I've always wondered how you make players buy WHFRP or expansions? Never in my RPG lifetime over 20 years has anyone but GM bought game components. It's sort of "being the host" thing. Also, centralized ownership is considered logical as the one who prepares games owns the resources.

You're right. The only way really, is to have players who are tempted to GM at some point themselves.

Whether or not they run a 'spin off' campaign from yours, or they just have their own idea of a campaign they want to run...

It has one benefit:

The vast majority of player careers and relevent information are contained within one supplement, the player's vault.

Job done?

Player's guide..and it's available via pdf.

jh

In our group, the GM bought the first set and introduced us all to this particular system (he had gotten us interested in a couple other free demo rpgs before), but other people in the group have been helping to buy the expansions. Especially when our GM says he'll add in any rules from an expansion we get, it gives us incentive to help pitch in and buy some. So far our GM bought the starter kit and Gathering Storm, and rest of the players have pitched in to get the Adventurer's toolkit and Winds of Magic. With 6 people in the group (I know, it's a lot, but usually only 4 or so show up at any given event), we each just pitch in $5-10, depending on how much the specific expansion means to us (our magician players really wanted the other orders and expanded magic rules in Winds of Magic). This has worked so far, as it allows us to add more rules without our GM having to spend tons of money (he pitches in at least $10 per expansion, but we usually end up paying the rest ourselves).

I bought DM's shield for D&D. And didn't even get any exp!

But yes. It seems to be the trend. I've almost all products in WFRP2 and 3 lines and looking at them makes me shiver when I think about the amount of money they've required.

The reality seems to be that groups tend to change and why buy an expansion to a game you might not be playing in next 6 months? For my group, only 1 core member remains since we started 2 years ago. Work, kids, hobbies, people moving, interest changing..

I tend to buy everything Warhammer I can get my hands on because I just like to read it, so I don't mind too much. Back when my husband and I were in school, though, he used to encourage his players to buy supplements by telling them that they could only use a character/trait/ability from a supplement if they were willing to purchase it themselves; if we bought it, those skills were available to NPCs, but not to the PCs. We also just straightforwardly asked for donations at one point, and given that we had a standing game with a lot of players, people were good about pitching in.

Now my problem is the opposite: I mention that we might play something in the future, and half of my players buy it and read it before I've even decided if I ike the system enough to run it! Plus, they're dice fiends. They want the specialty dice OR ELSE. Everyone had his own set of WFRP dice within a couple of days of our second session. We just played a game of Mouse Guard with the Box Set, and one of my players was on the web the same evening looking at whether he could get those snake/axe/sword dice. He was disappointed when they found he couldn't. (In fact, he griped to me--as if I could do something about it!) They're going to have a heart attack the first time we play an RPG with standard dice.