors between 4e and everyone else boils down to good ol' hubris. White Wolf failed on the biggest stage available to them, and they get extra points for basically ceasing to exist as a going concern. Meanwhile, D&D's downward slide is still ongoing, but they started rolling downhill from a higher peak and their marketing was a lot more ill-conceived.

Frank's first post is an excellent recap.

Overall I have to agree with the consensus: D&D 4E's failure to engage with fans, and the loss of the RPG crown to Paizo/Pathfinder, is probably the biggest debacle in gaming history.

When Gary took Arduin's alignment system and added it to Boot Hill to make 1st edition.

Bringing Lorraine Williams into TSR.

Vampire the Masquerade by Mind's Eye Theater LARP.

lock failure causing detonations in the launch tube.

Dragon Magazine Archive not having the proper rights, and MANY other copyright situations and lawsuits.

that is how i would order them from top to bottom.