Quote from: Omega;807920With publishers it seems to be they get sold on the idea of the edition treadmill and the 5 year plan. Even when it is obviously loosing them more players each time and often fractioning the playerbase at the same time. As opposed to supplements with updates and fixes. Sometimes they just seem to hate the fans really. WOTC is made of this, SJG progressively feels like this.

The edition treadmill is necessary for the industry.  No rpg has ever been able to maintain a significant market share over the course of decades without edition updates.  Failure to crank out an edition update every so often leads to an ever dwindling fanbase.  

Imaginine a world where WotC just kept on steaming with 3.0.  Do you seriously think whatever 3.0 supplements that such a world would have published in 2014 would sell as well as 5e has?

Quote from: Old One Eye;808045The edition treadmill is necessary for the industry.  No rpg has ever been able to maintain a significant market share over the course of decades without edition updates.  Failure to crank out an edition update every so often leads to an ever dwindling fanbase.  

Imaginine a world where WotC just kept on steaming with 3.0.  Do you seriously think whatever 3.0 supplements that such a world would have published in 2014 would sell as well as 5e has?

Agreed. At the rate they were going we'd have the "complete goat herder" class book by now or something. They have to have a blood infusion into the game at some point but the key is to doing so with foresight and delivering a good product on the re-boot.

As to the OP, I used to have a strong bias against diy and consumer created content. I even shied away from licensed 3rd party publishers even for reason: I like to read materials that are polished. I don't want it to look like it was edited by Tuypo1 or myself for that matter.

Being broke will definitely make you reconsider that stance and I am thankful because there are some good things out there not from the big game publishers. But I do still like me some evocative art and clearly laid out materials.

Quote from: MonsterSlayer;808079Agreed. At the rate they were going we'd have the "complete goat herder" class book by now or something. They have to have a blood infusion into the game at some point but the key is to doing so with foresight and delivering a good product on the re-boot.

As to the OP, I used to have a strong bias against diy and consumer created content. I even shied away from licensed 3rd party publishers even for reason: I like to read materials that are polished. I don't want it to look like it was edited by Tuypo1 or myself for that matter.

Being broke will definitely make you reconsider that stance and I am thankful because there are some good things out there not from the big game publishers. But I do still like me some evocative art and clearly laid out materials.

Dont be silly goat herding would not be its own book it would be a part of complete agriculture.

all joking aside i would totally buy a 3.5 agriculture sourcebook the market prices for all the fruits and vegetables alone would be worth buying the book.

Quote from: Old One Eye;808045The edition treadmill is necessary for the industry.  No rpg has ever been able to maintain a significant market share over the course of decades without edition updates.  Failure to crank out an edition update every so often leads to an ever dwindling fanbase.  

Imaginine a world where WotC just kept on steaming with 3.0.  Do you seriously think whatever 3.0 supplements that such a world would have published in 2014 would sell as well as 5e has?

The edition treadmill is a lie and a poison in the industry.

As Gygax himself pointed out once. Each new edition  will LOSE you up to 50% of the playerbase depending on how far removed from the original it is. Each new iteration will alienate the previous playerbase. Edition treadmilling is a failed ploy to wring a few more bucks from the previous customers bu forcing those that want to stay current to buy the whole damn game all over again.

Instead what you do is KEEP THE SAME DAMN GAME CIRCULATING WITH REPRINTS! Every 5 years just reprint the game, possibly with some eratta fixes, and new art, and you have the exact same results without the massive customer loss.

reprints would be nice

although to be fair great as he was gygax said a lot of stupid shit.

case in point his orc baby solution

I don't even know what "support" is supposed to mean in the context of pen and paper RPGs. Never have.

As far as I can tell it's exactly the same thing as "splatbook bloat" except by that name you're supposed to hate it. You "support" a game... by adding splatbooks... which get to be too much. And then ya hate it. But you want it to be "supported" because you want to feel like oh god I'm not the only one playing this shit. I guess?

I get that the term is borrowed from computer games but there, if you stop supporting a computer game long enough, it will stop running on computers. It will no longer be compatible with the operating systems people are using. Books stay books!

(I mean, I guess theoretically you could leave a DMG alone in a glass box for five centuries or so and it'll start running into usability problems in that sense)

Quote from: Omega;808092The edition treadmill is a lie and a poison in the industry.

As Gygax himself pointed out once. Each new edition  will LOSE you up to 50% of the playerbase depending on how far removed from the original it is. Each new iteration will alienate the previous playerbase. Edition treadmilling is a failed ploy to wring a few more bucks from the previous customers bu forcing those that want to stay current to buy the whole damn game all over again.

Instead what you do is KEEP THE SAME DAMN GAME CIRCULATING WITH REPRINTS! Every 5 years just reprint the game, possibly with some eratta fixes, and new art, and you have the exact same results without the massive customer loss.

Uh?  To me, there would be no difference in a game whose available product is a reprint every 5 years and a game that has gone out of print.  WotC would have lost my DnD business years ago if all they did was reprint books I already own and did not come out with new product.  You seem to want to buy the same books every 5 years, though, so maybe it would be a monetary wash for them.

Quote from: Old One Eye;808109Uh?  To me, there would be no difference in a game whose available product is a reprint every 5 years and a game that has gone out of print.  WotC would have lost my DnD business years ago if all they did was reprint books I already own and did not come out with new product.  You seem to want to buy the same books every 5 years, though, so maybe it would be a monetary wash for them.

It would be nice to split the difference; I want something new but not throwing out everything that came before, and not gratuitously changing things where it doesn't really matter.

Evolution, not revolution! Expansion, not bloat! I can recycle all the slogans from operating systems/programming languages/other software versioning.

i feel that while good in theory that would just make it really hard for people that dont like newer revisions to find games

Good support from a publisher, for me, is having them around, still excited about the game, and putting out the occasional adventure or sourcebook for it.
It doesn't take much. Happily Goodman Games hasn't seen fit to spam their DCC pipeline with more and more rules... but do keep up a solid stream of adventures.
Meanwhile the fan community has taken the game in all sorts of fun new directions... like the Thundarr based setting I played in tonight.

Call of Cthulhu is still fairly popular and even with the questionable changes to 7th edition it still runs the original adventures with a minimum of fuss... AND... I've bought each edition as it came out (till this one) and never felt cheated/frustrated the way I have with software changes or 3rd edition WFRP.
Chaosium hasn't weighted the system down with rules bloat at all... but they've put out a shit-ton of playable content.

Quote from: Omega;808092Instead what you do is KEEP THE SAME DAMN GAME CIRCULATING WITH REPRINTS! Every 5 years just reprint the game, possibly with some eratta fixes, and new art, and you have the exact same results without the massive customer loss.

Or you can do what they've been working on and just toss pdfs up online and sell them for eternity without having to deal with printing, storage and shipping costs. And you can keep churning out the new edition at the same time with relatively little opportunity cost.

Do wish they'd clean up some of the OCR though, some of the spelljammer books are damn near unreadable. It's put me off buying more of the old timey stuff to see what I missed out on.

I'm cool with any kind of support; of course, fan-support is often hit-and-miss, but you can say the same with publishers (only publishers will tend to be almost always hit OR almost always miss)

I like to hope that professionally-published product will have at least some minimum level of quality control.  I like to hope that, at least.

I fear that fan-produced content will have more misses than hits and I can't figure out which is which until I've spent time and effort I'd rather not spend doing my own quality analysis.

I'm okay doing it myself, when I have time, which I find I have less of as time goes on.

Quote from: Nick Bower;808791I like to hope that professionally-published product will have at least some minimum level of quality control.  I like to hope that, at least.

One can hope, but it doesn't always happen that way.  Not even with companies that produce great products.