D&D 4E What will happen if 4E doesn't use the OGL?

[Alzrius]

Between the loss of Dragon and Dungeon, and now the end of Dragonlance, things have reached a fever pitch in the (well-connected) D&D community. So then, let's ponder the worst-case scenario: what if 4E comes out, and doesn't use the OGL or anything like it, reverting to a totally closed-content game.

(As far as the worst-case goes, I'm not considering D&D ceasing production altogether. Hasbro wouldn't sit on it unused; they'd sell it, and whoever bought it would want their money's worth, so there'd be more new material. I just don't see the death of D&D happening...at this point, anyway.)

So, 4E is out and only WotC (or whoever) can produce materials for it. What happens to all of the other publishers? What happens to the industry?

Sadly, I don't think the third-parties would fare very well. It's been said by many people on many occasions that WotC basically IS the tabletop RPG industry, and where it goes, people will follow. This spells bad news for companies that rely on the 3.5 rules for their games.

Many, I think, will try to rely on purely using the OGL to continue to produce 3.5-compatible products, especially in PDF format. At the beginning, there'll be a sizable part of the gamer population that wouldn't want to leave, and these'd remain a viable market. However, it likely wouldn't be too long before that crowd shrank, and said companies eventually faded out of existence. The ones who'd last the longest would likely be those using their own variants of the system (such as Green Ronin with Mutants & Masterminds).

Eventually, though, all of them would return from whence they came, taking us back to the days of 1E/2E when, save for a few licensed products from the occasional other company, D&D was an isolated system, and you'd need to learn another rules set to play a different RPG.

I'd personally prefer not to go back to that, since I'm still being continually dazzled by what third-party companies are able to produce. But that's not up to me, and it may not be the standard for much longer.

What do you think will happen if that comes to pass?

 

[Professor Phobos]

It will not affect me in the slightest. I may be unique around these parts, but I'm entirely comfortable learning new systems and I play non-D20 games far more often than I play or buy D20 ones.

That being said, I'd be sad to see Mutants and Masterminds, Castles and Crusades, Midnight, True 20 or Darwin's World get into any difficulty because of this.

 

[Friadoc]

Well, it's pure speculation, but if 'pure' D&D, by 'pure' I mean D&D as it is owned by WotC, turned away from OGL all together and what we currently know as d20/OGL and became something different from what we have now AND didn't let anyone play in their sandbox, what would I do?

First off, assuming d20 was left in place, I'd still maintain my patronage of all the d20 things and places that I do now; Green Ronin, Malhavoc Press, Paizo Publishing, and others.

Secondly, if I liked whatever it was that was 4e, I'd buy it. If I didn't, I'd buy just the core stuff since, well, I'm a freelancer and I own tons of stuff that I don't play at all, or often, but would like to publish in or work on or play. I've got GURPS (3rd and 4th Editions), Traveler stuff (mostly d20), Everything Blue Planet 2.0 (except the GURPS box - no idea how I missed it), more WoD stuff than I care to admit, and so forth.

However, while I'm often an early adapter, there is a lot of stuff that has caught my attention, even liked, but I've never bought. An example is that I do not own any Heroes stuff and the only Paladium book I own is a Rift book on Atlantis (although I have played Rifts, I always used friends books).

Heroes 5th Edition looks cool, I wouldn't turn away a free copy and one day I might buy a new one, but...it's not happened yet. Heck, my Shadowrun collection skips editions, too. But, I used to play Shadow religiously back in the day. I remember when the Street Samurai catalog first came out, not to mention the novels, man was I in love.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If 4E breaks away from the D20 system, the fanbase will split, and an OGL alternative will be released almost as soon as it's announced. Adding an XP table and a character generation system is all that's needed to create a fully functioning game, and once that's done, a D&D alternative will be available almost immediately.

A strong enough third party company with a bookstore presence that got out in front of the change -- Paizo/Necromancer and Green Ronin are both good candidates for this -- would be able to make this a lot more than a temporary fork, since everything on the shelves at the moment it happened would support the OGL fork, rather than 4E.

Frankly, if someone like Paizo or Green Ronin wanted to tweak the problem areas of 3E and add their own flavor to things, I could see a lot of people enjoying those more than the WotC flavor they've got currently. The only reason to not do it now is that there's not enough of a market for an alternate set of core books.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I also don't buy that Mutants & Masterminds is in any way dependent on what system runs D&D.

 

[Moon-Lancer]

If wtc didn't make 4.0 ogl, I would show them the door by fliping them the bird. and denying them my hard earned cash and patronage.

I think if we stick together 3.5 ogl games wont die. wtc will try everything in their power to make that happen, but it cant happen if we don't let it. we have the power.

more people play halflife mods then then all of half2+mods. we too can be that awesome.

 

[S'mon]

Since the OGL is non-revocable it will continue, and I suspect that products released under it are likely to be at least 95% compatible with any 4th edition of D&D, although they won't be able to claim compatibility.

My current situation is that I use C&C for my ruleset and will only buy D&D product, from WotC or elsewhere, if it looks usable with C&C. This is still a win for WotC - without the OGL, when I burned out on 3e I'd almost certainly have quit RPGs, like I did during the 2e era. This way, they have a chance to sell me stuff - tempted by Dungeonscape & Heroes of Battle - as long as it's not too crunch-heavy.

 

[Ranger REG]

What do you think will happen if that comes to pass?

The community will split between the OGL-SRD fans and the D&D label fans, though some will straddle over the fence.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

If 4E breaks away from the D20 system, the fanbase will split, and an OGL alternative will be released almost as soon as it's announced. Adding an XP table and a character generation system is all that's needed to create a fully functioning game, and once that's done, a D&D alternative will be available almost immediately.

That's probably the most likely occurrence. WotC will probably still get the majority of the customers, but a 3.5 OGL game will have a strong following for a very long time.

I don't see major changes of the system, however, since those would only alienate all those fans sitting on their 3.5 books. The only chance would be if an alliance of the most important d20 producers was able to agree on publishing a new d20 variant together, and use it for all their new products. But I don't see the odds of that being very high, since every game designer tends to have his own ideas about developing rules...

 

[jasin]

If 4E breaks away from the D20 system, the fanbase will split, and an OGL alternative will be released almost as soon as it's announced.

How much can you mess with the system under the OGL, and how much can mechanics be protected?

Say you wanted to create an OGL game where Fortitude, Reflex and Will were static defensive values rather than modifiers to checks and where everyone had access to every skill, with a modifier that automatically increased as you went up in levels (both intentionally cribbed from the new Star Wars). Could this be done?