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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jhaelen" data-source="post: 6504229" data-attributes="member: 46713">Yep, that's how it usually starts:Yo have a group of 5+ players and each of them, having slightly different interests and preferences than the others, buys a different splat. Now, if you'd like to allow one of them to use material from his chosen splat, you're basically obliged to allow the other players to use _their_ splats.In our games this problem seems to be more pronounced because- most players are also GMs for other groups- our group meets at most once a month, so there's a lot of rpg-free time that players enjoy to bridge by buying splats and reading themAll of this doesn't necessarily have to be bad, until players start to share their splats. Then the optimization-gene that seems to be present in almost all of our players takes over:Options from several different splats are combined in unusual and unforeseen ways to create more or less broken characters. To compensate, the GM starts buying splats to deal with the inevitable power creep resulting in the dreaded arms race that signals the beginning of the end. Soon everyone's fed up with the game and the campaign implodes or fizzles.After a short while the same process starts again with a new system, edition, or simply a new GM.Regarding what the publishers should do:Continue to publish splats but focus on background material, introduce player options slowly and carefully. Disallow combining options from different splats whenever possible, i.e. splats should be mostly self-contained.</blockquote>

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