Stop!

In his reply to my previous post, The Grumpy Celt asks...

How should White Wolf have responded to the runaway success of the lines and what they were doing?

My answer is short and simple: Stop.

We have gotten this kind of obsession with sequels in our culture. Everything must continue forever. You can't just do something and STOP.

Tolkein wrote the Hobbit as a story for his kids. When asked for more, he wrote the LOTR trilogy. Then he stopped. He didn't write a slew of side novels about the stories of the individual characters beforehand or some crap like that. He wrote his epic and he stopped. He closed the book. The end. finito. game over.

At a certain point, you should stop working on something. If you are still energetic, do something new. But stop what you are currently working on. White Wolf actually kinda did that, in terms of making Werewolf and Mage and Changeling and so on. But they still couldn't stop, so they made a huge tree as things just kept branching off.

Final Fantasy can release a bunch of sequels because they really change the setting every time. Cloud lives in a totally different world from Squall. Most properties can't do that though, they have to stick with the same universe/world.

This inability to stop is how we got the Star Wars Prequels, Rocky V, Matrix Revolutions, and (sorry) Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition. If you are going to keep the setting alive, then truly reboot it. Go with a real change like Batman Begins did. Really reimagine things, change the theme, mood, etc. Shake it up.

But please don't just slightly stir the leftovers and serve it as a new dish.

Please.