It’s a perennial question:  why do role playing game companies publish games that aren’t complete, and then release perpetual streams of mandatory supplements?  Gamers often feel that they’ve been cheated when they discover that in order to play the whole game they have to buy something else.  Yet there are few games–and none of the major ones–which don’t have additional rules, expanded setting information, continued story lines all sold separately.  If these supplements are anathema, why are they so common?

Speaking Personally

  I began my role playing experience as referee of a basic version of a popular game.  Although it cost as much as any board game I had purchased, it was far from complete.  Characters could only advance so far, and then another book would be needed.  I never found the second book–I don’t know if it was ever published before that basic game was completely rewritten.  I did find the books for the advanced version of the game, at that time in three volumes, and continued the game with that.  There was much that was additional, new material to expand the limited game.  More significantly, there were many things which were different, slight inconsistencies which bordered on incompatibilities.  Some of the die rolls were different, some of the equipment had to be tweaked, and I never did introduce the corrected exchange rate for the money.  Still, the basic game had been a very limited introduction to a new kind of game, and the advanced version was more like finally taking the game seriously.  Fifty more dollars later, I began to build my world.

  A couple more books were published, providing mostly optional material–more creatures for encounters and similar expansions.  I bought each, not as soon as it came out, but when I had the extra cash.  Then a book came out which significantly impacted on my game.  It presented new types of characters, not merely new options but character types which had to be back-written into the world that had been expanding.  Major cities with huge populations and carefully considered fortifications suddenly were changed so that these other people were there, and had always been there.  On top of that, the new books made changes in the rules for character types my players were running.  So we all grumbled a bit; but we accepted the changes.

  And so with each new book, my game world expanded as I rewrote character information and recreated cities and dungeons to include the new material.  Three books grew to a dozen, each changing our game, creating more work, but giving us new options and ideas.  And then it all changed.  The game company produced a second edition.

  We had long awaited a second edition.  With the years of expansion through volume upon volume, the rules had become unwieldy and disorganized.  A new edition would bring it back together, putting the new rules and the old rules in the same book according to subject.  But the new edition was a surprise.  It was not like a new edition of a book, or a new edition of Trivial Pursuit.  It was more like a new and different game carrying the same name.  And it quickly became apparent that this new game was as much about selling supplemental rule books with character types and world expansions as it was about roleplaying.  Like so many other fans of the earlier version, we bought very little of the new game, and complained loudly about it.

  Then I was invited to help write a new game.  Its originator had the same feelings about games built on innumerable supplements.  We determined that our game would be complete in one package.  We invested literally years in finishing it, and then approached the problems of launching it.  Some of those we contacted told us we were crazy, that the only way to survive as a role playing game publisher was to break the game into many smaller books and sell them separately.  But we stuck to our plan, and released what we believed was a complete game.

Why Do They Do It?

  Perhaps that many publishers can’t be wrong.  All the big companies publish stacks of books expanding and detailing their popular games.  We can wonder whether they do this because, as the big companies, they can, or whether they are the big companies because they do this.  But in fairness, many smaller companies also do it, and survive through it.  And in this industry, there are a lot of reasons to move in that direction.

  If, unlike most young companies, you get good advice before you try to publish your first game, you will be told that your second book has to be ready and financed before your first one goes to press, and that you need to have something new on the market every few months.  This in itself is reason to keep part of your game out of the first book; you’ll need something to print in two to three months, and a small company has limited resources in all areas.  Also, whatever you print will have to sell, or you won’t have the money to prepare the next release; so it’s better to have something closely related to the original game, something that your customers will want, even which you can convince them they need.  And what better way to convince them they need the next book than to withhold non-vital parts of the game system itself?

  Even if you’re a big company, there are constraints on how much you can put in a book.  The core rule book can’t cost more than thirty dollars or it won’t sell; gamers will spend hundreds of dollars on a game, but they won’t spend more than about thirty dollars on one book.  They also don’t like the look of a book that’s more than about an inch thick.  If your game is bigger than that, you almost have to break it into two or more books.  Gamers will buy a three-book game for thirty dollars a book, one book at a time, even if they know up front that one book is not the whole system; they won’t buy a one-book game which costs more.

  And gamers themselves encourage this proliferation of supplements.  They call it “support”.  You can publish an excellent game, but if you don’t publish more books for it the average gamer will shun it, fearing that your company will fail and there will be no future material published for the game.  So, like parsley on the side of the plate, the publisher has to release books no one wants just so that distributors, retailers, and gamers will know it’s still alive.  But the publisher can’t afford to publish books no one will buy; and the distributors and retailers won’t stock new product from companies if their previous product doesn’t sell.  So every effort has to be made to convince the gamer that he needs the new book.

  At one time I wrote a page for my company which linked the catalogs of other game companies, listing all the books which the company claimed were “necessary” to their game or which appeared so integral to the game system that it would be difficult to play the game without them.  Someone criticized the page, saying that those familiar with the games would know you didn’t need all of those books to play those games, despite what the companies said in their catalogues.  This complicates the question greatly.  How can you tell whether a supplement is a necessary part of the game, or if it’s peripheral?

  One of the earliest games I played was a science fiction space adventure game.  The original rules contained no information about flying a spaceship, nothing about plotting courses, repairing spaceships, or ship-to-ship combat; there were only the sketchiest bits of spaceship design and space travel, and all that was given with any detail was the time it would take to travel between various known points in space.  For a game about space adventures, this would on its face seem unacceptable.  Yet the initial set was, in one sense, complete.  The players were expected to be computer and robotics specialists, technicians, trained fighters, medics, ecoscientists, and psychologists.  On spaceships, they were always passengers; their adventures took place in the halls and rooms of ships and stations, and on advanced and primitive planets.  We played hundreds of hours without ever needing anything which wasn’t included.

  Then a supplement came out, a second set which added a collection of spaceship skills, extended discussion of spaceship design, ship weapons, and spacesuits, and information about space travel generally.  It became possible for player characters to expand their abilities and become part of a crew, or even acquire a ship and run it themselves.  Arguably, this was a necessary part of the game, filled with rules that should have been in the original books.  Just as arguably, this was an optional expansion, and players could continue to enjoy the game for years without ever worrying about the problems it addressed.  It changed nothing previously stated; it only increased the possibilities for players and referees.

  It is to one degree vital that the game company convince its customers that they need the newest supplements, because these books have to sell to keep the company viable.  But the fact that the company calls a new book “necessary” or even “vital” is no proof that it even adds significantly to the material you already have.

The Alternative

  We published a game which we thought was complete in one volume; it is nearly six hundred pages, with a fifty dollar price tag not unreasonable for its size.  We packaged it with a setting book which presented several settings fully playable, almost two hundred pages included at no additional cost.  We promised up front that we would publish helpful supplements, but that nothing else would be needed to play the game.

  Some critics charged that because we promised supplements, we were intrinsically admitting that the game was not complete in one book; others agreed that the full game system was in the rules, saying even the accompanying settings were not needed.  No customer has yet complained that there was something lacking.  The most requested supplement has been another book of settings.  We’ve kept a high level of visibility, run on-line demonstration games, given away a stripped sample version of the game system and support material including a small but complete setting, and let people know that we intend to stay.

  But it’s an uphill battle.  Many gamers have said that we should cut the rules in half and sell it in two volumes at thirty dollars each, with the settings sold separately for another twenty.  They would rather pay eighty dollars for the full game as long as they can do it in installments.  The theory seems to be that you can buy part of the game, and even if you can’t play the game with that book you can at least get an idea of whether you want to buy the rest.  If they’re right, then we’re wrong–people wouldn’t rather buy the whole game in one package.  They would rather buy a cheaper first book, and pay extra to get the rest of the system.

  Supplements for our game are forthcoming; yet we’ve already tied our own hands in this regard.  We can’t tell those who have bought the game that they need something else, because we’ve told them already that they won’t.  It remains to be seen how many unnecessary supplements gamers will buy, and whether a game company can survive on such sales.

  But Multiverser has in large part been supported by volunteers who believe in the game, who are willing to work for stock options and the hope of future profits.  It has benefited from artists who have deferred collecting royalties on their contributions so that the company can put the money into daily operations.  Business has been done on a shoestring from our homes and over the Internet.  Were it not so, if Valdron Inc. had had to pay significant overhead during its first couple of years of operation, it would have vanished by now.  Survival in this business is not easy; companies need to find customers who will buy their games, and who will keep buying the supplements.  Would I have done it differently had I known all this before we went to print?  Probably not–I still don’t like games which require buying a complete library to play.

  But given the realities of the role playing game industry, I suspect this approach will be with us for a long time to come.

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M. Joseph Young is Vice President for Development of Valdron Inc and Co-author of Multiverser:  The Game.  His writings on the Internet are indexed for convenience.