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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 1557733" data-attributes="member: 3820">It would have take contract labor from monkeys with typewriters to make the gap negligible — it's just flatly impossible for us to get entirely new rulebooks, complete with new systems, and complete with enough periods of in-house review to make sure we're going in the right direction, produced in the same time it takes to produce a supplement for an already-existing gameline that has a lot of writers already familiar with the material. If we'd started earlier on the new books, we would have had to free up our schedules by ending the old World of Darkness even sooner. We've been sweating blood trying to get everything good as well as timely — I doubt anyone picking up the books would really rather have had shoddier work more quickly available. Every extra month of work and review makes the games more solid, both in terms of the setting and of the rules work. What we're doing is, as best as we can figure it, the optimal amount of time so that the Big Three games release as close to one another to keep excitement high, but far enough apart that there's sufficient time for serious quality control. To be honest, that probably puts you in the minority — that is to say, as someone who runs the games who finds the metaplot more useful than problematic. To go all anecdotal, when I picked up Oriental Adventures and decided to try and see what was going on in the Rokugan setting, the timeline of "recent events" was exceptionally off-putting. I wasn't someone who had followed the metaplot through all the world events that happened as the result of TCG tournaments or the various pre-d20 releases — and considering the number of major setting changes that happened in that brief period of time, it marked the Rokugan setting as clearly not for me. The trouble with an advancing metaplot is that although it's a lot of fun for the people who get in on the ground floor, it becomes successively harder to attract new gamers to your game with each passing year. There's just too much material for them to absorb, particularly if the rulebook is contradicted by the supplement that they just picked up the same day. Ongoing stories that showcase the world are a fine idea, but it's a lot easier to keep your setting consistent enough to be newbie-friendly if you limit those stories to the accompanying novels and other fiction. The actual supplements should add depth to the setting in a different fashion, gradually outlining more options and depth as time goes on without invalidating previous chunks. Long-term viability, that's our Grail.That depends entirely on the group, obviously. The new system is pretty significantly different (moreso than the Trinity and Exalted engines were), but still clearly related — but if even being related is too much for your group, well, so it goes.</blockquote>

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