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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9678621" data-attributes="member: 907">That's a good point, but I see two problems with this mentality:1. Different customers want different things. Just to take a random example, someone might be interested in a Baldur's Gate sourcebook, someone else might want an adventure, a third person would like more magic rules, and a fourth would want a sourcebook about mercenary companies. The old cadence would satisfy all of these within a reasonable time frame.2. Most game companies have adjusted their product schedules to the new reality, but not their core games. If you're only going to do a book or two per year, then perhaps your core product shouldn't try to be All Things to All People. Instead, do a more focused game that does One Thing Well. Then, a few years down the line, maybe you can do a new game that does a Different Thing Well, using the same engine (perhaps tweaked for the new context).As a bad example, take Aeon. Let's ignore that it's a setting for a wider game, Trinity Continuum, and pretend we have a single game that consists of both those books. Aeon prides itself on being flexible and allowing for many different types of science-fiction stories, and having tailored different locations within the setting to cover these stories. You could be fighting an oppressive fascist society in the Federated States of America, or you could be exploring the Final Frontier out in space, or you could be rooting out corporate corruption on Luna, or solving crime and dealing with media fame in Sydney. NO! The game doesn't have room to explore all those beyond about a paragraph each on the campaign styles and maybe a page on the sub-setting. And the supplemental material doesn't have enough either.By comparison, although I haven't played the game myself, I'm told that Blades in the Dark is absolutely awesome. One of the reasons it is awesome is that it's focused on the adventures of your little band of criminals in a a vaguely defined city. So everything is focused on heists or "scores". It does one thing, and it does it really well.The Old Way would often create a core game that touched on all sorts of angles, and expect to expand on them in future sourcebooks. You want to play pirates? Get the High Seas sourcebook. You want to do magic university intrigue? Get Academia Arcana. Wanna do monsterhunting? That's what the Slayer's Book of Slaying is for. But the modern world won't let you publish all those – you might get one, if you're lucky. So instead decide that this is the game for doing X, and make sure it does X brilliantly and has all the stuff you need for X. If someone wants to do Y instead, there's a different game for that out.Or, in the words of Ron Swanson:[MEDIA=youtube]Yq46oeK_JDQ[/MEDIA]</blockquote>

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