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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MoogleEmpMog" data-source="post: 3875402" data-attributes="member: 22882">I think the refrain of "OMG settings killed 2e!!111" is very much overblown.  See the Mongoose example below.Over-support of settings may have hurt 2e - but so did terrible business decisions at every level, little to no understanding of or interest in what amounted to an increasingly small market, fad-level corporate spending and production after the fad had faded, lack of market research, competition from multiple new forms of entertainment, and expensive packaging and production values.  To say nothing of an aging and overall not very good system.Did it really hurt 2e more to fragment the market by producing, each month, one new product for core D&D and up to five new products for five settings?  Wouldn't it have hurt nearly as much - if not as much - to produce six new products for "core" D&D?  TSR flat-out overproduced, to the point what they were producing was almost secondary.Very few people were going to buy all those books, regardless of what name they had on the cover; if anything, more successfully separating the various game lines (see Mongoose, below) might have helped.  Carefully investigating the sales of each line and pruning the size of production lines and product schedules accordingly definitely would have helped.  By explicitly marketing these lines to different people, and understanding that they were marketing to different people, they might have turned the inevitable market segmentation in RPGs from a weakness into a strength.Because Mongoose doesn't market those products as facets of a single line.  They don't have, or want, a unified fanbase - they want as many fanbases (note the plural) as they can get.For 2e, TSR marketed all its D&D settings as part of 'D&D.'  D&D was the big brand, Dragonlance or Spelljammer or Forgotten Realms or Dark Sun or Planescape - those were small brands attached to the big one.Mongoose doesn't roll that way, at least with their d20 products.  Conan is its own setting - but also its own core book.  You don't need to buy, say, Lone Wolf to play Conan, nor do you have to buy D&D.  So, if you're a fan of Conan, all you buy is Conan.  If you're a fan of RPGs in general, you can pick and choose.  But if you want, you can buy exclusively into one line and not be punished for it.  Caveat: I'm not sure if this is the case with the RuneQuest lines such as Lankhmar and Hawkmoon.Regardless, I'm willing to bet Mongoose keeps VERY careful records of what lines are selling, and how much they're selling, and thus how much to produce.  Not all Mongoose lines get the monthly treatment, for example.  TSR didn't do anything like that, and even if they had, the technology (much less their infrastructure) wasn't in place for them to adjust product lines with anywhere near the dexterity a tight ship like Mongoose can today.Mongoose, incidentally, doesn't just 'survive' this way - by most measures I've seen, they're the third biggest-selling RPG company in the world after just six years of operation.Arguably, only Exalted and nWoD are truly 'different settings' - nWoD Mortals, Mage, Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling, Promethean and, I believe, Scion all take place in the same world (the titular 'World of Darkness') and can theoretically be mixed.  In fact, the nWoD rules were redesigned in part to make playing cross-line work better.  Not that you can't run them individually, mind...</blockquote>

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