What I mean is that as fan material is produced it will reduce the demand for official material. Why pay $20 (or whatever price) for a book which covers the same material as a free book distributed by a website?
And how much will that matter to a fan who has already downloaded the unofficial version and will likely declare it their house rule because it is what they have become accustomed to?
Having been on both sides of this, official material is qualitatively better. Editors and play testers matter a lot. Author teams matter a lot.
Also, material is iterative. If Atlas hired someone to do, say, Cornwall, it'd be better than mine, by virtue of having read mine, much the same way Calebais 2nd ed is better than 1st ed.
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Hard agree from me on that front. Never mind stuff I've found online - more than once I've stopped using stuff I wrote as fan content for games when an official product covers it.
I always view fan content as a temporary fix for a gap in a system not covered by official material. Even if for some systems those temporary fixes can end up being used for a long time...
I would think that anyone who wants certain material covered badly enough to actively seek out or create fan content for it would be ecstatic to see it done to professional quality.
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Official material benefits from having an art budget. I gather the fanzine Sub Rosa spends most of its budget on art. Fan material has to make do with whatever stock images are free unless you have a decent artist who just wants to spend their spare time on the exact thing you are covering.
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TBH, while art work is nice, and in some cases improves presentation and readability¹, I'd rather have twice as much fandom material without artwork, than half the amount of excellent professional material.
Some of the material I have enjoyed the most is fan created stories which give both the story as intended, and anecdotes of what happened at the table. This exemplifies possible story lines and scenes much better than the polished material where the authors, after play testing, have arrived at one canon way to see the story.
I'd much rather have the fandom which is contradictory, and honest about it, because it is created by different people, than the professional canon which still turns out contradictory or ambiguous.
I'd much rather have the constantly evolving fandom wiki, with continuous improvement, than static books (whether PDF or print) which only update when there is a business case therefore.
That said, I would like to see more professional material. I am, like others who have posted, weary of subscriptions and memberships outlasting my own interest, but I am not ruling it out. Sadly, postage becomes prohibitive on individual books, easily more expensive than the book itself, and I really do find it easier to navigate books than PDFs.
But yeah, a subscription is not a bad idea. I would certainly consider it, even though I would prefer a periodical over a book club.
¹ Look at the 3ed Loch Leglean book for an example which would have been better and more readable without the art work.
It's funny I'm the opposite. Physical books get put on a shelf or in a cupboard and never looked at. If there's ever an option to just get a pdf I go for it in a flash! I can't live without my bookmarks and searchable text.
But you're far from alone in preferring the physical books, I've heard many people say the same.
I wonder if a Ars Magica "Folio" might have some merit.
If you do it, please make it more frequent than once every seven years ...
TBH ... I am not sure which features of the Folio you want to use.
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Speaking of which- a simple directory of what has been included in past folios, when various canon spells were developed, as a sort of detailed history of the advancement of the order would be interesting... probably not something that could be sold as a stand alone product but an inexpensive subscription which involved this sort of supporting material would be interesting: price it and produce it for such "tractatus" low end materials and the concern about quality degradation would be virtually non-existent: If I am paying $5 a year for a monthly subscription for example I am not going to be worried if a few months the material just doesn't feel worthwhile to me.
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I would pay an unreasonable sum of money for this product. The Legends of Hermes chapter dealing with Conciatta and the development of Vim is one of my favourite bits of content in the whole of 5e.
Edit: to round it out as a product maybe it could be used as a springboard for more in depth rules and advice on original research/lab work? Sort of use the historical advances as both world-building and also as mechanical examples? Like a mixture halfway between something like Legends of Hermes/Ancient Magic and Apprentices in terms of content.
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I myself have got very used to having physical and PDF copies, and find use in both. I almost exclusively use physical books while playing, while PDFs are all I read when doing prep work between sessions. I definitively would miss either of them.
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@Timothy_Ferguson I'm aware of one other person who makes all their $ from RPGs and that is John Tarnowski or "The RPG Pundit". I'm not sure about family, but know that he's based in Urugauy, where living costs are much lower, and earning an American currency cashflow goes a lot farther down there.
As for subscription or pre-orders... I'm basically down for whatever with more Ars Magica Material.
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WRT: "A team of writers?"
uuuh, they already had, and could easily have again, as all of us who were writing it loved writing it and would write it again (from what I've seen talking occasionally with them offline)
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A "team of writers" implies more than simply a collection of writers- a team coordinates and works together, not simply a set of people each contributing their own material without an effort towards consistency.
Which is what we did. For years.
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I know of a few people who make all their mac-n-cheese through RPG sales and material, but they're hitting multiple distribution channels, they're putting out a lot of content, they're working in popular systems, they're diversifying systems, they're writing a lot and building a solid back catalogue of material. It's a full time gig, and it's not common, but it's possible.
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Figured I would thrown in my two cents, since while not the primary SG I am the guy in our group with all the books (heck, I ordered a bunch of them while deployed in Afghanistan).
There is no way, shape, or form that I would be joining a subscription product. When I tried it in the 80's and 90's, I got screwed. Didn't even think of touching it again for decades. Then I tried it in the 10's, because subscription boxes became all the rage and I thought things might have gotten better. Yes they did get better initially, but the quality quickly declined and they rapidly felt like they were not worth the money. So I canceled all the ones I had.
Heck, I have been trying to cut down on my subscription services. It seems everyone has decided this is the method to use and it has resulted in the requirement to get multiple subscriptions to maintain the same quality of service as before. So they pulled their products off Netflix and want you to pay for their service. Sorry but you just made what I had worse and now want to multiple what I pay monthly.
A lot of people are subscriptioned out and want nothing to do with anything of the kind.
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This mirrors what I've seen, though I've been fortunate enough to usually see it second hand.
This is sort of also where my comments have come from.
I agree with you on general principle. I strongly dislike the shift from ownership to subscription in the current world (examples abound, like Office or streaming services). That said, I feel differently with this for several reasons:
- firstly: It's not rental but instead subscribing to buying;
- secondly: I have enough confidence in the quality of products created by Atlas Games that I'm willing to risk a subscription that I could cancel anyway if quality dropped;
- thirdly: the hiring of Justin Alexander is also a quality assurance for me, as I've been following him on The Alexandrian for years, and seems like a guy that can pull off a level of quality on par to David Chart's (which was IMHO impressively exceptional on all accounts).
TL;DR - I don't like subscritions, but I'm all for an Ars Magica subscription due to the reputation of the people involved.
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