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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alphastream" data-source="post: 6214194" data-attributes="member: 11365">I love the ideas. BUT, what you propose all rests on 3E pulling in enough sales to merit the approach. It is highly unlikely that it could have. The diminishing returns were already there on 3E. The Book of Nine Swords was already out. It was clear that the edition was done for WotC. They didn't need to print more copies of existing material, because the material was already sitting around all over the place. You can get pristine copies of just about any late-3E material... never played and cheap!The OGL adds to the misery. Try to support both and you further encourage your base not to try out your new edition. And every RPG company struggles with the now vs the new. Most small RPG companies can barely handle creating a few short adventures and sourcebooks for their main line and then also adding a second line. Most successful small-medium companies (Evil Hat is a good example) talk constantly about the difficulty of managing many freelancers on several projects across a couple of product lines. At the large RPG companies (Wizards, Paizo), it is a major undertaking to deliver on the quality expectations of the market. A single gameday adventure takes months of coordination and planning, writing, developing, editing, layout, and production... even when it isn't a for-sale product! The result is great quality and a vastly (in most cases) offering, but it takes significant resources. Follow the tweets of designers like Paizo's Logan Bonner and we can hear them talk about how much they have to do to keep things going. It's an even bigger challenge to try to also overlap with a new edition. We see WotC 'crying uncle' and letting their online magazines lie fallow while they finish up Next, and they have the most resources in the industry. But the cost of not doing so is too high. Everything rides on that new edition. You said that diminishing returns and new editions isn't the only way, but has there been a major RPG that truly did well with a different model for more than a decade? I hear you on the magazines, as it was clearly painful for WotC to create a proper publishing process. The idea to bring the magazines in-house could have been an assessment on costs (which could easily have been a bad idea profit-wise) at a time when they were changing the whole format anyway, but likely were heavily due to a desire to move away from the OGL model and control content. The benefit has been that the magazines have created 100% official content that really did work tremendously well with the rules rather than constantly being at odds with them. Further, there has been great value to WotC from having the intelligence inside. There was a time when I wasn't confident WotC understood its own game. I would speak to designers and they had never heard of things that every gamer was wrestling with. That wasn't at all a problem with the mid and late stages of 4E's lifecycle, though it was a huge problem with 3E and early 4E. It has resulted in great relationships between freelancers and the company. Rob Schawlb is an obvious choice, but also a host of lesser known guys. Both Paizo and WotC now have great ways of identifying talent and continually assessing the cream of the crop. That's a great benefit.</blockquote>

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