Mike Mearls On the OGL

[wayne62682]

Unlike Microsoft, though, WotC didn't offer secondary services (like training for Adminstrators/DMs and stuff like that). Maybe the DDI can be seen as changing this?

Would *you* pay $125/exam to take tests to become a WCDM (Wizards Certified Dungeon Master)?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Would *you* pay $125/exam to take tests to become a WCDM (Wizards Certified Dungeon Master)?

No*, but I'd pay 10 € monthly to get the entire service of the DDI. That's a "secondary service" surrounding their "OS".


*) or would I? If it made me a better DM?

 

[JDJblatherings]

What about the failure of gaining traction outside of Wizards of the Coast and publishers who got into the market under the OGL blanket? To me the biggest disappointment of the OGL was that it didn't seduce established companies in nor did any new systems really expand upon the base of the game (barring a few very notable exceptions). I guess that can't really be considered a failure exactly, but it does speak for the small traction that I think OGL ultimately has.

Soem established companies came out with Deadlands D20. Weird War D20. Tribe-8 had d-20 appendix, Talislanta had a D20 book, the Sword & Sorcery imprint of Whitewolf. WoW D20. Everquest D20. Harn D20. Chaosium had D20 Elric book. Not all giants certainly but many companies.

OGL small? Take a look arround an online vendor sometime, anything but small impact from D20.

 

[ThirdWizard]

OGL small? Take a look arround an online vendor sometime, anything but small impact from D20.

Anything that ends in d20 fits my description of "publishers who got into the market under the OGL blanket." I'm talking about non-d20 things. I'm talking about not the expansion of d20 gaming but the expansion of (edit) the use of (/edit) the license. If the OGL remained only for d20 games, then it has no traction in the greater RPG community. If almost all you can find published under the OGL is d20, then it's not much of a movement at all IMO.

 

[redcard]

Well, honestly, my FLGS hated the OGL. Sure, it produced some good products, but now every Tom Dick and Harry who could buy the rights from a movie product would create a RPG using D20. There are rows upon rows of merchndise that will never sell , will never be played, and are just crap products. Yes, there were gems, and that's awesome, but there were a lot more stinkers than gems.

Second, for the person who said that Opensource software is about one central code base with lots of developers, that's one way to do it. A more common way to do it now is distributed code bases that serve multiple purposes. For example, in Pidgin, there is a library called "LibPurple" that connects to various IM clients. That's used ALL over the place. It's expanded upon in different projects, and sometimes that code is folded back, sometimes it is not. Wizards is not a Microsoft because Wizards released their code under the OGL, as it were. They can't undo it. If you look at the OGL, you'll see that there's no way to undo what they've done.

Opensource works because of three key components, and this is from someone who is an opensource developer.

ONE. Freedom. The freedom to do what we want, when we want it, how we want it.

TWO. Code Reuse. The ability to take leverage large groups of coders to improve functionality in multiple products by providing functionality in ONE product.

THREE. Code Sharing. The ability to completely share all forms of code that touches an opensource product without fear of retribution.

Free software licensed under an opensource licenses is nearly viral, and it's complete for the entire project. Any code that touches most free software is typically released under the same license. In one case, it MUST be released under the same license. The failing of the OGL is it tried to "half-ass" Opensource. It allowed for the ability to create "closed source" zones. And when you have that ability, and companies are afraid of their IP wandering off, they will often use it.

In order for the OGL to be as successful as Opensource, you must get people to believe in the Open Source methodology. You must not have "Non-covered" zones. You must have people willing to take and extend the product at their leisure.

Now I agree that Wizards is not as good as anyone else in this.. but I remember when the OGL came out. I remember Wizards and people around Wizards coming onto Opensource mailing lists and discussing things like this. I remember the excitement that people got as we saw opensource flowing in a new direction. (To that end, we recommneded the GFDL instead of the OGL, but that was shot down quickly.)

I think it's obvious that the OGL has failed. A major system released under it, and their next revision was pulled out. No other major system is released under the OGL. Yes, there are derivatives of D20 that are now OGL'd and will always be. But until you get the three things I mentioned above, you're not going to see any Open license mimic what the Free Software Movement has done.

 

[BryonD]

That was not the part that failed he is talking about. He was talking more about the "feed-back" cycle.

There is Arcana Evolved. But there are no products re-using the concepts of Arcana Evolved from other publishers.
There's Iron Heroes. There is no one that re-used its mechanical elements and build upon that.

All these True20, Modern20, Arcana Evolved, Iron Heroes, Grim Tales, they didn't build much upon each other. They didn't refine the game. They created new, individual games. They stand on their own, and have their unique appeal.

First I must point out that I think you really are not particularly familiar with Grim Tales. Part of the genius of Grim Tales is that it takes so much of the best of the best and pulled it together into a single system. It is exactly the opposite of what you are claiming. Your point is still be valid overall, but Grim Tales is a great counter-example.

Maybe it's true that this can never happen as long as WotC still owns D&D, using their License. But maybe there's just no interest in this. Maybe all people really want are different game systems. They don't need an evolving game, they need only the game for their taste. It's "everyone gets his own FTP Client with his specific features" vs "There is one FTP Client that everyone likes and has all the features".

Maybe mearls is wrong in believing that this could have happened at all. Role-players are diverse and even the subset of role-players that focus on D&D are to diverse to create an iterative process leading to a generally better game. Judging from our "Edition Wars", that might indeed be the case.

I think there are two main issues here.
I think there are enough gamers that cling to some degree of "core only" that it was hard to move far from that base. Obviously the true "core only" gamers were meaningless to the issue because they didn't buy anything else anyway. But even gamers who bought 3PP supplements would be less inclined to buy supplements derived from other supplements. So market forces dictated that almost everything stayed within one step of a "wotc only" game.

Second, WotC decided that the OGL was their enemy a while ago. I think we were very lucky to get psionics in the ogl. It has been a while since they lifted a finger to support open gaming. And I give them full credit, the ogl wouldn't have been there at all if not for them (even if it is a significantly different "them"). And I also don't think they had the slightest obligation to support it. But if you plant some roses and then never tend to them, it isn't a fair judgment of the roses to say they didn't grow.

I think a lot of closed mechanics came out and that really hurt the idea of ogl growth. Obviously just the steady flow of WotC mechanics coming out is going to be a big pressure on how much risk a 3PP can afford to take. But that is just the tip of the iceberg of their effect. If 3PPs were allowed to work with more wotc stuff then who knows what could have grown from that. That should have been the ogl's greatest catalyst, instead of its greatest hurdle. Also, the more ground that was covered by wotc closed content, then more 3PPs felt obliged to steer clear of that area altogether. The land mines of closed content in the field of open gaming were scary enough that it just wasn't worth the effort.

Again, I don't remotely think wotc had any obligation to support the ogl. I just believe that their chosen path was a major element of the story of the ogl. If you look at it as an experiment, then after the initial set-up they mostly just contaminated the system. So the end result are very hard to consider really valid. But that OGL did as well as it did in the face of this is quite a positive indicator.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

That was not the part that failed he is talking about. He was talking more about the "feed-back" cycle.

There is Arcana Evolved. But there are no products re-using the concepts of Arcana Evolved from other publishers.
There's Iron Heroes. There is no one that re-used its mechanical elements and build upon that.

All these True20, Modern20, Arcana Evolved, Iron Heroes, Grim Tales, they didn't build much upon each other. They didn't refine the game. They created new, individual games. They stand on their own, and have their unique appeal.

Excuse me?

With all due respect, MR, you don't know what you're talking about.

Grim Tales was an attempt to do exactly what Mike is grousing about. I'm not going to single GT out because I think it's the best, it just happens to be the one I am most familiar with.

Grim Tales used rules elements of 3e, 3.5, d20 Modern, Spycraft, several PDFs from The Game Mechanics, MMS:WE, and... oh hell, just read the goddamned Section 15. To put it in a nutshell, I used every single good d20 resource I could get my hands on and did the best I could to make them into a cohesive whole, adding new material where I could to fill in the gaps.

And when you are done, look at the S15 for the latest iteration of True20. They did the same thing-- they rolled up every good idea they could get their hands on, and improved upon it (through Steve Kenson, no less, I assume!).

As new things were released after Grim Tales came out, I incorporated those ideas into rolling improvements published in other works or in PDFs, or updated existing GT pdfs.

It's not my fault that, as publishing houses go, I am a fart in a hurricane.

We never saw a sustained effort to improve the fundamental rules of D&D, and it's debatable that any such improvement would be embraced as such by enough end users.

Mike Mearls is completely, staggeringly wrong here.

Nobody tried to improve on the rules of D&D? What the hell was Mike doing all those years he was writing Dungeoncraft and Monstercraft and Book of Iron Might and Iron Heroes and...

The entire life cycle of 3e was populated with a sustained effort to improve on the fundamental rules of D&D.

Maybe Mike doesn't want to count his own work, but it's incredibly insulting for him to discount the work of his fellow designer/publishers. There are so many examples I can only assume it's Mike's specific intent to piss all over everybody else.

So... Where did it break down?

WIZARDS OF THE ING COAST.

They are the ONLY player in a position to grab the best of all that work and incorporate it into the fundamental rules of D&D and ENSURE that those improvements were embraced by the end users.

It was WIZARDS who dropped the ball. They and they alone are responsible for this perceived failure of the OGL.

 

[BryonD]

Dude, I just SOOOO beat Wulf to the punch. LOL

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Dude, I just SOOOO beat Wulf to the punch. LOL

Yes, but you didn't have to grab the top of your head off the ceiling and jam it back down on top of a steam furnace before you posted.

EDIT: And then edit your response down to just one profanity.

EDIT 2: And I like Mustrum. God forbid I'd responded to someone else.

 

[WhatGravitas]

The entire life cycle of 3e was populated with a sustained effort to improve on the fundamental rules of D&D.

Or they were "supplementing" - and I think that's were it broke down. WotC, but other publishers to a certain extent, tried to a) supplement D&D, and b) explore untouched areas (like IH did low-magic), but not a lot aimed at a "new" core D&D, like Pathfinder does now.

A lot of stuff instead fled into niche business. And when one "big" thing, like Iron Heroes or Arcana Evolved or True20 came out, there wasn't a lot of 3rd party support for that - some adventures, in the best case a bit of settings... and so what?

No publisher did the job and tried to recompile all of that into a singular D&D-esque game. Grim Tales, for example, is cool, but it's also a niche product for Grim & Gritty - it's not D&D Deluxe.

And that was needed. And yes, WotC failed to do that, but until now, only Pathfinder fills that gap. And has now the burden of backwards compatibility.

Cheers, LT.