The difference between too little/too much campaign setting support?

[fanboy2000]

A campaign setting has too much support when people ignor the support in favor of their own versions. If a company is putting support book after support book and no one's using it, it's time to move on. I like the Realms and (one day) plan to run a Silver Marches campaign. That WotC still sells FR books, shows that FR hasn't recived too much support (yet).

I take the opposite stance, you can't have too little support. Remember thouse min-games Polyhedron used to publish? They were right up my ally. Many of them were elegant and pithy things that did exactly what they needed to do. I just bought the Wilderland Player's Guide, and I would be happy with just that. I know that they're putting out a box set, and I'll buy it because I think that it'll have the right mix of setting information for my needs. (I need a generic D&D setting that has a lot of history.)

The Backdrop articles that Dungeon now publishes, are just what the doctor ordered too.

There is one exception to the "never too little" rule: when you put out a book and refer to support books that either never come out, or you weren't expecting to buy. I hate that. My favorate adventure for 3e, The Crucible of Freya from Necromancer Games is sadly guilty of that. It refers to Bard's Gate in the adventure, but the Bard's Gate book has yet to come after all these years. That's to little support.

In all fairness to Bill and Clark, they were new to the d20 publishing business (we all were, I thought they had something to do with the Scared Lands at first because of the Sword and Sorcery logo). I detailed Bard's Gate myself and the group had a lovely time and many adventures there. I'm still buying the book when it comes out though.

 

[Eremite]

I think FR is appropriately supported by game products (actually, I would like to see more) but over-supported with novels.

The novels tell too many large-scale stories and that can ruin a campaign when a campaign diverges from the canonical novel-created storyline.

One of my pet hates is for a series of novels to be published at the same time as a product. Frex, Silver Marches came out and one of the interesting adventure hooks was about the coming orc horde... and then the latest Drizzt/Driz'zt books came out using that as the major plot hook (apparently... I refuse to read them). That's just silly and too frustrating for many DMs.

Anyway, IMO, in terms of supporting a line, game products = GOOD; novels = BAD. Novels can be good when they are set in the past or in a small area without campaign-wide ramifications.