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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5608742" data-attributes="member: 4937">You are making the same mistakes that WotC is making.  Namely, you think rules systems are really valuable.   Now, I grant you that rules systems are not trivially easy to make, and I've seen a lot of bad ones.   But, as far as rules systems go, I think of them about like Neil Gaimen or Monte Cook think of ideas.  Ideas aren't really valueable.  A good idea talent can generate novel ideas by the ton - more than not only he could use but more than a dozen people could ever use.  Most peoples thoughts aren't even worth a penny because creativity in and of itself is so cheap.   Likewise, I'm a rules smith.  if I wanted to, I could probably generate a new core rules system a week for the next 6-10 weeks.  (Heck, I created a new system - SIPS - on the spur of the moment for my personal use just a few weeks ago.)  Rules systems aren't valuable.  You could publish a good rules system which you'd put a lot of work into, and chances are 99 times out of 100 it would be ignored in the market and your product would die.  For one thing, there are probably already a dozen or more good rules systems out there.   Who even needs a new rules system?   FATE, D20, HERO, GURPS, BRP, D6, Storyteller, Savage Worlds, etc. etc.   If you are spending big bucks creating rules systems, you are WASTING YOUR FREAKING TIME.  License out a system that does what you need, tweak it to fit your setting, and get to the hard work of producing a game.   Wrong!  Paizo was doing the hard work.  Towards the end, Paizo might have been more responcible for D&D's ongoing success than WotC was.  How many D&D players have as their defining moments of 3e things like the 'Age of Worms' adventure path?   D&D isn't just a rules set, it's a game and a RPG is as much or more defined by how you prepare for it than the rules system that you use*.  D&D's success in the market has always been tied more to how it encouraged and helped DM's to prepare for the game, than it was to its own often bumpy sometimes exasperating rules.   When I was getting into the game and young, what drove play as much as anything else is some friend bought a new module and wanted to run it.   I'd get into pick up games not because someone had a useless Player's Handbook in their lugage or backpack, but because they had a module stuffed in there.   We didn't need the rule books.  That was easy.  It wasn't the hot new rule books that drove the game or made us love the game, it was adventures.  Granted, you can make your own adventures and I do, but that's hard.   My current campaign has about 300 hours of preparation time in it so far and would seriously benefit by me having put triple that time into but I don't have time.  And I'm taking short cuts by incorporating some published adventures into the game!  I have a very very good idea of how much hard work goes into creating a good story or a good adventure path.  Don't tell me how Paizo only exists because WotC "did all the hard work".   There speaks either a player who doesn't run games, because I can't imagine a GM saying that. *Celebrim's Second Law of Gaming</blockquote>

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