Despite its current collectable state, I do not think it will persist. The game will continue to change and soon, if not already, it will not be recognizable. That will have an effect on people who might play and take a stab at picking up vintage items.

By the way, anybody watch the sci fi movie Basilisk. I had it DVRed and just watched it last night. Hilarious little D&D scene included.

sleepyCO wrote:Does anyone here, picking up on the comment about whether Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil would spark interest in the original 1e modules (T1 The Village of Hommlet and T1-4 The Temple of Elemental Evil), think that the same thing could happen with these newer hardback modules like Demonweb Pits -- i.e. woudl it also increase the interest in Q1 or some other combination in the G, D, Q1, or GDQ1-7??

Not unless they did a complete rewrite of those modules. I know this might offend some of my esteemed colleagues, but modern D&D players would take one look at those 8 page G series modules and laugh them out the door.

They were awesome back in the day. But now, they appear no more inviting than a simple hack and slash dungeon crawl (which is what they are; albeit excellent ).

There just isn't enought content: player descriptions for each encounter, npcs, background, etc.

The other problem is that the drow were basically new and mysterious. They did not exist until G3. That wow factor cannot be reproduced. Especially when you consider how the drow have been completely ruined as a "monster." While the drow were once feared, they are now loathed - TSR simply wrecked them (that Drizzle character ...).

I get your point, but I don't think it is solid. Take comic books for example. When readership died, so did collectable values.

Also, the book comparison (The Hobbit) is not valid, either. The Hobbit is still printed today...without any (significant) change from the original. So if you read The Hobbit and become a fanatic...bang...go out and buy your collectable copy. That clearly does not apply to D&D, as the current version is practically unrecognizable from the 70s version.

No, I still think as the numbers of players shrink and as the game continues to morph into some piece of crap, collectors will eventually fade away, and with them, the value will drop.


Someone might still pay a crap load for Woody, simply because of its impact on RPGs as a whole, but the tourny mods will not hold that kind of value forever.

Taking an optimistic note... A good classic D&D-based movie 20 years from now -- or Tri-D, or whatever it'll be --  could have an energizing effect on the hobby.

Much as the Lord of the Rings trilogy sent MERP values through the roof. The game was already out-of-print by the time the first movie came out. RPGers ignored the official schlock Lord of the Rings RPG, and went straight to the MERP books.

The RPG collecting hobby will continue to grow over the near future.

The equations in effect at the moment are:

1968 +16 = 1984

16+25 = 41

1984 + 25 = 2009

To explain:

The gamers who encountered AD&D in the mid-early 80's will be looking back over the past decades and seeking to collect their old gaming items.

I have arbitrarily chosen 1984 as the mid-point of the 1st edition / 2nd edition era.

I have postulated a high school sophomore from the era.

I have added 25 years.

I predict that RPG collectors will be highly active for at least three more years...through 2010.

The availability of AD&D products will decline as collectors stock their hordes and time diminishes the survivors.  Sellers seeking to liquidate their hordes will drive up the market over the years 2009 to 2010 as they "get out of the hobby (we all know there is no escape   ) and sell of their collections hoping for a profit.

There will be another burst of collecting activity starting  in 2021.  My equation for that collecting binge is:

2001 + 20 = 2021

Presuming that 3rd edition and OGL players were slightly older in 2001 than gamers in 1984, and postulating that the readily available resources of the internet and whatever takes the place of Ebay will reduce the lag time for collectors by at least five years....the next collecting phase will begin roughly in 2021.

The range of D20, OGL, 3.0, 3.5 materials will be much more broad because of the large number of publishers who glutted the market.  It will be fun to try to collect the more obscure of those publications.

Almost sounds like I know what I'm talking about, doesn't it?  

Mark  

HermitFromPluto wrote:Interesting calculations and hypothesis!    I think there is one major flawed assumption however. Your model assumes that only those people that played the game during those peak times are getting into the hobby and foresee three waves. The OD&D 1968 group, the 1st 2nd ed, 1984 group and the 3rd ed 2001 group. I get the impression however that a lot of younger people involved in roleplaying today are starting to get into the older material. If paper and pencil role playing remains a strong past time, this could see continuous demand on particularly OD&D and 1st ed.

Thoughts?

(I like your elegant model though   )

The pool of collectors for this particular hobby will get smaller and smaller as years go on....most collectibles face this sort of attrition.  With online and computer gaming getting even more and more popular, we'll soon come upon a generation that will never play pen and paper games, except in declining numbers. No matter what publisher of these sorts of games come up with (4th edition? 5th, 6th?) it will continue to be trumped by technological advances.  Plus, as time goes on, more and more OOP or rare items will become available through more and more formats....we'll see the day when a pdf of ST1 is freely traded through internet channels. Hell, nowadays counterfeiters are making bills that are incredibly realistic....as time goes on and technology gets cheaper, some enterprising soul is going to start printing up their own copies of hard to find items...that is, if they haven't started doing it already!!!  
  But while the pool of collectors may decline, I think the prices will stay constant..for awhile.  Mark is probably pretty close to the mark...we'll see a mini decline in the next few years, following with stagnant prices, then a small climb, etc.  I'll give you just one example....Early dragon magazines were going for huge prices when I first got online.....then the numbers declined dramatically when the Dragon cd came out (I purchased most of the ones I needed at this time for about $20 each, incluidng all of the 'teens).  They have slowly begun rising again....but what if, in the future, another edition of the Dragon cd rom is published?  Who knows.  What if a Dungeon cd rom gets published someday? etc etc.  Should be an interesting next few years though.....

Mike B.

I think D&D collections have a very good future in the long-term

'Gaming' - by which I mean mostly PC & Console gaming and in its broadest sense encompassing things like The Sims, Second Life - is set to become the dominant pop culture entertainment this century.

D&D has directly influenced the development of computer gaming from the very start, and the Roleplaying ethos can be seen in such mainstream pursuits as chatroom personas and the adoption of avatars.

In time gaming will be seen as a legitimate and interesting cultural phenomena rather than a sideshow for geeks, and the artefacts at the root of this flowering  - D&D modules for instance - will become more and more collectable.

I've been gaming since I was 7 in 1981 when, in the UK at least, it was still fairly underground. Now the PC RPG Oblivion is advertised on the side of London Buses.

With gaming in the mainstream the (relatively) rare and naive physical artefacts that personify its roots - D&D modules for instance - will become progressively more valuable.

I don't think that electronic copies are a threat to the paper orginals. It'll be about owning an artefact, not reading the text.

I'm talking over a 50 year period or so!

Well that's the way I see it anyhow. What d'ya think?

cheers
Sam

I can draw a comparison to an area I know a bit about: ham radio.

Amateur radio operators are a rapidly aging group of hobbyists with almost no new participants these days. Think about it; when was the last time you heard of someone under 40 who was a ham? In these days of the internet and global-coverage cellphones, talking to someone halfway around the world on a static-filled radio connection isn't nearly as exciting as it was 30 years ago.

As a result, I've noticed that secondhand radio gear from the last 20-30 years is often selling for less than it did 5 or 10 years ago. My theory is that most everyone who's a ham either already has this stuff or doesn't want it, thus, rather slack demand.

On the other hand, older radios from, say, the 1940s-60s still command CRAZY prices (particularly in good condition)...even though they're vastly inferior to modern gear. Why? Nostalgia. They're the radios that today's greyhaired hams first used when they were teenagers.

If you can compare oranges to tangerines, I think something similar might happen in the D&D market as time goes by. The collectible stuff that dates from the peaks of its popularity will maintain value, but the overproduced stuff from the years where interest wasn't so high won't. And the real early stuff will always have value, just because it's scarce.

Something else occured that makes me lean toward the generational thing: Back in the early 80s there was a backlask against D&D by the Christian right.

I don't know how much impact it had in other parts of the country, but here in the south it was fairly profound.

There were extreme cases -- groups burning D&D books -- and other, less drastic episodes that I remember vividly.  I had friends at school who simply quit playing the game, and knew of parents who wouldn't allow their kids to play the game.

These incidents may have taken a number of copies of OD&D and 1E material out of circulation, and had an impact on the availability of material now.

Just a thought ...
Keith