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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mouseferatu" data-source="post: 4859430" data-attributes="member: 1288">Unfortunately, there's no way around it.Look at every successful RPG in existence, and you'll find multiple editions. Some come faster, some slower, but they all arrive, because there will always come a point where one of two things happens:1) The company does, indeed, run out of ideas that are sufficiently salable, or2) The staff comes up with better ways to do things.Because it's not workable.First, no matter how you hype a given book, it's still never going to appeal to the entire market. It's possible to come close on occasion--I'd hazard a guess that the PHBs are all in the ballpark--but that's a rare event.More importantly, though, even if WotC could guarantee that, say, two books a year would sell that well, that's still not nearly enough to support the line.And the results would be either a book that's so big that it costs more than the average gamer is willing to pay, or has so little material for each specific class that you start losing buyers who want more material for the class they're playing. In either case, you still wind up with fewer sales than you do with a more targeted approach, because people aren't usually willing to pay for material they don't want. If Person X isn't interested in, say, divine classes, he's probably not going to shell out $60 for a book that devotes a quarter of its pages to those classes.As I said above, it won't support the line. It won't even come close. An RPG company doesn't make money if it doesn't keep printing books, no matter how well previous books might've sold.And what you end up with is a company that goes out of business. See, this is exactly what TSR did--they funneled money from more successful lines into less successful ones, and the final result was that what profits they did earn were eaten up pumping out more niche material. If a company with multiple product lines wants to succeed, each line must stand or fall on its own. And if a company that produces multiple types of products wants to succeed, each type of product must, at least for the most part, stand or fall on its own. Otherwise, the company makes no profit even if some of its stuff is doing well.You're not evil, but you're also not responsible for running a business. You can afford to see it as a hobby. A company that wants to actually stay in business cannot, no matter how much people might wish they could.Would WotC be able to avoid moving on to 5E if they slowed down their production to what you're talking about? Sure--not because there wouldn't be a need for it, but because it'd kill the D&D line stone dead. It's fine line to walk--too much product and too little product are both lethal--and frankly, I don't envy the folks at any RPG company who have to make that decision.</blockquote>

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