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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6279115" data-attributes="member: 18">This is undoubtedly true, but I feel like continuing to produce this kind of material does ensure that people continue to subscribe to services like the DDI in larger numbers than they otherwise would. Maybe physical books aren't a great model for that kind of material. I feel like there's also an "excitement" issue - repeating the same thing with a similar name (PHB2, Martial Power 2, etc.), even if the contents is good is inherently a lot less exciting and likely to move books than giving it a stronger theme, a stronger reason to buy and so on. 4E really wasn't helped by all this "PHB3" nonsense - if they'd hit a stronger theme, they might well have sold rather better.The real issue here is that, historically, WotC has produced very few good adventures over both 3E and 4E. The vast majority of WotC-produced adventures and quasi-APs and so on over that period have just been middling at best, and in many cases, quite painfully bad. Virtually all of them can be fixed, but in many cases doing so is as much work as writing your own adventure and renders the whole exercise rather pointless!Towards the end of 4E, quality came up a fair bit, but it remains to be seen whether that will continue into 5E.So they have a bit of a trust issue to overcome when attempting to sell this kind of "perishable" product. Paizo, for all that their adventures might be a bit dodgy from time to time, have never had the same kind of issue to overcome. So this makes attempting to switch to this kind of material rather tricky.Another kind of material which hovers between perishable and not, of course, is setting material. Particularly new settings which actually have something to say. Stuff which just digs deeper into or adds on to an existing setting has a limited market, but if one keeps putting out new settings, so long as you only make ones which people might actually want, I think there is much less chance of saturation. One has to watch one's costs, though.</blockquote>

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