Kristian Serrano
Explorer
I found two interesting Q&As from Ryan Dancey on WotC's site. They really give a strong perspective of what WotC was trying to achieve with the OGL and the D20 STL. I think they are interesting reads. Below are a few things I personally found interesting.
First, the OGL...
One point made
Another peice...
Next, the D20 STL...
The most interesting thing about this interview (IMHO) was the following statement:
First, the OGL...
One point made
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.Ryan Dancey said:The other great effect of Open Gaming should be a rapid, constant improvement in the quality of the rules. With lots of people able to work on them in public, problems with math, with ease of use, of variance from standard forms, etc. should all be improved over time. The great thing about Open Gaming is that it is interactive -- someone figures out a way to make something work better, and everyone who uses that part of the rules is free to incorporate it into their products. Including us. So D&D as a game should benefit from the shared development of all the people who work on the Open Gaming derivative of D&D.
Another peice...
Too bad we never saw any of those "rules light" or diceless systems. I think they could have been interesting.Ryan Dancey said:The idea is to abstract the "game" inside Dungeons & Dragons and reduce it to a genre-neutral set of concepts and rules. Then, we'll layer on a thick helping of D&D-type fantasy elements, like the standard D&D classes, races, spells, and monsters. In the future, we might layer on a science fiction layer, or a horror layer, or any other genre we think would be interesting. In fact, Jon Tweet feels that a very strong "rules light" version of D&D could easily be constructed from the existing manuscript; being completely compatible with but just smaller in scope and application than the full blown 3rd Edition D&D rules. There is a clear path, in fact, to a way to make D&D completely diceless! We may experiment with some of those options (or other people may choose to invest the time and energy to do so) via the D20 rules and the Open Gaming movement. Only time will tell.
Next, the D20 STL...
The most interesting thing about this interview (IMHO) was the following statement:
With these two articles in mind, I can see where WotC is coming from with the GSL. I think there are some mistakes from which they learned via the OGL and D20 STL in terms of QA, and the GSL is an effort to protect their product from those same mistakes.Ryan Dancey said:There are a lot of people at Wizards of the Coast who are already a little leery about this whole "Open Gaming" thing, and those people rightfully raised the roof about the quality of license compliance.