I was reading the rpg.net review of the new Paranoia XP game, and someone mentioned that the '5th edition' book basically never happened; there was some mention of "the Crash", which would suggest this edition had made serious metaplot changes along with perhaps rule changes.

Shadowrun has had the same thing; 1st edition was 2050, 2nd was 2053, 3rd edition is now into 2063.

This seems like an interesting avenue to explore if you want to establish a.. "franchise" is the wrong word, but maybe if you want to "industrialise" your publishing; you want to put out a new book every few years to keep generating revenue.

Obviously it's not going to work for generic-type games, but anything with a strong central setting could benefit from this model. Maybe you'd be able to customise the rules to each era. If you wanted to play 1st Era, you'd buy the first book.. maybe 2nd Era isn't interesting, so you skip it, but the 3rd Era setting is great and has got some new rules and crunchy toys, so you pick that up and start running a game set in that period.

Any other examples of this kind of publishing? How would you set it up to "work", if you don't think it's a great idea as it stands?

These weren't exactly new editions, but Last Unicorn Games published a variety of different main sourcebooks for its Star Trek line, each detailing a different ST television series. The main rules stayed completely the same, but each book did have some custom rules for that series in particular, and/or some additions (e.g. the DS9 book introduced rules for non-federation characters). Of course, each book had a completely different look about it too (all in high-gloss color).

From my perspective, as a customer, they were largely a waste of money, because they were expensive due to all that gloss and art, but reproduced material out the wazoo; IIRC, non-fed characters was the main addition in the DS9 book, and while I wanted those rules, I wasn't willing to pay for a whole new rulebook to get them. On the other hand, if you only wanted to play in one setting, you could do that.

ON the whole, it did indeed seem to be a money-making scheme with LUG, and not really in the interests of most players. If you do something like this, you have to really make each edition or alternate core book contain a lot of good material, to make it worth having -- doubly so if your production values, and costs, are high. If you do pdf, this may be more viable...but on the other hand, pdf also allows really cheap little mini-supplements.

I'd think PDF would be the way to go here.
It'd also be a way to satisfy people who like additional material (players guides to XXX for example) and keep things light.

First: just realised it cut off the rest of the topic. It ended: "..and metaplot." which is important since that was the thrust of the idea. ;)

I'd thought about PDF. Instead of PDF exclusively, I'd probably look at POD services. This sort of treatment - "game bibles" with a lot of rules and setting - seems like it'd work better in a physical tome, and I've found that a very large percentage of folk never print out their PDF books. This is mostly due to owning ink- or bubblejet printers, as opposed to the old laserjet workhorses; pumping out a 100+ page book is just horribly costly for them.

Maybe selling $5 quick-start + Setting Overview rules in a B&M store, and then have people go online to order up their POD books? The idea was to get away from having a central 'Rules Book' + a lot of sattelite setting books, so that seems like it might be an idea.