UA - Whens the next product due out?

[Michael D. Mearls 97]

This might be an old thread, but I just had to toss in my personal feel on
story arcs.

Back in the day, I used to be a big time BattleTech fan. The best BattleTech
supplements ever made were these 200 or so page histories of each major power
in the game. Most of these books didn't have a single game stat in them; they
were just narrative descriptions of the game's history. This was cool, because
it gave players a real sense of the how's and why's behind the setting. It was
cool to interact with other fanboys and talk about the history, or to evoke
memories/reactions from the mere mention of the name of a particular planet or
battle.

I got out of BattleTech as soon as the game developers concentrated less on
well thought out, well written expansions that gave depth to the game and
instead spent most of their time cranking out moronic piles of drivel that
"advanced" the "story" line. There was absolutely no point in playing out
battles or campaigns once you knew that one side had been declared the bad guys
and was going to get splattered in the next novel and supplements.

So, to summarize:

History = depth = good.
Stories = new stuff for the sake of new stuff = bad.

- Mearls