Mah, non conosco il libro di Dossena, ma basta vedere il numero di gdr che sono iniziati ad uscire subito uno dopo l'altro per vedere l'effetto valanga..
Non ho al momento fonti di prima mano (un altra maniera di dire che non ho voglia adesso di andare a tirare fuori libri e riviste dagli scatoloni senza essere sicuro di trovare qualcosa), solo roba postata in rete che ha l'autorevolezza che ha. Ma da un brano postato tratto da "The Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons: From funny dice to cultural icon" by Don Whetsell:
"Just how big is this phenomenon? Some estimates put the number of people (worldwide) who have played D&D, or are now playing, to be around 160 million individuals. That number doesn't count all the folks who's only exposure to D&D is through the many best-selling novels or the successful series of computer RPG's like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale."
[...]
"Now the stage was set. They had a manuscript, they had the legal right to use the ideas developed from Chainmail and they were ready to print. But they couldn't — because they lacked the capital to afford the $2,000 USD printing cost. They also shopped the game to Avalon Hill, but were turned down because there was no clear way to "win". Since they couldn't get the game published professionally, they just made mimeographed copies and handed them out to friends. Gary is on record as saying that it was the fact that he would get calls at all hours of the day and night from players asking about rule clarifications, that motivated him to finally get the full manuscript published.
At the beginning of 1974 they printed 500 copies of the new game, which sold out in about three months. The second run was 1,000 copies, which also sold in three months. From there they had runs of 3,000 and 5,000 copes and by the end of the year they just told the printer to keep going! They sold nearly 10,000 copies of D&D and proved that a role-playing game could be a successful product"
Quindi, il boom inaspettato c'è dall'inizio: stampano 500 copie e in pochi mesi arrivano quasi a 10.000 copie (parliamo della primissima edizione con i tre albetti spillati in una scatola). Partendo da zero.
E siamo nel 1974-75.
Si sa che l'edizione di D&D che ha venduto di più e' l'AD&D prima edizione, che e' uscito nel 1977-78 (in contemporanea con due successive edizioni di D&D). Ha venduto molto, molto di più dell'edizione di D&D "basic" di Mentzer (1982). Noi in Italia abbiamo una prospettiva sfalsata della diffusione relativa dei due giochi perchè da noi la scatola Rossa l'ha pubblicata l'Editrice Giochi come primissimo gdr mai pubblicato in Italia.
E si sa che "Unhearted Arcana" (1985) dovette essere prodotto e realizzato in fretta per salvare già allora la TSR dalla bancarotta...
Ci sono in rete un sacco di siti e blog dedicati alla storia di D&D, imagino che si possa riuscire a risalire alle esatte date di uscita dei singoli manuali o persino ai dati di vendita. Ma non ci serve stabilire qui le cifre esatte: basta vedere di che EPOCA stiamo parlando. Io ho comprato il mio primo Commodore 64, che era una novità recentissima, nel 1984. Quando è uscito l'amiga? Quando sono usciti i primi MMORP?
Anche Edwards ha qualcosa da dire sull'argomento (e ti pareva!
), ecco la citazione da "A hard look at Dungeon and Dragons":
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Hip to geek"The following is strictly a personal reflection from my own experiences of late 1970s and early-1980s role-playing, as a hobby culture. I was 13-14 years old in 1977-79 when I discovered the hobby, and through the age of, roughly, sixteen, I battered my head against (A)D&D in a variety of groups. They fell into the following categories:
* Mainly older people with a sprinkling of teens who tried to do adult things as much as possible. The adults were usually Army guys, with some hip types who ran kids' groups or community-course programs. The latter ran some damn good games, as I recall.
* Fellow teens - these get-togethers were often the least satisfying, on the one hand due to individuals who owned "special" rules that no one else did (brrrr ... what one guy armed with an Arduin Grimoire can do to a Social Contract ...), and on the other because of the perfectly reasonable assessment by many that the textual game itself wasn't particularly fun.
* I also knew of several college groups during this time, up through the early 1980s, mainly playing RuneQuest. I burned with jealousy and desperately wanted to be in college and to play with folks like that.
Significantly, many groups, even the teen ones, included women in their late twenties who were interested in role-playing and not at all concerned about the propriety of hanging out with boys ten years younger. This was the late 1970s, after all. I remember quite a few such individuals.
By 1983, things had changed drastically; in some ways, it mirrored a general subcultural shift across the entire country (see the film Boogie Nights if you didn't live through it). I'd realized that D&D had become a "pube" activity, meaning 10-13-year-olds exclusively, most of whom played once and then walked.
The content resembled video games of the time: lives, levels, and skyrocketing success scores, with no real loss at all. It was utterly divorced from fantasy or mythic literature, and the comics and fantasy authors of the day disavowed the hobby en masse. Successful play became more and more a matter of who could break the game fastest, and the social gamer became more and more consistently the social-outcast gamer. Gaming communities weren't an edifying bunch, actually; they'd been transformed socially and procedurally by the Cargo Cult context into a rabidly-abusive, nitpicky bunch, in which the Social Contract actually included making others upset.
It had lost its cool factor entirely, just in time for me to go to college in the fall of that year. The aforementioned Willing Female Factor had vanished like smoke, and, my priorities firmly in place, I swore off the hobby. The oath didn't last long, of course. I did find a lot of people to role-play with, including women my own age, but always on the basis that we "weren't like those gamers." Conversations about role-playing ceased instantly if anyone nearby evinced interest in D&D. We played Champions and Stormbringer, and looked forward to the buzz of GURPS."
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