D&D 5E Is D&D Next Open?

[DaveMage]

Isn't Mearls a part of WotC? It sure sounded like he wanted OGL 5e, at least for a while. It's second hand, sure, but from sources that, I think, are trustworthy.

Mearls cut his chops with the OGL, of course, so on a personal level, it certainly was a good thing for him! (Kind of like a minor league/development league for WotC. )

 

[Jester David]

I do!

The problem is, the genie's out of the bottle. Third parties can essentially create D&D (or D&D derivative) products at will. So WotC can either embrace that or resist it. Having more companies promote your brand would seem to be better than having those companies promote a different brand.

A major point of the OGL/d20 license was to sell more player's handbooks. For a time from 2000-2003, almost *all* 3rd party FRPG publishers had the following tagline (or similar) on a number of their products: "Requires the use of the Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook published by Wizards of the Coast". That's some serious brand promotion. WotC failed to continue to leverage it and embrace it, and instead chose to fight it.

Maybe. Maybe not. My group never switched to 4e, but for the longest time we didn't switch to Pathfinder either. If the OGL never existed, and there was no Pathfinder it likely would have made very little difference to us.
2e was less successful than 1e long before the OGL. 4e might have clung to life a little longer without the OGL but not much longer. People would have stuck to older editions or tried entirely different games.

If everyone had thought 4e was better than 3e/OGL content then the existence of the OGL is irrelevant.

 

[delericho]

I find funny all this conversation if OGL hurt Wizards or not. If hurt Paizo or not. If 4e was too strict or not. I find all this talk funny because we talk about the companies and how these actually make big, little or no profit. We are even taking sides about their profits. I can understand this to a degree. The RPGs companies produce the game we love. I can understand it but i don't agree with all the focus we give to the companies.

Almost noone is asking if open or close gaming policies helped the subjects: the gamers

That's because, quite frankly, we're not the important people in this discussion. 5e will be open, or not, based on the decision of WotC. They will take that decision, ultimately, on pragmatic grounds: will opening the game give them more sales than it will lose?

To that end, the question of whether the OGL helped or harmed WotC is the key one. (Although, actually, even that's not quite right - the question should really be: do WotC believe that the OGL helped them or harmed them?)

FWIW, I'll be very surprised if 5e doesn't have any license at all, and I'll equally be very surprised if it is noticably more generous than the GSL.

A major point of the OGL/d20 license was to sell more player's handbooks.

Indeed. But...

Back when 3e was in development, extensive analysis was done that established that it was core rulebook sales that made the overwhelming majority of the money for an edition. Thus, the purpose of everything else was to push those core rulebooks (and, specifically, the PHB). And so the d20 license made a lot of sense - all those additional products that required the PHB for use were undeniably a good thing. (And note that that's the d20 license, not the OGL since the latter allowed stand-alone games. In any case...)

However, I'm not sure the old analysis still holds today. I'm reasonably sure that for 4e the key was DDI subscriptions, and that for Pathfinder it is Adventure Path subscriptions that drives the business. If that is the case, then the calculation changes - it makes sense for Paizo to embrace OGL fully since any add-on helps drive people to buy their (closed) adventure content; it makes sense for WotC to seek a tighter (adventure-specific?) license since they don't gain anything from people producing additional rules material that isn't integrated into the DDI tools.

And having said that... I'm far from convinced there will be a 5e equivalent of the DDI tools - if they were doing such a thing, I'm sure we'd have heard about them recruiting the required people by now. And if they're not doing 5e tools, that changes the calculus again. So, we'll just need to see.

 

[variant]

The number one thing that would probably keep Wizards from releasing 5e under the OGL is the fear that Paizo will turn around, rip it off and name it Pathfinder 2nd edition.

 

[Henry]

The OGL is too open. Competitors shouldn't be able to make their own PHB. It shouldn't be possible to do what Paizo did.
But the GSL is too closed, to the point of being more of a hinderance than a benefit.
...
A policy for open gaming also helps the fans. At a time where anyone with a Google account can set up a free blog or website, hosting and sharing your fan content is pretty darn easy. It would be nice to know the WotC lawyers aren't going to start throwing around C+Ds.

I'll remind everyone what Kamikaze Midget already pointed out - the OGL did exactly what its writer intended it to do - he said as much in a FAQ in late 2000, before he left the company"

I also know that if the OGL is "dead as a doornail" in WotC's perspeçtive, then DDN is probably dead as a doornail to me other than one shots here and there. I regularly use free or very inexpensive 3rd party OGL tools in prep of our Pathfinder games - as a system it's very appealing to most of my game group, and it would take a lot of convenience and value added to persuade the. To switch from it as a mainstay. In order to make it easy for me to want to sell my group on it, it would not only have to be easy for my group to manipulate and advance PCs with free or cheap 3rd party tools, it would have to have easy and cheap/free tools for me to prep for each game session. If i want the latest monster book, it costs me 10 bucks to get it in PDF, and i know that in 2 or 3 months, a 3PP is going to make a tool to let me grab and prep an adventure using its stats. It doesn't cost me 30 bucks for the PDf of the book, and then another 10 pr 20 bucks a month just to use the stats in computerized prep. It also means I likely wouldn't have the optional support of companies making supplemental stuff like adventures, maps, and props compatible with that very material (like Book of the River kingdoms was for Kingmaker, or Under Frozen Stars was for Jade Regent).

OGL has a lot more connotations than just "pirate whole games" - it means being agile enough through the outlet of third parties to respond to customer need.

 

[Henry]

The number one thing that would probably keep Wizards from releasing 5e under the OGL is the fear that Paizo will turn around, rip it off and name it Pathfinder 2nd edition.

Yeah, but that wont happen until after WotC builds up a large fan base for 5e and then abandons it. Lesson to be learned - don't be mad if another person turns your trash into treasure.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

The number one thing that would probably keep Wizards from releasing 5e under the OGL is the fear that Paizo will turn around, rip it off and name it Pathfinder 2nd edition.

even the thought of that sent blood pressure through the roof...

and based on there track record they would not only do it, but I would be told by many people they were the 'true' path and WotC was mony grubbing...

 

[I'm A Banana]

Of course not. But the rich benefits of the OGL Paizo is reaping come at WotC's expense. Right now I bet WotC wishes they'd never even made the OGL. From a business standpoint, it was a mistake.

You could tell another narrative with that. One that has the OGL gain WotC the good will and free work to sell core books that network effects bring, and a 4e that, in contrast, was closed and locked down, and suffered for that fact.

I mean, if 4e hadn't been as closed as it was, Paizo wouldn't have had much incentive to make Pathfindner. Perhaps the mistake wasn't in letting the genie out of the bottle, it was in trying to put it back in.

All of which is just to say that any dire pronouncements on how the OGL was utterly ruinous to WotC may be more projections of the poster's own biases than they are business realities the company needs to deal with.

 

[DaveMage]

Yeah, but that wont happen until after WotC builds up a large fan base for 5e and then abandons it. Lesson to be learned - don't be mad if another person turns your trash into treasure.

Exactly. And I really don't get why anyone would be mad at Paizo. WotC wasn't interested in 3.5 anymore. Paizo simply filled a need. Obviously I can't speak for every Pathfinder fan, but if Paizo had somehow accepted and used the GSL, I still wouldn't be buying 4E stuff - even from Paizo. 4E was not a style of play I was interested in. I'm guessing there are many, many more like me.

 

[Umbran]

Folks, if you want to turn this into edition warring, company bashing crap, I can bring the banhammer out right now, and get started.

These hurts and rivalries are from over half a decade ago. Let it go and move on, already.