In contrast to the GSL, Ryan Dancey on OGL/D20 in WotC archives

[WhatGravitas]

You wouldn't want a publisher hijacking a theoretical open development community for its own ends, because when the goal moves from "serve the community" to "serve the publisher", the community suffers.

Ironically, I feel that WotC has done this a bit - a lot of 4E is at least inspired by OGL products, your own Iron Heroes brought you and some ideas behind it into 4E. That's why I'm pretty sad that 4E isn't OGC - because 4E is definitively a child of the OGL, incorporating ideas, experiences, and manpower birthed during the last years under the OGL.

Cheers, LT.

 

[mearls]

Unless, of course, WotC was doing a whole new edition for D&D and wanted to continue to lead the Open Gaming Movement, or at least be a part of it. Naw, I've got to call you on this one. There's obviously been a decision within WotC to pull as far back from Open Gaming as it can at this stage and that's just fine. It's their right to move away from the movement. No hard feelings.

WotC is part of a potential open gaming movement, for reasons outlined in my original post. If for some reason one could reasonably describe an open movement as specifically excluding any publisher, or any subset of publishers, then the movement has failed.

The GSL is a system license designed to allow publishers to profit by producing D&D compatible products. Its benefits and drawbacks are irrelevant to open source development. It occupies the same space as the d20 license. The d20 license was also irrelevant to open source development.

The OGL, in theory, was designed to allow for open source style development, as Ryan talked about in the links above. That didn't happen, though plenty of good designs did use the SRD as their basis.

Regardless of 4e's relationship (or lack thereof) to the OGL, an open source approach to design can help gaming as a whole for reasons I outlined above, such as by promoting a culture of design, discussion, and invention.

My contention is that the economic and social benefits of open gaming development - making money by publishing a game, the prestige of pointing to a published book with your material in it - are at best short term benefits to specific subsets of the community.

Cultivating a culture of design via open source methods has the potential for great payoffs by creating an environment of study and learning. The actual games produced by or tinkered with by such a group are irrelevant compared to the *process* of tinkering, creating, and learning.

 

[Darrin Drader]

You wouldn't want a publisher hijacking a theoretical open development community for its own ends, because when the goal moves from "serve the community" to "serve the publisher", the community suffers.

Ideally, an open movement serves the community, which includes both publishers and users.

No offense, but isn't anyone who is publishing open development products for money in effect hijacking the community, at least according to your definition? I have a hard time seeing any hijacking of the open community happening, and I apologize if this is putting words in your mouth, but it seems as though you are implying that there is a hijack going on. To cite specifics, Pathfinder is actively engaging the community to create a new version of the open game. Isn't this what you're promoting in the first place - rules improvement through community involvement of open design? What's more is that Pathfinder will most likely have an arrangement so that 3rd party publishers can support their game in an open fashion. I'm just not seeing any hijacking going on. To me, it looks more the like community is hijacking the future of the game towards a more universally desired end.

Don't get me wrong, 4th edition is a well designed game, but when you take that large of a step away from the game that launched open gaming and then put out a restrictive license that represents more of a threat to anyone who would adopt it rather than an enticement, does it really surprise you that there would be a community movement away from that product?

Take IBM for example. They opened up the PC architecture. They really intended for other companies to design widgets to work with the PC, but what happened instead is that Compaq came along and put out their own PC clones. While companies did release their PC widgets, others wanted to make their own PCs, and as a result PCs advanced faster than IBM could keep up. Eventually they were nothing more than a PC clone manufacturer, and after that they pretty much lost market share and stopped making them entirely. Now I'm pretty certain that the PC is far more advanced than it ever would have been if it would have remained exclusively an IBM product, but in order for that to happen, IBM had to lose control over its product.

The OGL is so open that WotC potentially faces the same fate as the IBM manufactured PC. If the final version of Pathfinder (or another OGL game for that matter) is released and then adopted by a large chunk of the gaming community, WotC has something to worry about. If this ends up happening, it will have been WotC's missteps that ultimately orchestrated their loss of control over the D&D brand. This isn't hijacking, it's evolution, and evolution is what open design is supposed to promote.

 

[xechnao]

WotC is part of a potential open gaming movement, for reasons outlined in my original post. If for some reason one could reasonably describe an open movement as specifically excluding any publisher, or any subset of publishers, then the movement has failed.

The GSL is a system license designed to allow publishers to profit by producing D&D compatible products. Its benefits and drawbacks are irrelevant to open source development. It occupies the same space as the d20 license. The d20 license was also irrelevant to open source development.

The OGL, in theory, was designed to allow for open source style development, as Ryan talked about in the links above. That didn't happen, though plenty of good designs did use the SRD as their basis.

Regardless of 4e's relationship (or lack thereof) to the OGL, an open source approach to design can help gaming as a whole for reasons I outlined above, such as by promoting a culture of design, discussion, and invention.

My contention is that the economic and social benefits of open gaming development - making money by publishing a game, the prestige of pointing to a published book with your material in it - are at best short term benefits to specific subsets of the community.

Cultivating a culture of design via open source methods has the potential for great payoffs by creating an environment of study and learning. The actual games produced by or tinkered with by such a group are irrelevant compared to the *process* of tinkering, creating, and learning.

What you are advocating here I think is a learning laboratory. My take is that such a thing to be successful should need some sponsorship. If there is a market around it, then obviously the market's biggest powers should be the ones to offer it. You work in Wotc. Do you see such a thing on the horizon?

 

[xechnao]

If not, then OGL is the next closest thing. If it manages to beat D&D's brand power -or whichever is the biggest one- some day then the open development movement will be the king of the hobby.

 

[WhatGravitas]

Do you see such a thing on the horizon?

I don't think WotC needs to do something like that actively. The RPG community is fairly close-knit (for a business), hence the industry itself is sort of a "learning laboratory". Between homebrews, Dragon submissions, reading insightful, and useful threads/posts (like this one), one should be able to get such experience - don't forget Mike himself was picked up in a similar way between doing freelance d20 stuff, Dragon articles, and being a member of ENWorld and, AFAIK, the Forge.

A programme for something like that isn't really viable, I think, considering the minimal benefits compared to the current ways to "learn" RPG design.

Cheers, LT.

 

[mearls]

I'm sure I could list a number of additional examples, but these are just a few that reflect WotCs closed-minded approach to open gaming with regards to their own material.

All three of those example point out why assuming that the responsibility for open gaming belongs in the hands of a publisher is a bad move. Publishers have to sell books, and they have needs that differ from a community of users.

The needs could range from "The sales team is concerned that putting this stuff online for free is hurting orders" to "We'd love to update the open content available online, but the realities of budgets and staffing means we have to choose between doing that and getting the next book out on time."

For an open source approach to work, it has to be community, not company, led.

 

[xechnao]

I don't think WotC needs to do something like that actively. The RPG community is fairly close-knit (for a business), hence the industry itself is sort of a "learning laboratory". Between homebrews, Dragon submissions, reading insightful, and useful threads/posts (like this one), one should be able to get such experience - don't forget Mike himself was picked up in a similar way between doing freelance d20 stuff, Dragon articles, and being a member of ENWorld and, AFAIK, the Forge.

A programme for something like that isn't really viable, I think, considering the minimal benefits compared to the current ways to "learn" RPG design.

Cheers, LT.

I agree with you. And yes, I do think that the hobby's or at least the open movement's problem now is D&D's brand name power.

 

[lutecius]

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.

huh, I had the impression that most publishers had a quite reasonable wait and see attitude. I think for most people, the "venomous rage" was pretty spontaneous (the comments and attitude of some wotc staffers didn't help though.) Maybe if they hadn't been left in the dark for so long, or if the GSL terms were friendlier, some of those publishers would be more enthusiastic about 4e.

 

[Kristian Serrano]

All three of those example point out why assuming that the responsibility for open gaming belongs in the hands of a publisher is a bad move. Publishers have to sell books, and they have needs that differ from a community of users.

The needs could range from "The sales team is concerned that putting this stuff online for free is hurting orders" to "We'd love to update the open content available online, but the realities of budgets and staffing means we have to choose between doing that and getting the next book out on time."

For an open source approach to work, it has to be community, not company, led.

Mike, the problem I'm addressing is that the community cannot legally do anything to update that content if it is not open content. Updating the SRD with errata, or releasing content based on closed content wasn't an option for the community because that non-SRD content was copyrighted and not open.

All I was suggesting was that WotC could have made the content open while only publishing it in a book (rather than in the SRD) with an OGL declaration. When errata for polymorph was released, there was no OGL declaration in it, even when it was published on WotC's Web site. When Complete Psionic updated psionics rules that were also available in the SRD, there was no OGL declaration in it that allowed others to publish those updates. In fact, had there been, community members could have made the changed for WotC in a version controlled document, and WotC could have allowed the community to simply updated the SRD with a simple upload with. d20SRD.org could have been a perfect venue for this in fact. It's outside of WotC's responsibility to update, but could have been officially recognized as the reference source for SRD updates.

WotC bound the communities hands from being able to update the very rules you claim could and should have been updated by the community.

What I'm getting at isn't an issue of whether or not WotC led the open gaming effort, but that it hindered it by restricting its biggest contribution to the open gaming community. No one, publishers or community members, was able to touch closed content from the world's most popular roleplaying game, the same game from which many D20 and OGL supplements were derived and for which most community members and publishers designed and developed new material.

By the way, I strongly disapprove of your insistent distinction between publishers and the community. In most cases, the community includes publishers and some community members ended up becoming publishers because of 1) WotCs reluctance to open its content and/or 2) because the OGL enabled them to become publishers of D20 and OGL material. Dreamscarred Press, which was created as a direct reaction to Complete Psionic's questionable level of quality, is a prime example of a community turned publisher as is EN World Publishing.