LogFAQs > #886634371

Lightning Bolt posted...

Depends on what you want. I want new ideas to play with and innovations to add to my repertoire, but I don't exceptionally care about the creators staying in business. New obviously wouldn't always be a plus to them, and I can respect that, but I still think it's a plus to me.

It's less of an issue when you're talking about RPGs, per se (mainly because, again, the average player can buy a couple of core rulebooks and spend the next 50+ years playing that same system without ever buying another book again, so you don't NEED a company to continue succeeding), but it's still a major problem on some level.

To wit, the moment 5e became D&D's "mainstream success" edition - which has also become the cornerstone to most popular streams or online games - it became the entry-point for most new gamers, and the standard by which they're going to continue to judge the system for the rest of their lives. While some rare few may eventually look back to previous editions and decide they like 4e or 3e or 3.5e or Pathfinder or even BECMI better, the vast majority never will.

And if you're a fan of an older edition, and dislike the "innovations" of newer systems (like, for instance, the mass dislike for 4e that many older gamers felt due to the perception that it radically altered most of the core elements and feel of the game), you can easily be "cut off" from new players, as your favored edition slowly withers and dies. Someone who loves AD&D 2e is going to have a much harder time finding players for their games than someone who wants to run a 5e game. In that sense, constant "innovation" as a core ideal (as opposed to simply releasing optional alternate rules or alternate systems/settings) can absolutely become a detriment in and of itself, even before you consider the value of individual innovations.

New ideas aren't in and of themselves automatically GOOD ideas. And a proliferation of bad ideas (or even just a moderate accumulation of bad ideas in ways that are extremely significant) can easily render a system unplayable, or at least unpleasant to people who prefer playing in a previously established way. Or at the very least, make it less worthwhile than other alternatives, rendering it a mostly shunned/ignored edition/system.

In that sense, it's not an issue of whether or not the business remains in business, it's an issue of whether or not you can even continue to play the game.

If anything, the desire for a business to continue existing helps FUEL innovation for the sake of innovation. Innovation solely for the sake of "art", or function, or quality, can often be detrimental to continued business. Because you need to keep churning out new content (even if it isn't really necessary, or you weren't even remotely inspired to produce something better than what you already had) in order to keep harvesting dollars.

Obviously, this isn't really much of an issue if you're playing a mostly homebrewed patchwork system and have enough players to support such a game long-term, but people like that rarely need new "official release" systems to provide new ideas anyway - there are literally hundreds (if not thousands) of competing systems already out in the world, and people willing to patch in ideas from multiple editions are usually just as likely (if not more so) to just homebrew their own system entirely from scratch anyway (and potentially eventually publish it).


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"Wall of Text'D!" --- oldskoolplayr76
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