Reply To: How Many Game Systems Is Too Many?

[limburger 21709xp 0]

I’d say the industry is as much part of the problem as the cause of it.

Everyone always seems to think that their version of a given rules set for a specific historic era is ‘da best’.
And you do notice that sometimes mechanics are renamed or tweaked just to avoid getting hammered by the corporate lawyers from the big fish in the pond (or a fear of getting ‘ripped off’ if someone else dare to name a space marine a space marine … ).

OTOH … it is difficult / impossible to share rules at a corporate level, because they tend to believe in creating vendor-lock-in as a means of survival (GW being a prime example). We saw what happened when D&D became ‘open source’ by accident … it gave live to a competitor and it must have scared the crap out of WoTC management. Their response was tightening of the screws, because they felt that the open nature cost them sales.

Pairing down game systems from an end-user point of view should be ‘easy’.
Pick systems that avoid vendor-lock-in and you can say good bye to quite a few systems in your possession.
However you’d still would want a lot of the systems, because of the fluff that helps you build your armies …