How important is third-party support?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If it wasn't for third party support, going all the way back to 1E and Judges Guild, I probably wouldn't still be a D&D fan. The vision of the various caretakers of the brand has rarely matched my own, and third party support allows many other flavors to be represented.

I buy a lot of 3rd party stuff -- I just purchased a bunch of Goodman Games stuff from Noble Knight yesterday and a copy of the Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary from Paizo -- but me staying in the hobby also drives me buying new stuff from the current brandholder (I'm a big fan of WotC's YA monster guides, for instance, and would have bought a Knights of the Silver Dragon sourcebook if they'd ever produced one).

I also have bought PDFs from third party Traveller publishers and am always open to more such purchases.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

One way to look at it, as some people think PF is just a copy/paste of 3x, yet even the slight changes between those systems - there becomes a huge difference in play. They become different games because of the slight changes. The same is true with any hand-wave or rules adjustment.

This is very true, not only for 3e versus Pathfinder, but for other elements of home gaming.

If the ONLY change between 2e and 3e was no longer using treasure values to increase xp (or even internally, for those who houseruled 2e to not use treasure as an xp source) then the games had very different focuses.



Third party products can take a playable game and make it unplayable, sure...but they can also take an unplayable game and make it totally playable.

Here's a non-third party example. I haven't enjoyed much of WotC's modules or settings for 4e....except for Dark Sun...they did an EXCELLENT job on that (and my future buying patterns will be investigating products by the authors and editors of that book).

Dark Sun 4e makes me want to play 4e. Without it, I might not care. Necromancer Games, when they were going to do 4e before the GSL debacle were going to make me want to play those adventures in 4e (the adventures from Open Design for 4e are great). I've played, GMed, or (at minimum) read every Necromancer Games adventure. They're incredible. They'd be incredible in any edition.

If I had one for an edition I didn't yet know, I'd go so far as to learn the darn edition so I could run it, or at least convert it.


That is one thing third party publishers can offer....increased options, adventures, worlds, etc that get fans excited about your game.

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

For me, I have too often been in a game where the DM hand-waved something that gets used over and over in game. At low levels or at the level the hand-wave was introduced it wasn't a problem. But as the game got towards epic levels, the misread by the DM on what the rule adjustment did to the overall system broke the game, as they hadn't considered the ramifications of what the ruling did overall.

I'd call this internal consistency. It's related to balance, because both are vulnerable to being broken by exploits, but I think of balance as necessarily being related to competition or at least comparison between players, whether it's within a party or between different groups.

With Adventurer Conqueror King, one of the things we fixed was the relationship between the price of a sword, the wages for a swordsmith, and how much it cost to run a smithy and support the smith's family. If the reason to fix this is that it doesn't make sense otherwise and spoils the sense of the fantasy world for a swordmaker not to be able to make a living, that's internal consistency. If the reason is that characters who specialize in making swords are doing poorly compared to those who specialize in making armor, that's balance.

For the most part I think that balance really becomes important when there's an organized play environment, which fosters the kind of multiplayer interaction you see in online games. Around my table, it doesn't matter if being an armorer is an especially good way to make money as long as that's justifiable within the framework of internal consistency and fantasy-world versimilitude. But in a MMORPG, you'd want all the different specializations to be balanced much more carefully.

 

[gamerprinter]

It could be semantics. The general term 'balance' to me applies to both your definitions of 'internal consistency' and 'balance.' But I get your point.

Don't know organized play (never played), nor more than one gaming group. I live in a rural hole - there isn't enough players for any one game system to build too many gaming groups with. Been playing with the same group for almost 20 years now.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

Third party support isn't essential for an RPG, but it sure is nice. Some of my favorite RPG supplements and adventures came from third parties: Judges Guild D&D and AD&D material, Necromancer Games 3e material, Pagan Publishing Call of Cthulhu material, Alephtar Games BRP material, et cetera.

And with the advent of the retro-clone publishers and magazines, there's a whole new category of products that sorta fall under that "third party" categorization: XRP's "Advanced Adventures" for OSRIC/1e, Knockspell and Fight On! magazine, providing content and adventures compatible with a whole range of out-of-print and retro-clone systems. There's so much stuff like that coming out, from such a wide range of small companies, that it's hard to keep up. I think it's a good time to be a gamer.

 

[alms66]

It was the endless stream of crappy 3rd party support material for d20 (not to mention the crappy material supplied by WotC) that made me abandon D&D forever, well - it was the last nail in the coffin anyway, I was already headed down that road, quite a ways down in fact.
I lost some good players and some good friends when I finally put my foot down and said I'm not running this garbage (D&D) any more, ever again, but it was sooo worth it in the end. If it wouldn't have been for that day, I would have never run into many of the great RPG's that I play today.

 

[Crothian]

3PP is looking for a diamond in the rough. There is a lot out there and imo much of it is of zero interest to me. But every now and again something good comes from it and it is these very rare gems that people seem to remember.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

It was the endless stream of crappy 3rd party support material for d20 (not to mention the crappy material supplied by WotC) that made me abandon D&D forever, well - it was the last nail in the coffin anyway, I was already headed down that road, quite a ways down in fact.
I lost some good players and some good friends when I finally put my foot down and said I'm not running this garbage (D&D) any more, ever again, but it was sooo worth it in the end. If it wouldn't have been for that day, I would have never run into many of the great RPG's that I play today.

I don't get this. I mean, I can see the opinion that it was mostly, or even all, crap (though I disagree).

But I don't get why one wouldn't just ban all third party support rather than abandoning a game. I mean this for any game, not just D&D. If all the third party support for Cthulu was crap (again, I don't think this is the case) but I enjoyed the core game, I don't see why the crappy support should necessarily matter to me or to my gaming.

 

[alms66]

I don't get this. I mean, I can see the opinion that it was mostly, or even all, crap (though I disagree).

But I don't get why one wouldn't just ban all third party support rather than abandoning a game. I mean this for any game, not just D&D. If all the third party support for Cthulu was crap (again, I don't think this is the case) but I enjoyed the core game, I don't see why the crappy support should necessarily matter to me or to my gaming.

I was already on the path to abandoning the game while we were playing 2E because I was tired of all the D&D tropes, still am to this day. I prefer something more original, than yet another world with elves - except these elves are green!... That plus I had already seen the constant dialing up of PC power in every edition of D&D from the start, so I figured it would just continue to get more and more ridiculous, and it has.

It was mostly the players, buying up these third-party books (and 3E books for that matter, I never bothered), whining about wanting to play a class or race that was in them when it was clearly more powerful than anything in the core rules. I never made the jump to 3E, we were going to finish up the 2E campaign we were playing then move on to 3E, but during that time the players bought up all kinds of 3E junk. We had also started planning the 3E campaign, thus all the whining about the upcoming 3E campaign.

And yeah, we tend to play rather long campaigns.

 

[gamerprinter]

I was already on the path to abandoning the game while we were playing 2E because I was tired of all the D&D tropes, still am to this day. I prefer something more original, than yet another world with elves - except these elves are green!... That plus I had already seen the constant dialing up of PC power in every edition of D&D from the start, so I figured it would just continue to get more and more ridiculous, and it has.

It was mostly the players, buying up these third-party books (and 3E books for that matter, I never bothered), whining about wanting to play a class or race that was in them when it was clearly more powerful than anything in the core rules. I never made the jump to 3E, we were going to finish up the 2E campaign we were playing then move on to 3E, but during that time the players bought up all kinds of 3E junk. We had also started planning the 3E campaign, thus all the whining about the upcoming 3E campaign.

And yeah, we tend to play rather long campaigns.

Hmmm, so you are saying you were 'leaving the game' back in 2e, so obviously your comment regarding 3e 3pp stuff is just made up then, because there was so little 3pp stuff for 2e your argument has no weight. While I agree there were certainly some crappy 3pp stuff for 3x, it was a low percentage crap. I found most 3pp stuff quite stellar actually.

In fact as you just said above - you never made the 3e jump. So how could 3x 3pp stuff be all crap when you never played 3x at all. I think you're just 'making up your facts' to make sly remarks for the sake of it. Your previous statement mentions because of all the 3x 3pp crap. If you never played 3x, how would you ever be aware of any 3pp material in 3x???

Why are you even participating in this thread - as you weren't even there when this supposely crappy 3pp material came into your game.

Your argument carries no weight at all...?

GP