State of the Hobby
Before the days of the Internet (1993
and earlier), collecting D&D material was an unknown hobby. Those
few who did it were either the Early Smart (those who carefully stashed
away items when they were published), or the Tragically Late (those of us
who scoured endless hobby shops in search of the stuff, often at wildly
varying prices and conditions). It was also the Heyday, when tabletop
D&D was still quite popular, and many incredible bargains could be had.
I fondly remember walking into an obscure gaming store in Jacksonville,
FL, and finding a second-print
Original D&D set
(now valued at hundreds of dollars) for $20; or the time I bought a shrinkwrapped
copy of the orange-cover module
B3 at GenCon for $160 (now
worth perhaps five times that).
As contributor Ken Wellens writes, "The only guide to collectible
D&D items in that medieval era was Zocchi's, a national RPG dealer based
in Mississippi. Old-time readers of
Dragon Magazine might
remember their whole-page ads, which contained lists of prices for old D&D
and 1st Ed. AD&D titles. In a pre-Internet age, the existence
of such a list in Dragon Magazine, the definitive source of news for all
things TSR, made Zocchi's list the definitive price guide for TSR collecting.
Zocchi's also maintained a significant presence at GenCon each year, and
the list was widely distributed there as well. It was not uncommon
for patrons of the GenCon used-games auction to visit Zocchi's booth each
year and review the list prior to going to the auction. Thusly, selling
prices at the auction often reflected those on the list."
Those days, while only just a handful of years ago, are now gone for
good. The Internet started the stampede, in the form of the
RPG Marketplace newsgroup.
Up until late 1998, the newsgroup would easily get 50 – 100 new auction
messages per day. For the first time, collectible items could be distributed
to a national buying audience, and price standards (as well as relative
rarity standards) could be established with some degree of certainty.
At about that time, David Papay began
a D&D Price List, a comprehensive listing of every item produced by
TSR and its average newsgroup auction price, as well as a D&D Trivia
Page, with printing info and data on a variety of collectible D&D gear.
Although discontinued in 1997, Papay’s exhaustive and thorough research
has formed a solid basis for The Acaeum.
The scene changed again with the rapid expansion of
eBay, the online auction house, in January 1999 (coinciding with the
media attention on eBay’s auction of the Mark McGuire baseballs).
Within a month, traffic on the newsgroup had slowed to a trickle, as buyers
and sellers alike quickly realized the advantages of eBay. Oct 1 1999:
Currently, RPG collecting is experiencing a rapid rise in popularity,
in direct contrast with the actual gaming systems themselves (which have
been declining in popularity since the glory days of the late 70’s and early
80’s… most likely due to computer games). As with many such collectibles,
the toys you played with as a kid are what you often seek to collect as
an adult, whether comic books, baseball cards, coins, Star Wars figures,
or D&D. The average age of "old-school" D&D players
is now roughly 30; just about the age when increased disposable income can
(and has) fueled rapidly rising auction prices for these items. For
that reason, we at The Acaeum feel that the "ceiling" on this
hobby is far from being reached. A Superman #1 comic book in mint
condition is worth probably $40,000 today; is it unreasonable to expect
that a Lost Tamoachan,
or a Dragon Magazine
#1, could also someday reach that lofty price point? Probably
not (D&D was popular, but didn’t achieve the market penetration of comic
books), but you never know. We’ll have to wait and see.
As for the present: Is the RPG market over- or under-valued? All
things considered, The Acaeum feels the market, as a whole, is slightly
overvalued. This is based on a few reasons. 1)
eBay (as stated before, the major outlet for the RPG market right now) is
a new phenomenon, and some of its incredible success is probably due to
that newness and faddishness – much like a run on Cabbage Patch Kids.
Eventually, the "impulse buyers" wake up and move onto something
else. On the flip side of the coin, those same impulse buyers increase
the publicity of the hobby, bringing more people – many of whom will start
a serious collection – into the fold. 2) The supply / demand
curve hasn’t balanced. While not an absolute in collecting (HOW many
Mark McGuire rookie cards are out there, and they’re going for how much?),
a skewed supply / demand curve creates an unstable market, prone to collapse.
Witness baseball cards a few years ago (before the McGuire craze started
it all up again)… collections "worth" thousands of dollars suddenly
became worthless, as the collective consciousness realized that just because
a price guide says it’s worth $1000, doesn’t mean it’s so: the sheer number
of available items creates competition between sellers, which drives down
the price. In the D&D world, this theory is exemplified by modules
like WGA4 Vecna Lives!
and the H-series modules.
There’s plenty of them, and there’s nothing really special about them, but
they’re currently in vogue. The abundant supply may eventually cause
values on these types of items to fall. Thankfully, the strength of
the RPG market is that there’s plenty of truly rare or uncommon items to
keep trading lively. 3) Ignorant buying public. Many "dabblers"
in the RPG market today may not know quite what they’re bidding on; since
there’s relatively little hard data available (pre-Acaeum, of course!),
some items may skyrocket in price simply because a couple of people bid
on it, and the bidding snowballs – hey, if Fred and Bob are bidding on it,
this must be good! This "feeding frenzy" is discussed in
more detail in the Collecting Ins and Outs essay.
What does all this mean? Simply put, if our theory is correct, prices
on "mainstream" RPG collectibles may fall a bit in the
coming year or two. For example, your copy of module A-1 in Very Good
condition may no longer fetch $15, but rather $8. eBay will no longer
be a fad, the supply/demand curve will balance, and the collecting public
will be more informed about what they’re bidding on. But fear not:
we also predict the prices for the rare items will continue to rise,
if not meteorically.
Apr 1 2002:
Much has changed in the past two-and-a-half years, most of it for the
better. eBay has continued to dominate the market scene; competitor
auction sites such as Yahoo! and Amazon.com have failed to attract a sizeable
audience. With the addition of a
Role Playing Games category, as well as expanded search functions, eBay
has firmly established itself as the place to purchase collectible
D&D material.
How have our predictions panned out? Surprisingly well. The
overvaluation we spoke of in the last essay has stabilized; while
Keep on the Borderlands
modules still occasionally sell for $50, these occurrences are thankfully
much more infrequent. Many of the impulse buyers have moved on to
a different hobby, and those that remain are much more informed than they
were three years ago.
On the flip side, rare items continue to sell for high prices -- but
the values of many of them have not increased quite as much as expected.
We believe that The Acaeum is partially to blame for that. We've received
a number of e-mails from sellers who regale us with stories of prospective
buyers who balk at paying higher prices than what we've listed in our indexes. "$100??
How can you charge that much, when The Acaeum says it's only worth $50??"
We'd like to think that we set our item values based on the market's
activity. In reality, since the market has so little guidance one
way or the other, the market tends to set its price based on what's on our
site. We end up in a catch-22, especially for items that have little
to no auction history. On such items, we've tended to set the values
cautiously low, with the idea that the market will show us how much people
are willing to pay for them. That hasn't happened; the bidding tends
to stop when it reaches the value we've set.
What's the solution? Perhaps a bit more value-tweaking, on items
that really do deserve to be worth more than what they're currently selling
for. We've done a slight bit of this already; a prime example is the
10th Anniversary Collector's
Set. Our original value for this was very low, as we had never
seen one sold. The rarity of this item, however, has never been in
question. When one finally sold in January of this year, we were horrified:
$91! Even if it was in only Very Good condition, this amount is far
too low for an item of this scarcity. A verified private sale a few
weeks later garnered $680: a far more sensible amount. We've since
adjusted its value on the site.
So what gets altered? Certainly, the vast majority of the values
we list are dead-on accurate, for nearly everything on our indexes.
The exceptions here are the Rares, specifically the class-5 Rares.
Common items fetch cover price, generally, because the supply is far in
excess of demand; the opposite is true for rare items. So, you will
be seeing a lot of green highlighting on the Rares Index this month.
If, after a few sales, the market fails to support these values, they'll
head on back down.
One other thing we'd like to point out regarding our value estimations:
condition of the item is important, if not paramount. Many
people only look at our "Mint"- or "Shrinkwrapped"-condition
value, and assume that's the universal value of this item. Nothing
is further from the truth. Why do we feel comfortable giving a mint-condition,
1st print Original D&D
Set a value of $2,000? Because we are absolutely confident
that if that set, in mint condition, were to come up for auction, it would
fetch at least $2,000. The vast majority of these sets are
in nowhere near mint condition, and are fetching a correspondingly lower
amount.
Of course, the real solution for all the problems mentioned above
is for every buyer to pay more attention to the caveat we post several places
on this site: use these values as a guide only. As the old
wisdom goes, "a painting is only worth what someone will pay for it".
We feel that the D&D collectibles hobby is in its infancy, and that
collections will only continue to appreciate in value. Following that
logic, our opinion is that it's never a foolish decision to "pay too
much" for an item you want, especially if that item is rare.
Time will tell if we're right, but if you agree with us, then let's take
this hobby to where it wants to go.
Apr 1 2007:
It's been five years since the last installment of this essay, and I
dare say it's long overdue! There have been changes to the marketplace,
but not to the extremes we saw in the first few years of the site's operation.
eBay has become the exclusive home of all collectible buying & selling;
other competitors, such as Amazon, Yahoo, and the venerable RPG Marketplace
newsgroup, have been completely marginalized. With this centralization
of the market has come relative stability and increased awareness of price
trends, all of which are good things (unless you happen to have been a predatory
seller, profiting from ignorance...).
Common item values (rarities 1, 2, and 3, for the most part) have generally
fallen a bit further from their point in 2002. I attribute this primarily
to the market's (correct) perception that these items are in no short supply,
and will come up for auction on a weekly or daily basis. Most of these
items are not in collectible condition -- they were played with, at least
to some extent -- and so, too, the people buying them aren't looking for
collectible copies anyway; they want to incorporate the items into their
current gaming sessions. Readily-available PDF files (legal or not)
of many of these items also contributes to depressed values; a PDF file
is just as suitable for playing as a physical copy. However, copies
that are in the upper bracket of collectibility, condition-wise (Near-Mint
or higher, and usually with shrinkwrap intact) still tend to command a premium.
Believe it or not, a First print B2 Keep on the Borderlands, in the
shrink, is a very rare specimen!
Rare items have fared better. Values on all of these have generally
risen. The high end of rarity -- certain class 5's, such as woodgrain
D&D Sets, ST1 Up the Garden Path, etc) have risen geometrically.
Several record sales have been set in just this past year -- some for amounts
that could have bought you a complete collection back when this website
site was started! Predictably, the availability of PDF's has not impacted
values negatively -- collectors want the real deal, not a photocopy.
Have these items reached their maximums? Probably not. As stated
before, there's a very limited supply. One might argue that the demand
is also limited, but I don't think that every potential interested buyer
is aware of the D&D marketplace yet. A good barometer of that
is our forum membership, or more specifically, the number of different registered
users that visit each day. At this point last year, we were seeing
about 80 different visitors a day; as I write this, the average is up to
around 105. Percentage-wise, a substantial increase. And each
new forum member, as I see it, represents another informed buyer or seller
in our market.
For the near future, I see the market continuing to mature. Values
will further stabilize -- helping minimize the occurrences of wild price
swings -- as well as continue to rise on the upper end of rarity.
More players from D&D's "Golden Age" will reach the point
in their lives where they have the interest and financial capability to
collect the games they played in their youth. And hopefully word-of-mouth,
random Google searches, and recommendations from current Acaeum members
will continue to direct them into this hobby!
History: