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How do you prefer a game system to be supported?   Do you prefer the support to come from the publisher, an active game community or just DIY?

Publisher.

I've seen too many times what a total fuck-up fan support can become.

Failing that. The core game should have enough for the DM to make more adventures at least with what is there. Most RPGs do. Some force it by having no predefined setting.

I've come to appreciate the fixed nature of dead games. No new setting "canon" to invalidate your interpretations, no new editions to awkwardly square with your home rules or debate with your group, often no remaining fanboys to criticize you for "not doing it right".

I grab whatever is good. I have seen both wonderful and both terrible official material, fan material, and DIY stuff of my own.

Official publisher material has the advantage that it is... duh, official, and you can expect it to be generally accepted when forming new groups or playing with strangers at conventions, especially if you go for current and popular games with a steady stream of official material (D&D, Pathfinder, Shadowrun...).
Of course the flip side of the coin are the dangers of power creep, metaplot and "everything is core", and we all have seen it happening often enough.

Quote from: Omega;807779Publisher.

I've seen too many times what a total fuck-up fan support can become.

I don't know about that, I've seen some publishers completely fuck up settings. Maybe leave the support in the hands of the creator of the game/setting themselves.

All three can be good or bad. The fan community can/has totally put me off a game in the past but other times it's been the main draw.
Publisher content is always a bit suspect to me because I assume the primary motivation is profit, with enthusiasm and creative energy being secondary or worse.

Over the years I think I've gotten more overall value from non-publisher sources than I have 'official' ones.

More the merrier.

I generally prefer fan support stuff because its often developed at the table whereas publisher support is often just freelancers cramming page counts.

DIY is a different hobby, now, imo.
And, yeah, it is superior in every way.

Full court press on all three.

People who don't want to sort through the fan created material can just limit themselves to what been created by the publisher.

Quote from: jeff37923;807814I don't know about that, I've seen some publishers completely fuck up settings. Maybe leave the support in the hands of the creator of the game/setting themselves.

Oh I've seen publishers screw things over royally too. Just usually not with the amount of venom that the "fans" can devolve into.

As for creators. ugh! Seen some of them implode spectacularly.

With the fans, what seems to happen is you end up with a single "gatekeeper" who is keeping the gate while adding his own "fixes" to things under cover of his great insight into the game. Sometimes with a clique of bootlickers to fawn on his every word. Star Frontiers and Spelljammer come to mind off the bat to one degree or another.

With 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.

With designers all bets are off on whats going to go out the window. Doesnt happen often. But when it does it tends to escalate from there. Sometimes though it is a combo of the designer and publisher both getting a potentially terminal case of the stupid.

generally official products i may use a few items and sometimes even the occasional spell from a 3rd party source (although with how bad i am at telling if things are balanced i tend to only use joke items and spells) but i have a strict no homebrew policy on both base and prestige classes.

that said i do use an alternate version of the reaping mauler but that is the version that the designer originally submitted but it was cut down to uselessness for some reason so it does not really count.

besides i allow pretty much anything from official books only real exceptions are quite a bit of exalted deeds content (although i do houserule a lot of it to make the things that should be evil evil) and i will never allow the elemental warrior because the mechanics in no way fit the theme.

that said i will run adventures from any source.

Quote from: Omega;807920Oh I've seen publishers screw things over royally too. Just usually not with the amount of venom that the "fans" can devolve into.

As for creators. ugh! Seen some of them implode spectacularly.

With the fans, what seems to happen is you end up with a single "gatekeeper" who is keeping the gate while adding his own "fixes" to things under cover of his great insight into the game. Sometimes with a clique of bootlickers to fawn on his every word. Star Frontiers and Spelljammer come to mind off the bat to one degree or another.

With 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.

With designers all bets are off on whats going to go out the window. Doesnt happen often. But when it does it tends to escalate from there. Sometimes though it is a combo of the designer and publisher both getting a potentially terminal case of the stupid.

i would not say that wotc hates there fans and besides i would think most of there fuckups are due to pressure from hasbro or maybe just hasbros aura of stupid

even then i think we can all agree that we would take wotc over Lorraine Williams era tsr anyday

although from what i have found that gatekeeper thing sounds a lot like pathfinder

Quote from: tuypo1;807936i would not say that wotc hates there fans and besides i would think most of there fuckups are due to pressure from hasbro or maybe just hasbros aura of stupid

even then i think we can all agree that we would take wotc over Lorraine Williams era tsr anyday

although from what i have found that gatekeeper thing sounds a lot like pathfinder

Oh, aheh, no. Meant that WOTC is too in love with the 5 year plan.

oh yeah i can agree with that.

im torn on the matter though on the one hand new editions bring in new blood on the other hand it would be nice to still get official content for your favourite edition.

the ideal would be to have new editions but continue to support the old ones but there are many reasons thats never going to happen

I'm primarily interested in quality adventures due to having very little time to prepare, or alternatively I would play a low-prep game but in my experience of those types of game don't tend to have enough mechanical crunch to satisfy the rest of my gaming group.

DnD is the default game for my group, and since 5e PHB is really quite expansive in terms of the character concepts it can cover I'm not feeling any need for additional character options at the moment.

And as DnD (of any stripe) is the best supported RPG from a module perspective this is a happy coincidence...

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. :D

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.

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.

The sad thing is that a "new edition" should mean "a reprint, possibly with some errata fixes".

When did "new edition" start to mean "wholesale re-write"?

In terms of the OP's question about support, give me a good core rulebook and I'm happy. I can play the game with my group (in rotation with other games) for decades.

I don't need "support" for the game to do that, and I don't understand when people complain that a game is poorly supported. You have the game. Why do you need "support" to play it? Just play the damn thing.

It's not like the book is going to spontaneously combust and prevent you from continuing to play if you don't constantly buy supplements and new editions.

Quote from: Blacky the Blackball;809537It's not like the book is going to spontaneously combust and prevent you from continuing to play if you don't constantly buy supplements and new editions.

It's not? I guess I drew the wrong conclusions from the scrolls I found in the dungeon.