Whatever happened to Necromancer Games?

[wedgeski]

I'm guessing they are much more concerned about another unintended side effect of DDI: the strangling of their own book sales. This has become a real problem for WotC.

I have to say I find it very hard to believe that no-one in WotC realised what the impact would be. I can't conceive of any pre-DDI strategy meeting *not* asking itself that question almost before the door was shut.

 

[JohnRTroy]

I think you do a disservice to the affect of the OGL. Open sharing among creative people fosters creativity. By having access to a plethora of other people's work I am more inspired to create myself, not less.

I'm going to have to disagree with this, simply for the same reasons I see a rapper sampling a song as less creative as the guy who knows how to play an instrument and actually composes the new music. It is simply much harder to do, and there's more work and sweat involved. I am much more impressed by the people who come up with something new than I am with the people who just copy 95% of the OGL SRD and just add a few house rules.

I also think you underestimate the number of people that appreciate the OGL. It is always dangerous to assume that those that disagree with your viewpoint are a fringe minority. I recognize there are plenty of people that couldn't care less about the OGL, but there are plenty of us who really like it as well.

I'm just looking at the facts involved.

While the OGL is being used for other games, it is not being used for major releases. RuneQuest and Traveller are probably the biggest examples, but they are games that have a hardcore audience and they are probably hoping for more 3pp acceptance. There are some other minor games but most are indy-sized, or based on other rulesets that were open gaming already such as FUDGE/Fate. White Wolf hasn't moved Exalted or nWOD to that system. Neither has Games Workshop adopted it. The major players using OGL are those whose games are based on D&D.

The OGL camp has been relatively quiet. ENWorld was the official forum for OGL discussions after Ryan abandoned the Open Gaming Foundation. The amount of correspondance on the mailing list was a lot more active.

If the OGL was a more powerful force, then Ryan would have been right and we would have seen more resistance to changes to 4e, and we would have seen more publishers try to take over the 3e ruleset. Instead, I only see one major player--Pathfinder.

I did not say "fringe minority", however, I think the OGL is being overrated in its significance towards the general gaming public.

 

[carmachu]

I think you do a disservice to the affect of the OGL. Open sharing among creative people fosters creativity. By having access to a plethora of other people's work I am more inspired to create myself, not less.

One can argue that 4e might not have come about the way it had without OGL.

 

[Wicht]

I'm going to have to disagree with this, simply for the same reasons I see a rapper sampling a song as less creative as the guy who knows how to play an instrument and actually composes the new music. It is simply much harder to do, and there's more work and sweat involved. I am much more impressed by the people who come up with something new than I am with the people who just copy 95% of the OGL SRD and just add a few house rules.

I'm not talking about sampling and copying. I'm talking about building on the work of others and feeding off the work of others. The Cthulhu Mythos is an excellent example of this.

One guy, we'll call him Howard, has a story. It inspires someone to respond with another story.

Now Howard, at this point, could say, "No fair, make your own stuff up." at which point the creativity is thwarted. But instead, Howard says, "Cool, write some more, and here, I'll respond to your story." Fifty years later and there is a library of work, all built off of a shared world. If Howard had said "Write your own stuff," instead of a library we might have a single volume which we could read.

Likewise, sure there are some people in the OGL (and we'll just stick with d20) who might just copy what someone else wrote and then add their own 5%. But thats not what most of the really good writers are doing. They see a monster here they like and use it. They see a template from Advanced Bestiary and they use that. And then they blend it all together in a neat way and presto, you have a new piece of work that might inspire someone else to come along and add to it. That's going on all the time in the OGL world. Its what makes Paizo's work so good. Moreover, they not only admit where they got the idea but encourage you to go support the guy that came up with the other idea and if you want, make your own and add to the rules and the monsters.

So while, yes, the guys that create entirely from scratch, all on their own, do more work, the communities that support and foster each other are more productive. Those musicians writing their own work: I bet a lot of them hang around other musicians and swap ideas. The great masters of old: ask yourself whether they worked in a vaccuum, locked in a closet or whether they surrounded themselves with teachers, students, friends, patrons and others?

Speaking of patrons, the patronage projects are excellent examples of this idea. You get a lot of people paying to be involved and we're all sharing ideas and one guy has this cool idea and another that and someone critiques the first and makes it better and another takes the new idea and is inspired to submit an adventure idea which everyone likes. The creativity involved is communal and 100 people brainstorming will normally outthink any single individual, no matter how good that individual is.

 

[BryonD]

I'm going to have to disagree with this, simply for the same reasons I see a rapper sampling a song as less creative as the guy who knows how to play an instrument and actually composes the new music. It is simply much harder to do, and there's more work and sweat involved. I am much more impressed by the people who come up with something new than I am with the people who just copy 95% of the OGL SRD and just add a few house rules.

I think comparing Mutants and Masterminds or Spycraft to sampling in a rap song is absurd.
If we are going to use this kind of tortured analogy, I'd say calling those (and many other) products "less creative" is like saying The Beatles were not creative because they used guitars and drums rather than inventing whole new instruments.

 

[JohnRTroy]

I think comparing Mutants and Masterminds or Spycraft to sampling in a rap song is absurd.

I don't know about Spycraft, but according to Wikipedia, this is the origin of M&M.

In the late 1990s, Steve Kenson had an idea for a superhero setting that he had been contracted to produce. Through a series of misfortunes, the project fell through and he was left with a partially completed manuscript. Shopping it around to various publishers, none were interested (superhero games had lost their popularity)[10] until he talked to Chris Pramas (President of Green Ronin Publishing) about the setting.

Chris made the offer to publish the setting if Steve would also create a superhero game system based on the d20 System. Steve agreed and got to work. Over time, it became clear to him that the game would need to be released under the Open Game License. Releasing the game under the d20 Standard Trademark License, as originally planned, would have prohibited the inclusion of ability generation and character advancement rules. Presenting a complete game was seen as taking precedence over having a d20 logo on the product, so the decision was made to use the OGL.

This tells me that there was already a game (or at least roots of it) in place that did not derive from the SRD, and what they did is retro-fit it to work with the OGL. (At the most charitable, it was just a setting). In other words, all the OGL was for that creation was a marketing gimmick. You saw the same thing happen to Deadlands and Silver Age Sentinels. This is a case of the OGL/d20 compatibility used as a marketing gimick to get sales, not a case of it "encouraging innovation".

Regardless of M&M and Spycraft, most of the d20/OGL products were mostly using the SRD as a base, D&D clones, etc.

I have no problem with people who like the OGL, but people like to make a lot of Logical Fallacies, by stating that its existence along created a rise in the market, that it was the cause of innovation, etc? Was it the OGL itself that was the cause for 3pp rise, or people taking advantage of D&D's market share and compatibility? Was Mearls hired because of the OGL, or like those people before him they were hired because they were a good game designer? Did people buy products because of the OGL, or because they were supplements to D&D?

Too many people IMO assume the OGL was the cause for all of this. I think it's not that simple.

 

[Wicht]

I, but people like to make a lot of Logical Fallacies, by stating that its existence along created a rise in the market, that it was the cause of innovation, etc? Was it the OGL itself that was the cause for 3pp rise, or people taking advantage of D&D's market share and compatibility? Was Mearls hired because of the OGL, or like those people before him they were hired because they were a good game designer? Did people buy products because of the OGL, or because they were supplements to D&D?

You would argue that Mearls would have been hired by WotC regardless of his OGL work. I would argue that you couldn't prove it one way or another because the reality is that Mearls did OGL work and was noticed because of it. "What ifs" are all very well for fiction but have no real value in determining actual history.

You ask whether people bought products because of the OGL or because they were supplements to D&D and I would answer, "yes." They are not mutually incompatible ideas.

I think it almost irrefutably true that the OGL produced a lot of active 3pp books and creativity. I'm not sure how you can argue otherwise. Its all very well and good to say those same people would have been just as creative without the OGL but I don't think you can prove it.

 

[BryonD]

... but people like to make a lot of Logical Fallacies...

You are making a rather major logical fallacy right here.
A lot of people have made a lot of ideas for super heroes RPGs for a very long time.

The incarnation of Mutants and Masterminds that is a huge hit was built on the spine of the D20 system through the OGL. I have no doubt whatsoever that Steve Kenson was thinking about it long before he ever heard of the OGL, or that there ever even was an OGL or D20 system to hear of. But the final M&M that was a huge hit was both highly creative and very much a result of the OGL.

 

[Pramas]

This tells me that there was already a game (or at least roots of it) in place that did not derive from the SRD, and what they did is retro-fit it to work with the OGL. (At the most charitable, it was just a setting). In other words, all the OGL was for that creation was a marketing gimmick.

That is not correct. What Steve had designed was a city setting. Gold Rush Games was originally supposed to publish it for the Hero System but it never happened. I told Steve I'd publish it if he designed a d20 superhero game. He started with the D&D3 rules as a base but obviously many changes were required to suit the genre. During the design process Steve asked me if he should be more concerned with sticking to the d20 rules or emulating the genre. I told him genre should win every time. When Steve was done, it was clear that M&M would be better served as a stand alone game, so we took the gamble of forgoing the d20 logo. This was at a time when most folks thought you had to have the logo to have a successful OGL product. Turns out they were wrong.

 

[Piratecat]

MnM was a revelation to me. There was a long thread here about whether a really good superhero game was even possible under d20 rules, and the general conclusion was "nope." Steve, and GR, showed that conclusion to be absurdly wrong.