On Editions: RPGs

A lot of people complain every time a new edition of a game comes out. They see it as the company try to squeeze extra money out of the fan base. For the most part, they're right. Sort of.

Let's not kid ourselves here. Game companies exist to make a profit. If they don't end the quarter in the black, the investors do bad things to the management. Bad things involving thumbscrews. So in order to make a profit, companies need to sell things. RPG companies need to sell books, war gaming companies need to sell miniatures. With me so far?

The problem for RPG companies starts when they've done pretty much everything they can do with a system. After the core books there are only so many supplements a set of rules can stand. GURPS 3e is a good example of that. They had these wonderful little 100 page supplements on damn near everything. GURPS Imperial Rome. GURPS Celt. GURPS Steampunk. GURPS Undead. GURPS Vampire. You think they could have covered everything about vampires in the undead book. Nope, needed a seperate supplement for that. I think it was actually called GURPS Blood Types. They were fantastic books, don't get me wrong. I learned more from those books than some of the classes I've taken. But there cam a point where they couldn't put out any more books like that. They had covered everything worth covering, and a lot else besides. Plus, with the advantage of about a decade of hindsight, old SJ Games realized they had done some really stupid stuff. So they decided to fix all of that. Thus came GURPS 4e, with core books available in both normal and limited leather bound, gold embossed editions. Yes, it meant that if you wanted new GURPS content, you had to upgrade to 4e.

This was done on purpose. SJ Games sells, among other things, books. If they don't add new books to their line, they'll go out of business. Such is life. SJ games may be a bad example, as they've made every effort to make 4e compatible with the old 3e material, even if it means selling fewer copies of the new GURPS Animal Rights Activism.

A better example might be the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons. D&D 4e is a radical departure from the last edition of D&D, but 3e didn't exactly follow 2e's example to the letter, either. A large portion of the community genuinely seems to dislike 4e, and to that I say: tough cookies. Wizards owns the license, and this is where they've decided to play the game.

That being said, I don't remember any firemen kicking down my door and burning my 3e and 3.5 books. I assume they didn't do that to you. If you don't like the new D&D, play the old one. Write new content for your games yourself, or even switch to other games. It's your time, play how you want. Just don't expect a company to conform to your tastes simply because you've bought a few of their books.

Next post I'll talk about new editions in war gaming, and how the phenomenon manifests differently than in RPGs.