OGL I think Paizo gets it.

[Sigurd]

The Paizo Community Use Policy allows non-commercial users to create content compatible with most of Paizo's products, and to share that content with others. A package of logos, illustrations and other content is available for free to users who sign up for an account on paizo.com and register their content there. Paizo will maintain a registry with links to this community-generated content, allowing easy access to the wealth of material being created by Paizo's community.

A lot of RPG players may only make a few things. They may be of varying quality but to the writers they will be important acts of giving. Making amateurs feel welcome and giving them clear guidelines should be a high priority for RPG companies. They're perhaps the best sort of encouragement you can give new games. Also, If someone buys your game and then can get a download for free it increases the value to the customer.

I like the idea of a project registry helping people find your work. A few pdf encouragements to this list of authors and they have content and a writer pool for very little money.

This feels to me like the environment WOTC retreated from when it left the OGL.


Sigurd

[freyar]

I've felt this way since I noticed ToH monsters in the first Pathfinder issue, etc. But yeah, having some logos and art available to use is really cool.

[Ourph]

This is almost the exact same model that Black Industries adopted for Warhammer FRP 2e and (while they eventually stopped publishing the books) that fan policy allowed the creation of a tremendous amount of really good gaming material that has been amazingly useful to me and really increased my enjoyment of the game.

If the Pathfinder fans take advantage of this opportunity the way Warhammer fans did, I expect to see a whole boatload of ultra-creative support material generated by this policy.

[Alzrius]

I agree, it's really cool of Paizo to not only make a very generous policy for non-commercial works, but to actually supply items in support of creating those works. That's a really generous move on their part which I think will pay off big time in raising support for Pathfinder.

[DaveMage]

Yeah, kudos to Paizo. I'll be interested to see the results too.

I love the way they run their company.

[Morrus]

With luck, WotC's fan policy will be similar.

[CapnZapp]

Originally Posted by Sigurd

This feels to me like the environment WOTC retreated from when it left the OGL.

Yup.

To be honest though, anything less and it would have been a huge disappointment.

[Garnfellow]

I've been getting pretty heavily into Mongoose Traveller lately, which also makes great use of the OGL. Combined with Marc Miller's various (and all very generous) licensing and fan use policies, I am absolutely struck by how vastly superior this all is as a business model to what WotC is doing.

Not to mention how much better this is for me as consumer.

There are a ton of free Traveller resources on the web, but instead of reducing my buying of Traveller material, all of these ancillary services are actually increasing it. They are creating and reinforcing my buying patterns.

The same thing happened during the d20 era: for close to 10 years I hardly even looked at another game system outside of the d20 family. Cool 3PP books increased the perceived value of my D&D investment, which led me to buy more WotC books, miniatures, and other accessories. The SRD, freely available on the web, made it incredibly easy to prepare adventures and work on my campaign -- which again increased the value of the game.

I'm not talking about hippy-frippy "open source will save the world, man" pie-in-the-sky dreams. I'm talking about the OGL driving significant, real sales patterns.

I didn't jump on the Mongoose Traveller bandwagon because it used the OGL. I jumped on because it got good reviews and Traveller has always been on my gamer lifelist. But once I got on, the use of the OGL coupled with Marc Miller's generosity with his IP are significantly helping to keep me on. (The fact that MGT is an elegant little system is key, too.)