How Often Should An RPG Company Publish Supplements?
My question is: how often do you, the role-playing game consuming public, want to see supplements for your game of choice published?
I am just curious what my readers think about this issue. Some companies, ie. Wizards of the Coast or Paizo, routinely publish new supplements monthly. Many smaller RPG publishers publish only once a year, sometimes less.
To my thinking, there are two schools of thought on this issue. First is that more supplements equals more exposure and sales. Therefore, you can never publish too much product/content. The other school believes that too many supplements produce “supplement fatigue.” Crippled by a tyranny of choice, gamers buy little or nothing because they cannot “keep up” with all the product. I personally fell victim to this in the 1980s and early 1990s with flood of product from TSR. So many box sets, so little money….
I am assuming of course that both methods produce quality product. Obviously producing dozens of terrible products versus one great one is not a fair comparison. This is just a thought experiment about what is the optimal rate for supplement publication. Let us leave the quality issue aside for the time being.
What say you? A flood or a tantalizing trickle of new content?
Trask, The Last Tyromancer
Filed Under: Publishers
About the Author: Trask is a long-time gamer, world traveler and history buff. He hopes that his scribblings will both inform and advance gaming as a hobby.
I think it depends on the game.
Some games, like D&D, have the vast scope that can accommodate two or three releases a month. From these games, I expect, and want, lots of releases in a year.
Some games are built with a smaller scope in mind, and for them to be expected to produce two or three books monthly would be unfair. For these games, three or four big releases should be sufficient. Just enough to keep interest in the game alive and keep it in the news sometime, and give the fans something to look forward to.
Then there’s some games that don’t need splatbooks at all. They just are. Maid: RPG for example.
I think the supplement treadmill is problematic. There’s power creep and general consumerism and game loyalty and other side effects. I’d rather have new games than supplements, the exception being supplements that take the game to genuinely new directions. They are okay.
I’m fine with supplements, so long as they are optional supplements and not stuff I should have had in the core book in the first place. As long as I got a complete game when I got your book, publish away. If you have 5 Rule books and 7 Monsters books that I need to get everything I need for a fulfilling, enjoyable game (which will obviously be different requirements for different folks), that’s going to irritate me.
I was stuck on the Rifts treadmill for a while. That’s not something I wish to hop back on.
No offense to any of the publishers but I personally hate new supplements. They are the evil incarnation of temptation and they are the devil’s advocate to make you feel that you are running an inferior game unless you buy them; the fruit of knowledge in the otherwise Eden of gaming.
Alright to be honest, I really hate the supplements being made by Wizards but I would love to get my hands on all the Pathfinder Chronicles. I’m fine with supplements that can potentially add something to a game but it MUST be OPTIONAL. There mustn’t be an implied blurb saying that it has rules for a ‘missing’ part of the system. This is why I despise the Wizards’ splatbooks (the Completes). I don’t want new mechanics (just to tell you that the current one sucks).
Supplements like setting supplements (god knows how I love my copy of the Silver Marches) or genre-specific supplements (Heroes of Battle, Heroes of Horror and the terrain series) are good supplements in my books. They make your current game better with ideas and flavor. One fluffy supplement will beat 10 crunchy books for me anyway (yes, I’m a fluff addict).
As far as frequency is concerned it depends. I say that a company should get all their crunchy supps out of the way as soon as possible and then dedicated the remaining life cycle of their system by adding as much flavor as possible. But if that is not in their release schedule, I would prefer it if they only released 1 rules supp in 6 months. Not everyone (i.e, me) has enough time to suck a crunch book dry before they are ready for the next one, releasing them too closely is a great way to start the ‘supplementary chase’. As for flavor books, I say once a month because everyone would have a flavor of the month and if something does strike their fancy this month, they could just wait for the next.
As a publisher that falls into the significantly-less-than-monthly club, I can tell you I publish when we have significant material that makes sense to be published. This could be a single organization with all the fluff and crunch that goes with it for one of our lines, or the articles needed to put together an issue of Targum Magazine.
Would I like to publish more often? Yes, but only sometimes. More product does not necessarily mean more sales, and oversaturation is a constant danger, for both publisher and consumer.
Ideally, though, new material should not be, IMO, published before your prior product has had its proper chance of being read, used and almost overused.
I think it depends. I wasn’t planning to get any of the 4e supplements, but my group got Martial Power and they loved it. Now we’re all counting off the days until Arcane and Divine are released so that the rest of the group can have the same options. But at the same time, I couldn’t care less how many Adventurer’s Vaults the company puts out.
So I think my answer is that they might as well publish as many as they can, because not everyone will want every supplement. Wizards may be putting out 3-4 books a month, but in my eyes, they’re only releasing 3-4 books a year that I have any motivation to buy.
It would be nice to have some breathing room, I’d say a quartely or Bi-annual deluge of books would be cool.
Gives you a chance to digest what has already been released, before buying 5 more books that are all different directions at once :)
I think it depends on the game. D & D maybe has too many supplements, but at the same time they have enough of a player bas that everyone is buying something. I like how wizards puts out books for Star Wars. Some settings, some expansions on the rules. You don’t want to play the Old Republic setting, don’t get the book. It all comes down to how much the material is worth playing and how many people would even buy it.