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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9270275" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not as skeptical or critical as you are but I do agree with the general complaint.  95% of what has been written and is for sale is basically useless to everyone and professionals who are putting out content for sale do way too sloppy of a job way too often.  Worse, they spend all of their time doing the easy stuff that wouldn't take me much time to replicate and leave so much of the hard stuff up to me that I wonder why I pay them.  I end up regretting almost every RPG purchase I ever make.But then again, we consumers validate that by preferring apparently to buy content for new games and new systems and incompatible new editions of old games which are just as sloppily constructed as the ones before rather than preferring to buy lovingly revised systems that have been gradually improved through lengthy play and feedback.  Every game I play requires an enormous amount of effort on my part to fix the rules, fix the scenarios, invent the campaigns, and generally do a ton of work and that barrier to entry for new GMs is so high that it significantly hurts the hobby.  That said I can and have ran CoC for 6 players, and I can and have ran Star Wars across a dozen planets, and while there are fundamental issues with most science fiction settings and combat it's not a truism that all sci-fi combat is bad or has to be bad.  What is true is that the work required to get those sort of things to come off well is just too high for most participants and there is a steep learning curve to being a GM because so many of the examples of play are just bad that GMs don't have any good template to learn by.  Part of the reason that I'm just not that interested in new systems is the enormous investment in time that comes with a new system.  I have no interest in systems.  I have interest in games and I have interest in good GMs.  I'd pay for that.  I'm increasingly uninterested in one's unplaytested sloppy set of rules that they have only ran for their spouse and your best friend using a heavy dosage of rulings to overcome the limitations of their own system and which they can't communicate a single example of good play to anyone, not even the guy running their game at a convention.</blockquote>

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