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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 4859421" data-attributes="member: 29398">OK, I'll concede your points re market share and settings; that all makes sense.But, we're still left with problem one: overall bloat, now and forthcoming.Business models be damned, there comes a time when either one has to ask "how much is too much" and slow things down drastically, or collapse the edition (as happened with 2e and to some extent 3e) and start again.Collapsing the edition is not, to me, an acceptable solution.As for market share, there's another way around it: instead of scattergunning out 25 books in a year, each appealing to a greater or lesser extent of the market, why not just hype out one or two?  Make a Big Deal out of them (and, of course, make them top-notch in quality and content), and nigh everyone in the market will buy each one.  1e's Unearthed Arcana is an example of this, though one could argue not all the content was top-notch.  This is sort-of what I thought WotC would be doing with the annual PH-DMG-MM releases.An example for 4e might be a Powers book, but instead of one for each class or role like I gather they're doing, just have one great big one covering everything.  The hype for this could have started, for example, shortly after 4e's release, with the book released shortly before last Christmas.  And pretty much every 4e player would want it, as no matter what class they play there'd be stuff they could use.But just do one of these type of things a year, such that someone coming in 5 years down the road doesn't have quite so much catch-up purchasing to do and can thus afford to dive into the game.And, the profits made from these big sellers can go into producing the lower-run specialty stuff - settings (in box sets!), adventures (though these can sell well too, if they're any good), and so forth.Lan-"I see this as a hobby rather than an industry - am I evil?"-efan</blockquote>

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