Drachenväter: Die Interviews E-Book

Tom Hillenbrand

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 354

Beschreibung

In diesem Interviewband schildern die Schöpfer einflussreicher Pen&Paper-Rollenspiele ihre ganz persönliche Sicht der Dinge. Wie entstand "Das schwarze Auge"? Wie kam "Dungeons & Dragons" nach Europa? Und wie waren die TSR-Büros dekoriert? "Drachenväter: Der Interview-Begleitband" enthält 18 Gespräche über die Geschichte des Rollenspiels. Zu Wort kommen die Macher von "Das schwarze Auge", "Dungeons & Dragons", "Midgard", "Shadowrun", "Plancescape", "Dragonlance", "Fighting Fantasy", "Drakar och Demoner", "Mutant", "Call of Cthulhu", "RuneQuest" oder "Tunnels & Trolls". Die Gespräche waren Teil der Recherche für das Sachbuch "Drachenväter: Die Geschichte des Rollenspiels" – für diesen Begleitband wurden sie in nahezu vollständiger Länge transkribiert (in der jeweiligen Gesprächssprache, Englisch oder Deutsch). Die Interviewpartner: Wolfgang Baur Monte Cook Ryan Dancey Elsa Franke Jürgen Franke Werner Fuchs Richard Garriott Tracy Hickman Steve Jackson Ian Livingstone Rick Loomis Frederik Malmberg Sandy Petersen Steve Perrin Ken St. Andre Dennis Sustare Margaret Weis Jordan Weisman Lou Zocchi

Leseprobe

Impressum

Drachenväter: Der Interview-Begleitband

www.drachenvaeter.org

© 2014 Thomas Hillenbrand und Konrad Lischka

Alle Rechte vorbehalten

Gestaltung: wppt:kommunikation gmbh

Süleyman Kayaalp, Beatrix Göge, wppt.de

Inhalt

~ Wolfgang Baur

~ Monte Cook

~ Ryan Dancey

~ Elsa und Jürgen Franke

~ Werner Fuchs

~ Richard Garriott

~ Tracy Hickman

~ Steve Jackson

~ Ian Livingstone

~ Rick Loomis

~ Frederik Malmberg

~ Sandy Petersen

~ Steve Perrin

~ Ken St. Andre

~ Dennis Sustare

~ Margaret Weis

~ Jordan Weisman

~ Lou Zocchi

Anhang

Über die Autoren

„It's unfortunate that in an interview sometimes things can seem so black and white.“

~ Gisele Bündchen

Vorwort

Bei einem umfangreichen Projekt wie „Drachenväter: Die Geschichte des Rollenspiels“ ist das Schwierigste die Auswahl. Was soll ins Buch, was lässt man weg? Selbst in einen 360-Seiten-Wälzer passt nicht jede Anekdote hinein, die man im Laufe einer mehrjährigen Recherche erzählt bekommen hat. Das lässt sich nicht ändern, gleichzeitig ist es jedoch schade, da viele der Spieledesigner, die wir interviewt haben, nicht allzu oft mit Medienvertretern sprechen und die Transkripte damit einen nicht unerheblichen zeitgeschichtlichen Wert besitzen.

Hinzu kommt, dass viele der Interviewpassagen zwar nicht ins Buch passten, jedoch gerade Hardcore-Nerds interessieren dürften. Wer in „Drachenväter“ beispielsweise gern noch mehr über die Genese der deutschen Rollenspielszene erfahren hätte, dem bieten vielleicht gerade die aufgezeichneten Gespräche mit Werner Fuchs („Das Schwarze Auge“) oder dem Ehepaar Franke („Midgard“) weitere interessante Einsichten.

Bei den im Folgenden wiedergegebenen Interviews handelt es sich um die Originalgespräche. An einigen Stellen haben wir Passagen gekürzt, um sie lesbarer zu machen (und dies wie üblich mit Pünktchen als Auslassungszeichen in eckigen Klammern kenntlich gemacht). Auf das bei Interviews ansonsten gängige Umschreiben und Umformulieren haben wir aus dokumentarischen Gründen verzichtet, sofern Lesbarkeit und Textverständnis nicht leiden. Alle Gespräche sind in der Sprache wiedergegeben, in der sie geführt wurden. Im Anhang finden sich zudem Informationen zur Form (persönlich, telefonisch, schriftlich) sowie zu Zeitpunkt und Interviewpartner.

Nice Dice,

„The hobby as a whole is still very vibrant, but it feels increasingly splintered.“

 ~ Wolfgang Baur

Wolfgang Baur (1968 geboren) ist amerikanischer Spieledesigner mit deutschen Wurzeln. Anfang der Neunzigerjahre nahm er zunächst einen Aushilfsjob bei TSR an, später war er Chefredakteur der Hauszeitschrift „Dragon“. Er arbeitete an D&D-Settings wie „Planescape“, „Al Quadim“ oder „Birthright“ mit. Später veröffentlichte er zahlreiche Abenteuer für das Rollenspiel „Pathfinder“ und gründete den Spieleverlag Kobold Press, der im Auftrag von Wizards of the Coast federführend Abenteuer für die fünfte Edition von „Dungeons & Dragons“ veröffentlicht.

What was your first encounter with role playing games?

A set in a hobby store. I saw the dragon. I saw a wizard and a guy with a sword. And I said: ‚ That's for me.’

So you already were into fantasy literature and that stuff?

Yeah. I had read „King Arthur“ obsessively like in the third and fourth grade. I read it 50 times. I read „The Hobbit.“ I thought „Robin Hood” was great. I think I had read „The Lord of the Rings“ around the same time.

It was a little tough for me, but I was into fantasy literature. Then I saw this box and said, ‚Let's try that.’ Roped my little sister into it and a neighbor kid. […]

They got you hooked. Then, fast forwarding, how did you get to work at TSR?

Sure, I had been writing for the magazines in high school and college, just writing adventures for „Dungeons“. I was young enough that my parents needed to sign my contract because I did not have the legal right to sign away my work for money. But once I turned eighteen, I started signing my own contracts, and then, around twentyone, twenty-two, I was told that they were hiring. TSR was hiring. A friend of mine had heard this somewhere, and it was before the Internet, I'm still not sure exactly how he knew. An AOL message board, probably.

It was before that, I guess.

Yeah, it was pretty early. This was 1990 or '91, somewhere in there, before the Web, I should say, not before the Internet. Anyway, I said: ‚Aw, no, come on, Steve, it'll never happen.’ He said: ,No, no, you've written for them. You should apply.’ And I did. I sent a resume via paper mail. I was invited out to talk to them, and they told me later that they were perfectly willing to hire me on the spot, as long as I knew how to shower and didn't drool on my shoes. They really knew my work because I had been writing for them for years, they were more interviewing me over lunch to see if I had any table manners, if I would be fun to hang out with at the office. I was, because I got hired.

When you got there, what was your impression of the company? What did the place look like? How were the people? Was it very corporate? Was it very freewheeling?

I don't know. I wouldn't say freewheeling exactly company. When I got there in 1991, the company had already been there long enough. To have a ‚gee, it's our way of doing things’ and hierarchy, and budget, and structure. A creative company needs structure, and direction, and hierarchy maybe more than most. Because you're working with art studios, and cartographers, and editors, designers, all freewheeling, creative, inventive people.

If you don't have some way to keep track of all that, it all turns to mush. It all turns hard. It's horrible. There was a designated person, who pretty much was keeping the schedule and had to yell at people who missed their deadlines. There was a budget for, like, ‚You get six weeks to do this painting. That's it. If you're not done, we're printing it the way it is.’

One of the first lessons for me there was, ‚It's creative, but it's business’, and as an editor, you know that. I was hired as an editor first, and I became a designer later. I was told how many words to put in the magazine this month: ‚Edit them.’

‚OK.’

‚This article needs to be fifty words shorter. Kill fifty words.’

‚OK.’

It was that ability to set creative boundaries and schedules. That was part of my first impression. At the same time, all the people there were so full of creative energy, and juice, and crazy stuff. The Halloween parties are still legendary around here.

Was the dress up so weird?

Yeah. Some of the costumes were crazy. Vince Cook, for instance, one year decided to be the Illustrated Man, but he didn't have quite enough tattoos, he covered most of his face and one arm [and went as] the abbreviated Illustrated Man. Things like this. At the graphics and art department, of course, [they] were very good at costuming as well, and it was a small town. Lake Geneva is mostly a tourist town in the summer and empty in the winter. By the time October and Halloween roll around, it's pretty empty and pretty quiet. Living in Lake Geneva, most of the staff got bored in the winter.

Did they still have, when you worked there, the separation of the new building and the old building?

They had the new building when I got there. They had the huge warehouse and the new building, and the magazine's department where [...] [there] was a little annex in the new building. No, it was all lashed together. There were sections here and sections there, and the executives had their own little branch. Land was very cheap in rural Wisconsin, having space for everyone was not a problem. It was a very ramshackle office. I understand it was some needlepoint or hobby embroidery firm that owned the warehouse before TSR did, but you couldn't tell. It was cubicles and no real windows to the outside world.

A dungeon.

There were skylights, but [laughs] yeah. It was a dungeon. It really was. [laughs] It kept people concentrated on their work. People enjoyed what they were doing, it wasn't really a problem. We played games over lunch, right? It wasn't like we felt a need to get away from the office.

Which year did you get there?

I got there in 1991, and I left in 1995 to go work with a new firm called Wizards of the Coast.

I've heard of them.

Yeah, and a year later in 1996 I was fortunate enough to have a year experience in Seattle, when the rest of my friends from TSR were bought up and moved out here.

When you said you played games over lunch, that sounds like the oft repeated myth that Lorraine Williams declared gaming at TSR illegal (which is untrue). That seems to be a myth, right?

I don't know that she ever declared that, at least not when I was there. She was the boss when I was there. We didn't always have time to play test everything, but we ran lunchtime games for our own amusement. We played some of the competing games, or old SPI war games and Avalon Hill games. It was just part of ...

... the job, right?

Yeah, right. You need to know this stuff. If you're going to make a new game, especially you want to know some of what's already out there.

Overall, it sounds like it was a good and a productive place to work.

Oh, absolutely. Being out in the countryside away from too many distractions during the winter meant you could concentrate on your writing. Or your editing and producing great games. I have to say that I did a lot of work there as an editor for the magazines and as a freelance game designer. And my first stand alone books for „Dungeons & Dragons“ as well. A really good, creative period for me, even though the company was financially running into trouble in that time.

What in your opinion was it that did them in?

Oh, boy. They never told the creative staff what was profitable or not. Folks didn't pay enough attention to what was making money and what was losing money. The story I hear after the fact is (...) I worked on all these Planescape boxes, and I was very proud of some of the design I did there. The whole team was very proud of the Planescape releases. After the fact I heard 20 years later:

‚Yeah, every one of those boxes we lost money on.’

That was a very good product. Maybe it was a marketing problem or something, because I remember those boxes.

I know. I don't know if it was they were spending too much on printing, if it was badly managed, if the finance and the bookkeeping was too slow and it wasn't clear when we had a hit or didn't have a hit. It's clear that TSR spread its efforts very thin. The other thing, of course, that killed it indirectly is: a lot of people who were the natural audience for role playing games went to „Magic“ and card games. Which was great for the hobby stores and fantasy gaming generally and in just bringing people into the world of somewhat geeky games, but it wasn't particularly good for role playing.

It sucked the gamers' budget dry. I remember.

Yeah. I know. I spent my money on cards. I loved those games, too. That had to be a contributing factor.

The two things I read about the demise of TSR (...) and I'm still not sure, because there's lots of stuff on the Web, but there's no way to fact check most of it. One thing I read was from the Wizards of the Coast manager, who was involved in checking out whether this would be a good asset to buy. He said in his ...

Ryan Dancey?

Yeah, Ryan Dancey. Right.

He's still around here. I can put you in touch with him.

He wrote a longish post about it and said the main thing that puzzled him, and it goes a little with what you said, is that he didn't find a lot of customer feedback data that indicated which products people loved and which they didn't.

Right. The idea was if you're a creative at TSR, you go to do good work. Don't worry your pretty little head about how we're selling it or whether it's selling or any of that. Part of it is, the fan base for a role playing game is very committed and deeply invested in the property and the setting. Vanishing worlds like this can be really, really engaging. If anyone ever does say to cancel a particular setting, instead of saying: ‚Well, that's all right. I'll stop buying for a while, but I can keep playing in this world because I still have all the books’, somehow their usual reaction is: ‚Oh, my God. You're killing my baby.’

Yeah, right.

The fan outcry makes it very hard for a publisher to say ‚Yeah, we have six worlds, and we only need two.’ They never did it. They pretty much kept everything going with the exception of some titles like (...) Dark Sun, where they sit on top: ‚Yeah, we're going to do this for one year or maybe two years if it's going really well. Let's do a limited run, and we don't promise long term support.’

I remember how angry I was when Dark Sun went away. [laughs]

They set it up day one. They said: ‚Well, it didn't go forever.’ [laughs] People were still angry, and I get that. It makes it very hard to do business because the first few products of a world are always the ones that sell the most. Then by the time you do book 20 or book 30, not everybody is interested.

I had the same impression. I have a dealers' catalog from TSR from 1995 or something, or '94. The number of product lines seems to be stunning. [laughs]

Yes, and the quality in some of those product lines was terrible. It's like: ‚Well, we need to do something to support, I don't know, Greyhawk.’ [Greyhawk] often caught the short end of the stick, this for reasons that are obscure to me, but it's like: ‚Well, let's not put our best people on that. It's Greyhawk. It's all the old guard. Let's do something for them, but let's not do very much.’

[laughs] If you don't want to do a good job but you've really got to do something, then don't be too surprised if it's a big pile of junk.

Yes. Very true. One other thing that strikes me when I look at the old dealers' catalogs is [...] how many paperback novels per year TSR turned out [in the mid 'nineties].

Some of the novels did extremely well. There was a point where „Dragonlance” was keeping the company afloat and going really strong. The books were doing as well or better than the game side of things. It was an experiment with „Dragonlance”, but it really worked. Even the early „Forgotten Realms” books sold very, very well and continue to sell well today. Those books are another way to engage with the world. Some people love them and read all of them. Because they are setting specific and you get two or three authors, who are all pretty good at doing it for one setting. As a fan, hey, that means I get two or three times as many books as I'll get out of George Martin or somebody.

There's always a new Forgotten Realms [laughs] book coming, and that was part of the secret of their success, like „Hardy Boys” or something. There's always another one coming.

I heard that in the end they had a bad book market year, and Random House gave them back a couple of truckloads of books. Is that correct?

Yeah, this is part of the strangeness of the book market in the United States, is the way it takes returns.

Not just in the United States. [laughs]

All right, but not every country does this. [laughs] Yeah, it's very strange. Those books sitting on shelves got returned, and suddenly the money they thought they were getting they weren't getting. The book department got a lot smaller very quickly.

This is one of these other hard to check myths that are going around: The TSR management and Random House had some fallout, and then Random House wasn't willing to defer the payments of the returned books?

I don't know the details. Oddly enough, the person I used to work for, the man who knew the answer to that, Brian Thompson, was the publisher of the magazines and also invested in the book site and ran those things, but he died a couple of years ago. Someone who would really know is probably Jeff Grubb. I don't know if he'll tell you, but I just don't know enough about how management worked with Random House. It sounds credible but I can't confirm it.

What puzzled me is that, normally, if you have an ongoing business relationship over the years, and this is the company that has given you so many New York Times Best Sellers, you would at least think twice before burying them under a mountain of books.

Yes. There are so many things that can go wrong. I really don't know. TSR made a number of really stupid business decisions, in addition to making a number of really brilliant moves, like any company. I was really down in the trenches making sure that books and magazines met their ship dates, and had very little or nothing to do with management. Some people who were more senior than me at the time, people like Jeff Grubb, would have more of a sense of that. I know a few other, some of the TSR authors, like Robert King or Thomas Reid. I don't know if you want to talk to Bob Salvatore, you probably do. I don't know if he'll tell you, but he could give you the author perspective of some of that.

From the trenches, as you said, what was your view, or your colleagues' view, and your opinion of the management of TSR at that time? Of course, one of the things I'm getting at is that Mrs. Williams appears to have been a very controversial figure.

Yes. She was certainly polarizing for people who had been there longer. She's the person who signed by paycheck and kept the company moving forward. Essentially, I never met the former owners, the Blumes. The Blume brothers and Gary Gygax are not people I ever saw while I was employed there, I can't compare them. I heard some rumors about how badly money had been mismanaged under the old management and how well Lorraine Williams was doing. I also heard complaints that executives [were] meddling in the creative process, cover design ... [and it] was costing the company money.

Those are more like minor misdemeanors, right? Yes. She said: ‚Well, things happen.’ I never got the sense that she was deeply invested in the gaming hobby ...

[laughter]

… but I never got the sense that she didn't care about the company and its success or about the employees. Some people went through various personal problems or hard times. Somebody quit once to go to Alaska. When he came back, he had decided he wasn’t going to make a hundred thousand dollars as a crab fisherman. He came back two weeks later and he said: ‚Can I have my job back?’

[laughter]

She said: ‚Yes.’ I know there are people who dislike her intensely because they worked for Gary Gygax and thought that was better, and maybe she forced them out. I wasn't there for that period. It seemed like a reasonable executive management of the company, the exception of we did way more Buck Rogers products than would have been called for (...).

From what I've heard, apparently Gary Gygax hired her because he thought that she was a very level headed smart businesswoman.

Most of the times she was, but there's weird things about the publishing industry that can bite you. I don't know if she had some bad advice or made a bad decision on book returns or it was just the industry (...) got caught up in trading card games. There was no manager in the world who was going to be able to turn back time and undo „Magic“, somehow. I don't think she did a bad job.

Apart from this, the management personnel involved in the books and the cards (...) how much, do you think, did other role playing companies like FASA or White Wolf impact TSR's business when stuff like „Shadowrun“, like „Vampire“ came out?

Sure. Those are all good for the role playing business, mostly because they were addressing audiences that weren't being well-served by TSR. I was doing core fantasy and a few things around the edges, but really it was the core of Sword and Sorcery (…) „Shadowrun“ said: ‚Let's do cyberpunk with magic kernels.’ It was very much an urban modern game. White Wolf and „Vampire“ were huge in this nineties period and brought a lot of women into role playing, as much as anything else. Any fan of Anne Rice would at least give „Vampire“ a look. They were bringing new players in, which I thought was wonderful.

Me and some of the other TSR stuff played a „Werewolf“ Campaign, the „Vampire“ game, „Changeling“. I didn't play „Shadowrun“ but I know that it was around. I don't know that it directly hurt TSR. I think a lot of people still said: ‚„Dungeon & Dragons” is the core. It's the game I learned first, it's easy.’ They still had a strong audience pool. It may be the argument that role playing was more than „Lord of the Rings“ based fantasy. It could do other genres. […] Wouldn't it be nice to change it up a little? It was good for the hobby and not necessarily bad for TSR.

After TSR’s end (...) I mean after D&D got sold to Wizards of the Coast, there was this explosion of products because of the open gaming license. In hindsight, what do you think of it? A lot of people say now, in hindsight of course, that there were too many products and too many bad products. That impacted on the overall quality.

The gold rush was inevitable. Everyone thought: ‚My stuff is going to be the best. I have an opportunity to tap into this huge market of „Dungeons & Dragons” players. Of course I'm going for it.’ In hindsight, I don't think those people were necessarily just trying to cash in. Some of them sincerely thought: ‚I can do better than TSR's doing’ or ‚I have something new to bring to the table.’ A lot of them were perhaps overly optimistic about their abilities. There was a lot of junk. In every gold rush there's a bunch of stuff that people try, and it's an experiment, and it does or doesn't work.

It was foolish for people to think that everything under the open gaming license was going to be a big hit and make gamers happy. There was a glut and, then, there was a crush. The companies that had done good work generally survived the crush and continued to do interesting work for the open game license.

There were a lot of awesome third party products. I really liked the Necromancer Games, the Scarred Lands from White Wolf, a lot of great stuff. It tended to be from companies [...] already into what they were doing, like Scarred Lands. White Wolf already knew how to do role playing, and their bread and butter was Vampire. Scratch a Vampire player: Half the time, underneath [you'll] find a D&D player.

[laughter]

Do you know whose idea it was to do the OGL model? That was quite a unique idea.

It was. I don't know who can claim the credit for. I'm pretty sure Ryan Dancey will take credit for it if you ask him. I don't know if it was originally his idea, or if Lisa Stevens had something to do with it, or if Peter Adkison was involved. I'm sorry. That's a story I don't really know.

Going forward even further to the fourth edition. There seems to have been this split or maybe even a schism, is that what you call it?

If it were religion (...) it is a religion, so it is a schism [laughs] between the people who said: ‚3.5 rules’, and the people, who like the fourth edition.

That seems to have gone right through the gaming community. How did that happen?

If you have an open license for many long years and then you say, „No more open license“, part of what happens is that old publishers say: ‚I’m going to stick with this open license over here if you're going to close off that avenue.’

It was the market leader, „Dungeons & Dragons“ fourth edition. Here's the new thing, people have loyalty to that name, and they've played it. They know what they're doing. The other side is you have all these third party companies, some which have grown quite large. They're supporting 3.5. Part of it was publishers, and I think that reflected what was going on at the gamer level. It's different tastes, right? Gamers always love the new thing, no matter what the new thing is. They're the ones who will go off and say, ‚Let's play „Shadowrun” this week. Let's play „Vampire” this week. Let's play something new.’

Other gamer's, once they've mastered a system, never budge. There are people who will still play First Edition D&D. There are still people who are playing any edition, you carry the name. That's what they learned when they were first introduced to it, or that's what they're most comfortable with, and they stick with it. That conservative ‚„I know my rules, and I'm happy with them“’approach to gaming is fine. It's just those people are no longer customers for TSR or for Wizards, or most people. They're playing their game and enjoying it.

When you put that on one end of the spectrum, and the people who love the new thing and fiddling systems, and changing the rules on the other hand, then you have that a fourth Edition versus 3.5 split in a nutshell [...].

Wasn't there any way to get the genie into the bottle again?

I don't think so.

Apparently, no. Otherwise, Paizo and other companies wouldn't have been able to [continue with 3.5] .

Yeah. A lot of the people at Paizo had already gotten a big chunk of the fan base paying attention to them, because they were running the magazines. They were writing the public face of „Dungeons & Dragons“. They had a very strong position to say: ‚We're going to continue with the gaming license.’ I don't know if they had much of a choice, because they weren't offered a license for fourth edition that was anywhere near that. The magazine licenses had been taken back. They had run out. What were they going to do? They supported the license that they had.

Yeah, it's a weird bit of history. If Paizo hadn't been given the magazines in the first place, I'd argue that Pathfinder would be a much smaller system. They'd have a much smaller fan base, but because they were in a central seat and Wizards of the Coast didn't seem to realize that killing the print magazines was (...) Really, Wizards of the Coast never seemed to realize when there was going to be a huge fan backlash. It seemed obvious to me. I thought to myself: ‚I worked for the magazine, maybe I'm more invested in that’ but, no. A lot of people said: ‚I’m going to go with Paizo, because they're doing good work in a style that's familiar to me.’ Other people said: ‚I’m going to go with fourth edition, because it's new and I trust Wizards to do something interesting with it.’ They're both good decisions, but it fractured the already small market.

What do you think the future of RPG's looks like, apart from computers? I still hate to call it ‚pen&paper,’ but that's what it's called now, right?

Yeah. It's more like tablet and character generator, but I know what you mean. I think we're going to see increasing fragmentation. We're going to see Paizo continue to have a big chunk of the more conservative players. We're going to see Wizards launch a fifth edition with perhaps a lot less momentum behind it than third or fourth edition. We might just see continuing fragmentation, lots more indie gaming. Lots more open licensing, lots more, ‚I’m just doing my RPG as a Kickstarter’ […]

The hobby as a whole is still very vibrant, but it feels increasingly splintered. It's harder and harder to find the core and the center of ‚Where is tabletop game today?’

As you say: very vibrant. And when I look at your Kickstarter, or when I look at what Monte Cook did, an amazing number of people are willing to put their money down for this. Are they mainly older players, or are there younger players growing or following […] ?

I don't ask my customers how old they are. On Kickstarter, I don't know if they would appreciate the question maybe. I think there is a definite older generation that is out there. I'm surprised. Players in their teens and 20's, there's plenty of them. A lot of those people come from computer games to table-top. If they grow bored with their MMO, or they hear that WOW is built on a lot of stuff that comes out of a game called „Dungeons & Dragons“, then sometimes they get curious and they come back to the roots.

They said: ‚Well, what is this Dungeons? Oh, look! There's people playing it. Hey! These folks are great! Gee! I want to play that!’ It tends to be more in that direction, where people from the computer world show up as new tabletop players. That's great. It used to be that all of the people who would maybe now be computer-players would have been tabletop players at one time. I don't know. There's still a really large crowd. The numbers at Gen Con go up, and the numbers at PaizoCon go up every year.

Oh, really?

Yeah. It's surprising, given all the doom and gloom that people have about tabletop games.

„When third edition D&D came along, it revitalized the industry and brought new gamers in large numbers.“

~ Monte Cook

Der US-Amerikaner Monte Cook (1968 geboren) gilt als einer der umtriebigsten Rollenspieldesigner. Er arbeitete bei ICE und TSR. Für Wizards of the Coast entwarf er gemeinsam mit Skip Williams und Jonathan Tweet die dritte Auflage von „Dungeons & Dragons“. 2012 finanzierte Cook sein Science-Fantasyrollenspiel „Numenera“ per Crowdfunding und bekam mehr als eine halbe Million Dollar zusammen.

Which books (or other media) and authors have influenced your conception of fantasy and sci-fi and/or got you interested in the genre in the first place?

Like many people my age, I probably was initially drawn in by „Star Wars“. My conception of fantasy developed shortly thereafter when I read Tolkien, although I would say Steven R. Donaldson's „Chronicles of Thomas Covenant“ and Michael Moorcock's „Elric“ series had as much or more influence on me. I guess „Lord of the Rings“ is the baseline that just about everyone has, and Donaldson and Moorcock shaped me specifically.

What was the fantasy and sci-fi scene like in the pre-RPG days?

I was too young to know. I started playing D&D when I was 10 years old in 1978. Before that, I watched „Star Wars“ and „Star Trek“ and read old issues of „Galaxy“ magazine, but even then D&D was around – I just hadn't heard about it yet.

Can you describe, from your point of view, how the RPG business changed and evolved from the mid seventies onward?

In the seventies, it was something that spread from the miniatures wargaming societies into colleges, and then into high schools. It grew faster and larger than the creators could ever imagine, and what had been a hobby business grew into a big business. D&D was the #1 Christmas gift in 1980. It was huge. Throughout the early eighties, the flow of products was slow enough that everyone had all the same stuff. Everyone had „Keep on the Borderlands“. Everyone had „Tomb of Horrors“. By the end of the decade, this was no longer true. Other games had come on the scene and grown their own audience. „Traveler“, „Champions“, GURPS, „Call of Cthulhu“, and a hundred others had appeared. Even among D&D players, the audience splintered into those buying Greyhawk, those interested in Forgotten Realms, and so on.

In the nineties, this trend continued to the point that companies had to churn out products to keep afloat. If in the eighties a small RPG company could sell 10,000 copies of a product, in the nineties they sold 2500 copies of four products. Same sales, but more cost. Fewer customers. RPGs were still popular, but the audience was fragmented into hundreds of tiny pieces. On top of that, the audience that had started in the eighties began to age. They got married, had kids. They didn't have any time to game.

In 2000, with the launch of third edition D&D, gamers came back. Nostalgia was a big part of this. Older gamers taught their kids how to play. Plus, now D&D (and nerdiness in general) was cool. This was the latest big explosion of sales in the RPG industry, as the d20 license enabled other publishers to jump on this bandwagon and also help support the new edition of the game.

Today, we see the audience fracturing once again. The launch of fourth edition D&D seems to have split the D&D audience right in half, with one side going with the new (very different) rules, and the rest staying with third edition or going back to even earlier versions. Other game companies support their own games with their own audiences. With no „Dragon“ magazine, there is no centralized hub of gaming culture. The various splinter groups move farther and farther away from each other.

What kind of people got into RPGs and fantasy in the seventies and eighties?

Although it started as an adult (male) hobby, the growth area throughout that time was mostly kids 16 to 20 years old. Many were fans of science fiction and fantasy (or comics), but more and more games like D&D introduced kids to fantasy, rather than the other way around. In the seventies and eighties, we saw D&D shaped by fiction (Tolkien, Moorcock, Leiber, Vance, etc.) In the nineties and beyond, we saw D&D shape fantasy fiction.

Do you think there is any connection between the sixties student movement and the rise of fantasy games?

Only in that D&D took off in college and propagated by networks of college students, and in the sixties we saw a large increase in university attendance and organizations.

Please name a few milestones (events, game products, eras) from the thirty-five years of RPG history that you consider vital to the development of the industry.

Well, D&D started it all, obviously. In the late seventies and early eighties, the explosion of other RPGs, like „Traveler“ and „Champions“, was a big development. In the late eighties, with the advent of second edition D&D, „Dragonland“, and the Forgotten Realms, the influence of things like story and presentation became important. Before then, it was all about stats, facts, and information. But in the late eighties, we started to see beautiful products with interesting layouts, maps, and artwork. Flavor text and background became something no longer ignored, glossed over, or left for the GM, but instead fueled products. This led to a whole new revolution in RPGs, heralded by „Vampire“. „Vampire“ changed two things: it started a trend of game supplementary products meant to be read rather than played, and it brought a larger percentage of girls and women into the hobby.

When third edition D&D came along, it was significant in that it revitalized the industry and brought gamers back into gaming as well as bringing new gamers in large numbers. While it didn't ignore story, it renewed the importance of well-designed rules. It also brought about the d20 license, which shaped the next 8+ years of products produced by the entire industry.

The US have alway been the number one RPG nation in terms of publishers, gamers, designers. But what other countries have made important contributions to the hobby?

I'm probably ignorant of a lot of contributions. Great Britain, of course, has always been important to the hobby, with Games Workshop, TSR UK, and others. A number of game designers and artists as well as a few small companies are in Canada. France and Germany have both created RPGs that have crossed borders and gained international attention. Italy and Brazil both have large, flourishing communities of gamers. The Scandinavian countries have a well known community of free-form gamers and LARPers. For what it's worth, I have made friends from these places plus Denmark, Japan, Israel, South Africa, and more, all through gaming.

Some RPG designers, like Sandy Petersen, later worked on computer games. How big is the influence of classic RPGs on modern computer games? Are there a lot of RPG people connected with the computer business?

The influence is so big, I wouldn't know where to begin. Many, many computer game designers – particularly in the eighties and nineties – got their professional start in pen&paper games, and the rest have very likely played pen&paper games. It’s hard to imagine „World of Warcraft“ without D&D, „Fallout“ without „Gamma World“, and so on. Plus, there have been many computer versions of traditional RPGs, and vice versa.

How did dungeons become such a pervasive feature of fantasy RPGs?

Dungeons are simply a really easy way to create an interesting environment in which to set a game. It's a ‚wilderness’ to be explored, but it's controlled (if you stand at a point where the passage goes left or right, you can only go left or right), so the GM can manage the number of options the players have. It's easy to run, and easy to play in. On the flip side, while it has strict controls over where you can go, and how you can get there, it has no controls over what you'll find there. You can have ANYTHING in a dungeon, from a weird room where everything is upside down to a buried starship to a prison filled with faeries. In other locales, the spectre of ‚realism’ rears its head often, but rarely so in a dungeon. Controlled gameplay, no limits on your imagination.

What was the impact of the internet on P&P RPGs (positive/negative)?

The internet has allowed gamers to get in touch with each other and trade ideas, opinions, and home-grown game material in a way that was impossible before. Someone might have sat alone with his D&D books back in 1979, with no idea how to find other gamers. 30 years later, he can find other gamers online, talk to people [...] about the game, or he could play the game online, if he wanted. It's also allowed gamers to interact with designers in a much more direct way, and in so doing influence the game products, as well as rules updates and errata, that come out.

D&D was there first, but one might argue that other games like RQ were at least as good. Why did D&D become so huge in the eighties, with TSR dwarfing any other company in the business?

For years, no other company even tried to be the one that brought in new customers. Everyone assumed that their game would appeal to people already playing D&D. So, even if you liked „RuneQuest“ better than D&D (as you said), the publisher's strategy was for you to ‚graduate’ from D&D to RQ, rather than starting with RQ instead. Not until „Vampire“ came along did a significant number of people start with a game other than D&D.

With 3E came the idea to create an open source community of third party publishers. Whose idea was this and what was the rationale behind it?

It was the business manager of D&D at the time, Ryan Dancey, who pioneered that concept, modeled on open source computer software development. The idea was that more support for D&D ultimately led to more D&D sales. Even if you bought a third party supplement, you still needed the D&D core books. Plus, if a third party supplement kept you playing the game a bit longer, and brought you into the game shop a few more times, you were that much more likely to buy another D&D product.

Do you know of any other RPG publishers who had a strategy similiar to OGL?

I think Mongoose may have tried it with the new „RuneQuest“. We did something similar at Malhavoc Press with a free limited license for anyone wanting to put out a book supporting Arcana Unearthed or Arcana Evolved.

Why did WotC change their strategy with 4E?

I have no idea. I suppose they believed that the Open Game License created unwanted competition. But I haven't worked there for more than eight years now, so I am not privy to their rationale or motives.

There appears to be a schism between 3E and 4E gamers: One piece of evidence is Paizo's „Pathfinder“. And then there's an old school revival, with people recreating AD&D first (edition). How did this happen?

It seems to me that it was a case of WotC making radical changes to the game and assuming that the audience would follow them, even when most were still very happy with the core of the game as it was. This led to many sticking with 3E (or going to something that is only slightly different, like „Pathfinder“), rejecting both and going to something like first edition, or leaving D&D altogether.

What was ICE like? Who founded it and who were the main people behind it?