GMforPowergamers
Legend
I think of it as 1 company vs manuy myself.WotC vs 3PPs
I actually double hit the 0 on my phone, I meant 20-30 the 30 was right not the 200 but I can see you had a 50/50 shot of getting my meaning. my fault for not catching the typoNo.
Because you're not dealing with 200-300 more, are you? That's nonsense.
if I was playing zelda on my switch sure... but I play at 2 tables a week and (inthory but not for months) 1 table a month those tables have some overlap and so just counting tuesday/saterday that is 7 or 8 of us per week. we would have to have a consensuss on what company to trust, to do so one of us would have to put in the work to learn 1 company then pitch it, and if we do that we might end up all with different companies... so out of the 20 or 30 out there (before counting DMs guild that Might make it into the 100s) we would be down to 5-8 (depending on overlap) to talk about and as such when I DM I could end up with any number of them to consider... and I put MORE time in then some of us do.You're dealing only with what you actually choose to add.
now for me to choose a company to go with I need to come on here and other places to look to see what others think. then pick 1, then listen to the other pitches others have... OR as we have we can just all agree not to put each other through that and player facing content will be WotC and any editional stuff will be DM side only.
IF we are to vary from that it is normally for a system (I have TORG as my go to, but we did do the middle earth 5e system 2 or 3 times)
I'm not pretending, I don't want to use the time to do it. I HAVE done it... mostly in 3e/3.5 but a bit in 4e. We decided as a group NOT to do it in 5e.So you're illustrating the lie here - people pretending like 3PPs are this huge extra balance burden.
let me tell you I have seen at a 3.5 table, 5 players 1 DM have 17 3pp and multi WOtc books... that 17 sometimes is "2 spells and a feat from this book, a prestige class from that one and a whole optional sub stem from this one for 1 player character)
an example from me. I played in a game as an Avatar (a summoner base class 3pp) that took a summoning prestige class from a wotc book, but had feats out of 2 other 3pp books and was asking for spells out of the sword and sorcery studios books and I had a magic item teh DM put in from yet another 3pp, so I had at the table 3 wotc books, 5 or 6 3pp books of my own and would take stuff form other peoples...
I don't want to DM a table like that in 2023, even though in 2006 it sounded fun.
so how do you find the ones you are intrested in? you look through a few right... then everyone at the table looks through a few (maybe some overlap mostlikely at least some but who knows) then we have to talk it out and now even if we only narrowed it to 2 each how many is that per table... and remember we start with how many before we narrow it to 2 each?They're not. You - as a DM - do not have balance/monitor "all 3PPs". You only have to look at the ones you're interested in and actually add to your campaign.
for player faceing content we make it 0That's a much smaller number.