How the Hobby Handles Expanding the TTRPG Player Options

EricMesa

- 5 minutes read - 906 words

As someone who is relatively new to TTRPGs (~3 years at this point, give or take), I first started with D&D 5e 2014. Before I could buy too many adventures or campaigns, D&D 5e 2024 came out. So, in my mind, a TTRPG should have 3 core books containing all the species (formerly races), classes, subclasses, monsters, and so on needed to play. Then, in 2024 I heard about the 5e fork Tales of the Valiant. If you’ve spent any time on my blog recently, you know that we’ve gone all-in on Tales of the Valiant, and haven’t really played D&D since. But I thought it was weird that Kobold Press started doing kickstarters for Monster Vault 2 and Player’s Guide 2 and were adding new species/ancestries in The Labyrinth Worldbook. “Well,” I told myself, “D&D has been around for 50 years. It’s had time to establish itself. Maybe KP needs to just put these books out now?”

It turned out that I just didn’t know my TTRPG history. The Cosmere TTRPG was my gateway into Pathfinder 2e as I learned they were inspired by Pathfinder’s 3 action economy. At least once a quarter (or so it seems) there’s a Pathfinder Humble Bundle. So I picked up some $500ish worth of Pathfinder 2e books for $40 and I saw that they have both a Player Core and a Player Core 2. After I had the idea for this blog post, but before I could start writing it, I came across this news story about Pathfinder coming out with a Monster Core 2.

Additionally, when looking at the D&D 4e books published on RPG Drive Thru (or GM’s Guild? It’s all the same company) I saw that 4e had multiple Player’s Guides, Dungeon Master Guides, and Monster books. So it’s not so much that Kobold Press was weird - it was more that D&D 5e was weird.

In fact, as I learned more about D&D 5e - it seemed as though their new player and GM options were either hidden in campaign books (not too dissimilar from KP and The Labyringth) or as fake in-world books like Xanathar and Tasha’s. While cute, and matching with the author’s notes that, sadly, didn’t make it into the 5e 2024 books, it did slightly obfuscate things.

With that bit of history out of the way, I wanted to talk about how I feel about the expansions. On the one hand, even with the expansions, TTRPGs still have one of the best hours of fun vs cost ratio out there. Not counting only using the free/community rules, the best ratio is obviously when only buying the core 3 books (or 1 or 2 books if that’s what your system does - I see you, Daggerheart). If we take the average of a new edition every 10 years (and you don’t HAVE to go to the new edition - I have a future blog post about that), then it comes out to roughly $10/year. If you’re playing 4 hours / month, that’s $0.20 / hour to play the game. That’s pretty awesome compared to anything else - movies, streaming, most non-sandbox video games, books, comics, etc. So even if you’re buying a Player’s Guide 2 and a Monster Core 3 and so on, it’s still pretty cheap amortized over the life of the game. (Just don’t buy the 2014 rules the year before the 2024 rules come out - yeesh!)

Where things start to get a little iffy for me is when new character options are gated behind settings or campaign books. Sometimes it makes perfect sense. Let’s say your favorite system puts out an American Wild West inspired campaign setting. GM discretion is always a thing, but I don’t think I’d want a “cowboy” at my table if I were running a medieval style campaign (or if it were a Sci-Fi campaign - Cowboy Bebop, aside). But if you look at Tales of the Valiant (which is a system I love and have poured a lot of money into and enjoy playing and running), they put their dragonborn species in The Labyrinth Worldbook. So even if you don’t care at all about that setting, if you want the character options, you need that book. It also blurs the line a bit. In a multi-book TTRPG (ToV, D&D, PF2e), the Player’s Guide is really the only book that a player needs/should buy. The other two books are for the GM. Can a player buy a Monster book? Sure. But if they’re not going to DM/GM, that’s just a purchase for fun, not a purchase they’ll be able to use. So, in that vein, it seems “wrong” for them to “have to” purchase a setting book to get player options. Also, this is not a Kobold Press problem or issue - I’ve seen the same thing (or similar things) in D&D 5e (now that I know where to look) and Pathfinder 2e (although with ALL the Pathfinder rules available for free on AoN, that’s kind of a non-issue)

I know I don’t currently have comments implemented on my blog since I switched to Hugo, but I intend to post this to Bluesky and Mastodon. If you have thoughts, including business reasons for why character options are doled out the way they are, I would love to hear them. I’m always ready to have my opinion changed, or at least have my knowledge expanded.