Evaluating a Game by it's Third Party Output

 A short post today....because better to post a bit than not at all! While digging through stuff to keep my sanity amidst the long and arduous work days I noticed that my current OSR/Indie darlings....Old-School Essentials and Shadowdark, to be specific, have a metric ton of output from third party publishers online. Shadowdark is measurably immense in the volume of content out there, and just browsing Drivethrurpg.com led me down a rabbit hole and I suddenly have like twelve new books ordered and on the way. OSE is not much different, either.....it's slightly obfuscated by having an identity that is shared with B/X D&D and all the other retroclones it is in direct competition with, but it also has a serious volume of output from the 3PP corner of this hobby.

BRP, to contrast, gets a modicum of love from some very obscure angles in the 3PP space, most of which is actually dominated by the Miskatonic imprint for 3PP from Chaosium and almost all of that is for Call of Cthulhu and not BRP. 

I have a working theory that the more energetic a support base a game has is dependent on just how easy it is for the fans and interested authors/artists to 1: generate content with the rules in question; 2: get that into a presentable PDF/POD form; and 3: the extent to which those 3PP feel that they retain creative control in this process. So the less creative control a 3PP feels they have, the less likely you are to see a high volume of support. There's a 4th factor at work here, too: if a game has enough of a following it will generate 3PP output, regardess of the other factors. This may explain why Pathfinder 2E has a modest but noticeable amount of third party content, but only from those who love the game enough to write for it and also don't mind the vagaries of the ORC license, which I have heard some differing opinions on. Meanwhile the third party output for 5E remains sky high; but the latter is probably driven by creators who also like making money and know that, even today with 5.5E as fractured as it seems, it is still the top dog in town and will sell the most product. 

Anyway.....just some thoughts. Now I must continue to peruse the dozen or so new Shadowdark books (and a few more OSE books) I snagged.