What Do You Need From Publishers?

[Celebrim]

This question is NOT aimed at new entrants into the hobby. of course those people need rules and adventures and stuff.

But the vast majority of ENWorlders are NOT new entrants into the hobby. They have been playing RPGs for years, probably decades. They own games, probably multiples systems.

So, assuming you are a customer of "the industry" as a whole -- what do you need from publishers (whether it is WotC or a tiny one person outfit)? Why are you buying stuff? What can't you do with your own imagination and elbow grease?

Facetiously, I need them to publish things that I would like rather than things that would sell for a profit.

More seriously, I need RPG publishers to actually put in some hard work rather than doing all the easy stuff and then leaving me to do all the hard work. So many publishers out there seem to think they've done enough to be "inspiring" or to give lists of ideas. Bits of micro fiction and some sort of catchy novel theme and a basic resolution engine and then they think they are done. If D&D had started with that, it would probably have never caught on.

I need rules that tell me how to handle the hard stuff, like what happens if the PC's are running a business, or leading an army, or decide to get in a aerial dogfight with like 12 participants, or at the very least how to run a chase scene well when your combat engine is turn based. I need an RPG to have out of the box excellent adventures as good or better as I could design myself.

Almost no modern RPG is meeting that test which is why I'm buying and playing games mostly designed and published like 30 years ago or more, then spending 1-2 hours writing adventures for every hour at the game table.

But most of all, I need Chaosium to get off their butts and instead of giving me a 6th or 7th edition of Pendragon with only minor edits to all of that already really well done material, to get the license to Tortall and give me a Tortall campaign using Pendragon as an engine because in this day and age I can't get groups to get all that interesting in King Arthur - especially the highly immersive medieval inspired King Arthur they are doing with all their excellent research into the literature - but I could get players for Tortall with all of its modern anachronisms just because it's so much more relatable to most people who haven't had 12 hours of coursework in medieval history.

 

[bedir than]

For one shots to not take a dozen sessions. That's a campaign (short, yes).

Give me something I can do in a day.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Both the recent starter sets from WotC, and the Cosemere one someone in my group is running, have made me realize how incredibly nice it is to just have a simple adventure packaged with the battlemaps and monster tokens you need to play it. I'd probably find it too constrictive for a big campaign (I'm not sure I'd ever run a big campaign close enough to "as written" for it to be worth the probably very high cost of such a product), but it's nice to have a neat little "everything you need for this little campaign" set for when the DM can't make it last minute, or for the one-shot my sister-in-law wants me to run this Christmas. It would probably be best for campaigns written to be run basically with no prep at all.