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Seriously, why no setting support?
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<blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6947329" data-attributes="member: 37579"><p>As mentioned, most people who buy the books are doing homebrew. The largest minority plays in the Realms. Any other setting is a fraction of a fraction of the audience. Selling those books at numbers worth selling is unlikely, even for WotC. </p><p>(You don't have to look far for an example. 4e's Dark Sun product was as much generic player crunch options as it was setting book. Likely to broaden the audience.)</p><p></p><p>Generally speaking, if you're a fan of a campaign setting, you <em>already own that product</em>. So any revision of that setting has to market to people who aren't fans and the smaller percentage of fans who already have the setting material but will buy it a second time. And unlike rules products - which are wholely incompatible after an edition update - 95% of most campaign settings work just fine between editions. </p><p>That's a hard sell. </p><p>Reprinting a campaign product means competing with past products. The books are already out there for interested people, available used and typically for a price lower than you could buy the book if it were new. I've said before that you can generally get a couple Eberron books off Amazon for less than the price a new campaign setting hardcover would run.</p><p>This just gets harder with PDF and Print on Demand options available.</p><p></p><p>Eberron and Dark Sun are the most different worlds. Eberron has five races, dragonmarks, and artificers. And maybe dragonshards (which were a big part of the setting but never interesting in the rules). That's 20 pages of content. Tops. Not even 10% of a 320-page hardcover book. Dark Sun has three races, defiling, and elemental priests. So that's even less. </p><p>It's hard to justify buying an entire hardcover book just for that content...</p><p></p><p>Lastly... are books the best format to release campaign settings in?</p><p>I mean... I love my big hardcover campaign setting books. But they're not easy to use. Flipping is slow for rules, and even worse when looking through a page for world information, rumors, the head of a city, etc. </p><p>Campaign settings are tricky because worlds are sprawling an interconnected. Characters relate to cities, nations interact, race information overlaps with nation information. But you can't easily fit that into a book. Instead, the elf entry says "x" while the elf nation information says "y". Neither can say both, because that's redundant, despite it being necessary in both places. </p><p>The *only* campaign setting I've seen work around that level of interconnectivity worth a damn was Ptolus. </p><p>Really, digital tools (a wiki or Realm Works) is likely a far superior way of conveying that information than a book.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jester David, post: 6947329, member: 37579"] As mentioned, most people who buy the books are doing homebrew. The largest minority plays in the Realms. Any other setting is a fraction of a fraction of the audience. Selling those books at numbers worth selling is unlikely, even for WotC. (You don't have to look far for an example. 4e's Dark Sun product was as much generic player crunch options as it was setting book. Likely to broaden the audience.) Generally speaking, if you're a fan of a campaign setting, you [I]already own that product[/I]. So any revision of that setting has to market to people who aren't fans and the smaller percentage of fans who already have the setting material but will buy it a second time. And unlike rules products - which are wholely incompatible after an edition update - 95% of most campaign settings work just fine between editions. That's a hard sell. Reprinting a campaign product means competing with past products. The books are already out there for interested people, available used and typically for a price lower than you could buy the book if it were new. I've said before that you can generally get a couple Eberron books off Amazon for less than the price a new campaign setting hardcover would run. This just gets harder with PDF and Print on Demand options available. Eberron and Dark Sun are the most different worlds. Eberron has five races, dragonmarks, and artificers. And maybe dragonshards (which were a big part of the setting but never interesting in the rules). That's 20 pages of content. Tops. Not even 10% of a 320-page hardcover book. Dark Sun has three races, defiling, and elemental priests. So that's even less. It's hard to justify buying an entire hardcover book just for that content... Lastly... are books the best format to release campaign settings in? I mean... I love my big hardcover campaign setting books. But they're not easy to use. Flipping is slow for rules, and even worse when looking through a page for world information, rumors, the head of a city, etc. Campaign settings are tricky because worlds are sprawling an interconnected. Characters relate to cities, nations interact, race information overlaps with nation information. But you can't easily fit that into a book. Instead, the elf entry says "x" while the elf nation information says "y". Neither can say both, because that's redundant, despite it being necessary in both places. The *only* campaign setting I've seen work around that level of interconnectivity worth a damn was Ptolus. Really, digital tools (a wiki or Realm Works) is likely a far superior way of conveying that information than a book. [/QUOTE]
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