I like supplements just as much as any other obsessive RPG enthusiast. I've got so many 3.5 books that they literally bend the shelf they sit on in my game room. Admittedly, I'm not the completist some collectors are; I still don't own several late 1st edition hardbounds. But then I don't really consider myself a collector, despite owning a vast swath of RPG books. Nor am I the kind of guy who buys a gamebook just to read it. Hell, I've never read huge portions of the text in several of my 3.5 books, mostly because I don't need someone else's D&D fluff. But new monsters, magic items, or crunchy character bits? Pile 'em on, baby!
But there are many other games where I just don't have any interest in more books. Maybe this is because I don't need another game in my life that comes a zillion supplements to absorb, but my shelf o' Traveller crap suggests otherwise. Interestingly enough I generally buy Trav books for the fluffy parts. Few mechanics outside Books 1-3 interest me. On the other hand, I would totally run a Traveller campaign using just the original books. Or Starter Traveller. (Don't let the name fool you. It's basically a sleek update of original Traveller material and probably the best incarnation of the original game.) If I didn't feel like wrestling with the vast Third Imperium setting, I'd just generate a subsector and drop the PCs somewhere near the middle of the map. No biggee.
Which is sorta my approach with a lot of games for which the supplements never interested me. I adore the original Empire of the Petal Throne, but I have no real interest in further delving the depths of Tekumel lore. If I ran an EPT campaign and the PCs went outside the scope of the original book, I'd just make some shit up. My version of Tekumel would never win the M.A.R. Barker seal of approval, but that sure as hell wouldn't stop my group from having some rocking adventures. I feel this way about a lot of good games. The Feng Shui faction splats are probably chock full of gaming fun, but do I really need them to run a game that focuses on bullet ballets and kung fu shenanigans?
It was Warhammer 40K that got me thinking about this subject. Nowadays there's all these splatbooks that tell you exactly what you can and can't do with your army. And since almost all play seems competitive league or tourney style, those restrictions are ironclad. While I'm happy that the game was successful and lotsa people play it, I can't help but think that something has been lost since the days of the original Rogue Trader hardbound. That one book was the secret key to unlocking a new universe of brutal sci-fi adventure. Without the splats and the official novels and all, it was a half-described world of amazing potentials. Everything published since then has only boxed in that creative energy.
You can see a similar story with every other successful sci-fi or fantasy property in the hobby, whether we're talking about various D&D worlds, Traveller, BattleTech, Exalted, Glorantha, or the World of Darkness. Of course you can ignore the info contained in the new Cobblers of Faerun supplement if you want. I'm not one of those guys who is always whining about someone else writing in the blank spaces within a setting. Nor am I arguing that do-it-yourself is the one true way to run a campaign, though I think I feel less creatively cramped in my own homebrew sandbox. I turn around and make campaigns that are little more than bad pastiches of my favorite geekiana, but sometimes I find that more rewarding than running someone elses bad pastiche.
But there's no right or wrong here. An armful of setting books can be a real aid in creating and maintaining an internally consistent campaign. While a homebrew allows your personal creativity a freer reign. If I have anything to say here I guess it is this: Supplement-aholics may find it refreshing to do a homebrew for a change. Homebrewers may find that letting someone else do the setting gruntwork frees up some energies to devote to other parts of the game. And while the standard model for success in the industry is to do a whole line of books for a game, there are plenty of single book games out there worth checking out. My personal favorite at the moment is Spaceship Zero, but there are plenty more out there.
A Return to the Stars
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After a veeeeerrrryyyy long, and mostly unplanned, hiatus, Stuart and I got
together to play more Stargrave in recent days. It was good! It was also a
bit ...
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Posts
My supplement-o-philia has scaled inversely with my age. Back in the day, I grabbed most new supplements for my chosen game systems. Although I dumped almost all of certain lines in a couple purges over the last few years, I still have substantial collections for Shadowrun, Vampire, and Battletech.
ReplyDeleteThese days, I appreciate the elegance of a basic book and a core idea. When a somewhat older kid told me, years ago, that the D&D Rules Cyclopedia was amazing for being all-in-one, I thought he was insane. Years later I picked it up used because I think he's right, and if I ever run a D&D game again, I'm strongly inclined to just use that. Similarly, I'm tempted to pick up D&D "core settings" I never bought before (e.g. Planescape) for the basic concepts, but I have no interest in having more than one, or at the outside two, books for a given world.
These days, I'm also not as interested in crunchy bits, because I never like other people's material as much as my own interpretation, so that's another downcheck against picking up new books.
That makes me feel a little bad, since that makes me a poor revenue source for companies I like -- except, you know, I buy Magic cards, so I think Wizards is doing fine on getting cash from me.
The dirty little secret of our hobby is:
ReplyDeleteYou don´t need supplements.
- paraphrased from Frank Mentzer
I don't have a problem with supplements so much as with players who become imaginatively dependant on them. Some gamers boggle at the idea of creating their own game setting (or even adventures!) or writing their own stats for a model. Sadly some companies deliberately discourage gamers from letting their imaginations run wild, Games Workshop being one of the worst offenders.
ReplyDeleteMy real gripe, though, is with companies that split their core rules into several books in order to squeeze more money out of gamers. It's one thing to have a main rule book and then a separate one for vehicle, spaceship, and/or mecha design. But when they start splitting it up into Player's book and GM's book, or Core Rules and endless Army books, my scam alarm starts to buzz. That's what I really like about, say, HERO Games is that they make it plain up-front that the single core rulebook is all you need to play, and everything else is optional. Some other game companies do the same, and more power to 'em, I say. And more power still to the various free rules out there, especially the ones released under a real Creative Commons license.
My only real complaint (as with many gamers, including jerry, above) is with "supplements" that aren't supplemental, but rather core material held deliberately hostage for marketing reasons. It becomes more common every day and it's the main reason that the traditional RPG industry becomes increasingly irrelevant to my gaming table. We don't put up with that shit. Simple as that.
ReplyDeleteMy big fear is that the micropress publishers are going to start imitating the approach more regularly. I seriously fear that, because I love being a homebrew gamer but I never, ever want to be JUST a homebrew gamer. I want to buy stuff (or schmooze stuff) and then go play with it. It's getting harder.
That's my take on supplements in general, which is a little different from my take on heavily-explored game settings. Those I tend to be leery of mainly because quality maintenance is difficult and rare (and "quality," as far as I'm concerned, includes a strong gamer-focus, which is something the industry shat out the window in the 90s when it become obsessed with licenseable/tie-in IP development as a business approach). I consider it one of the [many] baby-and-bathwater problems of gaming ... detailed settings have become a "bad" idea because of frequently bad execution, not because the idea itself was ever "bad."
My preferred approach lately (though not the only good one by any means) is what I call the "Hommlet Solution," or exploring intimately rather than broadly, since such explorations (A) are the most easily ignorable and (B) are frequently the most actually useful and evocative. My own CARAVEL is, obviously, me putting my money (and more importantly, my hours) where my mouth is on the subject. It's 100% non-critical information and benefits immensely from that, IMO, both in terms of value to the GM that buys it and lack of hassles for the GM that doesn't. It rewards group A handsomely but it doesn't punish group B in the process.
That said, I grovel at the feet of the most of the GAZ series, because it's the rare example of that notion done well, instead of the cut-and-paste approach that's most common (both then and now).