Player Supplements in History of RPGs

Player Supplements in History of RPGs
Hi my name is Barry Osser from North Coast Role Playing in Eureka, California and I’m here today to talk to you about the history of role playing. Our next big jump goes forward to ’96 or ’97; I sadly enough can’t remember the date. TSR had had a number of monetary problems and sold out to another company called Wizard of the Coast that owned a little card game called Magic, you might have heard of it, when they sold out and transferred over, Wizards of the Coast wanted to find a way to pull as much cash out of that product as they could and the way to do that was now the 3rd edition of Dungeons and Dragons. So between ’97 and ’99 the 3rd edition came out and again was a move forward, it changed the game over from being this big tomb of information that you had to read, but really didn’t need to actually being a collection of rules that you could use. I’ve actually played quite a bit of the 3rd edition, I enjoy it, but at the same time that happened, most of the other companies started doing 2nd and 3rd editions of their games and everybody had kind of moved forward. They said we need to have hard backs, we need to have prettier pictures, we need to have more information for the players because right now we’re expecting a game master who’s the one that runs the game, he generally has 6 other people there, we expected the game master to be the one to play and run and buy everything, not the players. So we had a big move to player supplements, things that would allow the players to move forward and that’s kind of where we’re in right now. I would say, I don’t know if this is official, but I would say that we’re kind of in the 3rd age of role playing. The 1st one was getting our feet under us, the 2nd one was getting us forward and this one here is kind of we’re now an aging crowd, we’re a group of people that are generally 20 to 25 years older than when we started, most of us starting around 10 to 12, we’re now in our late 30s and the industry is a strong vibrant industry of imagination and still growing. I’m waiting to see what the next age is going to be.