amaril said:
I beleive this is what Mearls was reffering to in his recent post about the OGL failing. However, as some have noted, the failure was in part of WotC not incorporating those great ideas presented by the public. Instead WotC went on its merry way while other publishers fragmented the community with variant systems.
I've talked about this in passing in various places, but I think it bears repeating.
It isn't really practical for WotC to dynamically incorporate community improvements in to the core rules. We'd have to reprint the rules on a far more regular basis than the typical gamer would stand for!
Thus, I think it's more practical and useful for a user-maintained and generated process to emerge, like a database or wiki of variants and ideas organized, modified, and grown by volunteers.
More importantly, if fans run things, you (hopefully) prevent economic pressures from messing with it. For instance, imagine if WotC did maintain such a wiki. When 4e came out, it'd be hard for WotC to justify spending any effort on the 3e wiki. A company only has so much time and energy to go around.
By the same token, you wouldn't want a publisher hijacking the process for its own gain. It's been interesting to see how the discourse on 4e vs. 3e has shaped up. This is the first time in D&D's history that you have a number of publishers whose best economic interests lie in stopping people from moving to the new edition. I imagine that the venomous rage has been in part fed by people who serve as opinion leaders for some portions of the audience.
Now, in open development there will be factions, jealousies, and competition, but ideally the social environment around it helps to muffle them. IME, bringing money into the equation simply magnifies such issues.
But what does that mean for the game's development? Well, the people at WotC play and read tons of games. When they hired me, they were well aware of Iron Heroes. My work on that game played a role in helping put me into a position to have a lot of input on 4e.
By the same token, people at WotC make a point of keeping track of what's out there for RPGs. It's just good business, and makes sense to keep track of the state of RPGs. A fan-driven movement to iterate the game would draw attention and would have an effect on the game.
At the end of the day, the real value offered by open gaming is transferable across all games if open gaming promotes a culture of design, useful criticism, growth, and learning. Regardless of what game you play, that's good for the hobby.
Even if WotC doesn't directly tap into the specific design produced by the (theoretical at the moment) movement, the movement improves all design in the industry.
