> I am curious whether you think that the other genres TSR offered early on
> (but were based on D&D system derivatives) failed primarily because of the
> system deviations or because of the quality of the settings and offerings.
They weren't derivatives. TSR followed their own path to madness and
released a number of games with different mechanics.
One thing that has always stuck in my memory is Johnathan Tweet telling me
about how the first RPG product he bought for himself was Gama World, and
how pissed of he was when he got it home and discovered that it didn't use
the D&D rules.
Gama World, Gangbusters, Boot Hill, Top Secret - they all used different
rules. Silly. TSR should have spent the time internally to abstract D&D
down to its core components, strip out the things that made it a "fantasy"
game, and turn it into a generic structure that they built different genred
products on.
They tried it a little bit with Star Frontiers(*), did one version of Buck
Rodgers with a D&D engine, but both were so poorly conceived that they
couldn't establish anything in the way of a market presence. Then they
walked down the systems path and diverged >AGAIN< with Alternity. TSR was
stuck in a mental loop it just couldn't break out of.
Ryan
(*) Say what you will about Star Frontiers, but compared to the "state of
the art" in SF games at the time, it was a very poor product. It was
written for too young an age bracket, contained a lot of rampant silliness,
and never managed to deliver the original value premise its advertising
held. If anything, Alternity is what Star Frontiers should have been,
except that Alternity should have been a d20 game. The only problem, for
Alternity, is that d20 evolved from a lot of the work that went into
Alternity, so it ended up being a chicken and egg conundrum.
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