[Tegyrius]

Speaking as one of the aforementioned developers (thanks, Leg!), I will say that there is a wide spectrum of critical behavior in gamer responses to published material. At one end, you have a subject matter expert who puts forth a well-reasoned analysis of a work's shortcomings and offers some solid alternatives. At the other end, you have the semi-literate, hebephrenic scrawlings of a fan (short for "fanatic," let's not forget) whose offense stems from the work's contradiction of his own uninformed opinion of the way "things ought to be," which may involve a vast body of "unpublished supplements" that would induce retinal hemorrhaging in any real author who chanced to lay his gaze upon them.

The former sometimes gets you hired as a freelancer if you can write and hit deadlines... and if the company still exists. The latter makes us sit around and cry bitter, bitter tears into the cheap beer that is all we can afford to use to drown our sorrows.

ETA: I became too enamored of my own vocabulary (I so rarely get to deploy "hebephrenic" - thanks, Justin Achilli!) and forgot to make the point for which I originally hit "Reply." As a game designer (if I am allowed to lay claim to that title), few things other than a paycheck please me more than seeing fans take my work and use it as a starting point for things I never would've thought to do. If I wanted to produce pure shining material unbesmirched by the hands of fans, I'd be writing teen fiction and threatening lawsuits over derivative fanfic. Instead, I create tools that other people can use to tell stories. For T2k, Paul Mulcahy's work stands out to me as a shining example of awesome fan support - Paul is the Jane's of T2k and has compiled a library of game material that few publishers would ever be able to produce as a commercial product. For 2013, one of my favorite fan threads in the 93GS forum was Traject0ry's Karelia Regain material, because it was a look at a corner of the world that I never would've thought to examine in enough detail to use as a campaign setting.

- C.