D&D 5E So, 5e OGL

[darjr]

Sure a lot were done with it. And also, a lot were not done. Which is what I mean about making existing fractures in the community wider. The people who are on the fence, and the ones who want to continue with the old edition, are both encouraged to choose the old edition if it continues to receive good support (from anyone).

The OGL means there will always be support - so it will always be harder to get people to join a new edition regardless of the details of that new edition. And it makes edition warring worse because it's easier to fight about the negatives of a new system WHILE arguing for the positive of the support for the old system; than it is to argue simply for the negatives of the new system vs. the stagnant old system.

I think you need to think some more about this. Most people that I know if that were not done with 2e kept on playing it. Some even to this day. Many others stopped playing D&D. Some when 2e came out. Me included. If 1e had an OGL and was supported by a third party I would probably have kept playing D&D. Instead I stopped.

You can't force people to play what they don't want to play, stop supporting what they want to play when they want support, they'll stop playing either thing.

 

[darjr]

[MENTION=2525]Mistwell[/MENTION];

I have to add I don't understand where you're going. I would have thought you'd be the first person to resist being forced to do anything. I rankle at those kinds of shenanigans. If there was an OGL at the 2e/3e transition and a vast majority of gamers stuck with a 3rd party supported 2e, that would have been very awesome. It would have meant that lots and lots of folks would have been able to keep playing what they liked and enjoyed. That's a good thing.

A person being forced to move on or adopt something not quite to their liking is not.

Regardless of a 2e OGL I think most of those folks who would have rather played 2e, kept playing 2e, and some just stopped playing.

But it's only really guesses about a 2e OGL and it's possible impact. I just can't see a huge majority staying with 2e because of an OGL because they wanted to stay with 2e as a terrible thing. This from someone who does not like 2e.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

For a lot of people, it's not. They have ongoing games they simply do not want to change to adapt to a new system. As long as their current system is well supported, they will continue with that system.







There are no easy transitions anymore with the OGL.



3.5e support ended. Many people were not naturally going to shift to Pathfinder on their own simply because it offered slight improvements to the rules. It was the cessation of support for 3.5, combined with increased support for Pathfnder, that did it. Paizo is the first to admit they created the game BECAUSE 3.5 was ending and they saw the opening in the marketplace. And now Paizo is stuck with Pathfinder - they can never leave it really, because if they ever do someone will simply fill that gap and support Pathfinder.



The OGL makes it harder to shift to ANY new edition, regardless of content, because ongoing support for a prior edition is a disincentive to even care what the new edition is about. People want to play a supported system - and the OGL means whatever existing system they are playing, is supported. Many will always naturally want to continue with whatever system their currently playing, if it is supported.

I disagree with the implication that the transition from 3.0 to 3.5 to Pathfinder wasn't smooth, in relative terms. It took time, people tend not to want to switch mid campaign, but the iterative nature of the changes, combined with low barrier of entry provided by the SRDs and other OGL enabled tools, meant that groups could change over at their own pace. And they have.

The OGL only gets in the way when a new edition can be adopted gradually.

 

[The Black Ranger]

To what end? Why is it important to avoid an OGL glut? Other than a general aesthetic preference for not having the market flooded with third-rate products, who is actually hurt by it? Sure, game stores have to pick and choose what to stock, but they have to do that anyway. I don't see that Wizards suffers from it. Gamers benefit from the competition. And out of the ocean of garbage, the occasional gem will emerge. They can always have something like the d20 System Trademark License for people who want to advertise their compatibility with D&D--presumably they would write it carefully enough this time around to avoid another Book of Erotic Fantasy incident.

You can't lawyer your way out of Sturgeon's Law. 90% of everything is crud and always will be. If you want the other 10%, you just have to accept sifting through the 90% as a cost of doing business.

Exactly!

I never understood the whole glut argument. If you don't want X book in your game then just say no, if you don't want the product then don't buy it.

There are people out there who will buy it and like it. Why should we deprive those people of more options just because of the whole internet "glut will ruin games" discussion?

 

[Li Shenron]

Ok, going to step in here. Paizo created Pathfinder as a move of last resort. They were going to move their Pathfinder Adventure Path books from 3.5 to 4e... except WotC kept pushing back the license, and pushing it back, and they were forced to make a decision on what to do. Pathfinder the system was a Hail Mary Pass, not a move to slip into a market place. To them the AP is the flagship product, and they needed a system to support it. They had absolutely no idea it would explode like it has. That was never the plan. Though I'm more than sure they aren't complaining that it worked out so well.

Pathfinder was created because they needed a rule system in print for their adventure line. If the GSL had come out sooner, and if it wasn't quite the strict thing it was when it came out (including the poison pill section that prevented use of the OGL if you accepted the GSL), then Paizo would have published their material as 4e support material, and Pathfinder the game never would have happened. (Though of course, some other company may have stepped up to the plate... but a lot of what makes Pathfinder works is the high quality of the material and the talent they have working on it. Not a lot of companies can boast the same.)

I've spoken with many of the Paizo employees about this several times, and we have a recording up on our site that explains a lot of this here: http://35privatesanctuary.com/index...ur&catid=35:the-tome-know-direction&Itemid=34

EDIT: This may be the version I'm thinking of, instead... http://35privatesanctuary.com/index...11&catid=35:the-tome-know-direction&Itemid=34

That's Lisa Stevens talking about how WotC was formed, Paizo was formed, and how Pathfinder came to be.

Good post, to me this is unprecedented info, I really didn't know... I simply thought Paizo decided to capture that part of the D&D customers who weren't happy about 4e. In a sense, your post makes it sound like WotC almost "suicided" 4e with a wrong licensing choice, because if they made a different choice then Paizo would have created excellent adventures for 4e and 3e support would have essentially stopped, probably many more people would have switched to 4e because they would not have had good alternatives.

I never understood the whole glut argument. If you don't want X book in your game then just say no, if you don't want the product then don't buy it.

There are people out there who will buy it and like it. Why should we deprive those people of more options just because of the whole internet "glut will ruin games" discussion?

It's not that simple. When there are too many products to choose from, and a large share of them is mediocre, customers' choice is much harder, they will make purchase mistakes, and after a few mistakes customers tend to stop buying. This is what happened for instance in the video game market crash in the 80s.

 

[Morrus]

Ok, going to step in here. Paizo created Pathfinder as a move of last resort. They were going to move their Pathfinder Adventure Path books from 3.5 to 4e... except WotC kept pushing back the license, and pushing it back, and they were forced to make a decision on what to do. Pathfinder the system was a Hail Mary Pass, not a move to slip into a market place. To them the AP is the flagship product, and they needed a system to support it. They had absolutely no idea it would explode like it has. That was never the plan. Though I'm more than sure they aren't complaining that it worked out so well.

Pathfinder was created because they needed a rule system in print for their adventure line. If the GSL had come out sooner, and if it wasn't quite the strict thing it was when it came out (including the poison pill section that prevented use of the OGL if you accepted the GSL), then Paizo would have published their material as 4e support material, and Pathfinder the game never would have happened. (Though of course, some other company may have stepped up to the plate... but a lot of what makes Pathfinder works is the high quality of the material and the talent they have working on it. Not a lot of companies can boast the same.)

I've spoken with many of the Paizo employees about this several times, and we have a recording up on our site that explains a lot of this here: http://35privatesanctuary.com/index...ur&catid=35:the-tome-know-direction&Itemid=34

EDIT: This may be the version I'm thinking of, instead... http://35privatesanctuary.com/index...11&catid=35:the-tome-know-direction&Itemid=34

That's Lisa Stevens talking about how WotC was formed, Paizo was formed, and how Pathfinder came to be.

There's more to it than that. Lisa wrote a series of anniversary blogs at Paizo's 10th anniversary, one for each year.

The truly catastrophic thing for them was the pulling of DRAGON and DUNGEON license. If they'd retained the magazine licenses, they'd have quite happily continued working as a magazine design studio for WotC.

[Lisa Stevens, 2006]Our license for publishing Dragon and Dungeon was due to expire in March 2007, and this meeting would be the first step toward negotiating a renewal of that contract. It took a while to find a time that fit everyone's schedule, and we finally had to resort to meeting by phone rather than face-to-face. On May 30, 2006 at 2 pm, I had a conference call with Wizards, and it was during this call that they let me know that they had other plans for Dragon and Dungeon; they wouldn't be renewing the license for the magazines. I personally don't remember much of my reaction, but after the call, I brought Erik in to my office and told him the news, tears streaming down my face. (Read Erik's recollection of this major event below.)

We always knew that this might be a possibility. That was, after all, one of the main reasons we had been building the other parts of our business: so we wouldn't be caught unprepared if the unthinkable were to happen. But I don't think any of us ever really thought that this was much more than a remote possibility. Dragon and Dungeon were finally firing on all cylinders and were enjoying critical acclaim that hadn't been seen in years. So this news struck us to the core. In one meeting, the last large chunk of the company that we started not quite four years before was going away. We were numb. How the heck were we going to cope with this? Frankly, it seemed impossible at the time.

I have to give Wizards of the Coast a lot of praise for how they handled the end of the license. Contractually, they only needed to deliver notice of non-renewal by the end of December 2006; without the extra seven months' notice they chose to give us, I'm not sure that Paizo could have survived. Wizards also granted our request to extend the license through August 2007 so that we could finish up the Savage Tide adventure path. This gave us quite a bit of time to figure out how we were going to cope with the end of the magazines. It would have been very easy for WotC to have handled this in a way which would have effectively left Paizo for dead—all they would have had to do was follow the letter of the contract. Instead, they treated us like the valued partner we had been, giving us the ability to both plan and execute a strategy for survival. For that, I will always be thankful.
​

Erik Mona recalls the same event:

[Erik Mona, 2006]That seemed like a solid strategy until the day in late spring when Lisa Stevens called me into her office to discuss a phone call she'd just had with the higher-ups at Wizards of the Coast. As soon as I saw the tears streaking down her face, I suspected that the call had not gone quite as expected. Lisa was in shock. Not only would Wizards not be renewing our license to create Dragon and Dungeon magazines, but they were going to cease publishing the magazines entirely. There was some vague chat about Wizards wanting to start a kind of online subscription program tied to their upcoming edition (something they'd been very cagey about, and about which we'd only heard the barest of rumors by this point), but the upshot was that in just a few months, the magazines as printed products would be dead and buried.

And I was the one who would get to shovel the grave dirt onto their corpses.

Not exactly the role I had been prepping for since third grade. While Lisa's tears showed her human concern for the business we had built and the employees she referred to as family, I wasn't quite ready to think about any of those big-picture concerns, yet. I was still fixated on the massive sense of rejection I felt from folks who had been my coworkers at Wizards, and whom I still considered close friends. I was worried about my own career, and about the fate of two pillars of D&D that had helped support the brand (and my own gaming hobby) for decades. I couldn't even contemplate a world without Dragon and Dungeon magazines, even as I had just been told that world was coming. Soon.

I don't remember a lot of the details about that conversation in Lisa's office. I do remember numbly wandering out of the building to take a quick walk to gather my thoughts. It was a gorgeous day, and I'd lately been in the habit of taking a half-mile walk on my lunch hour, so my slipping out must not have seemed odd to my co-workers, who had no idea what had just transpired. I walked down Richards Road to an old abandoned residential hospital that had a nice lawn behind it facing a gorgeous wall of trees. I sat down on that lawn for a half-hour, going through the ramifications of the day's news, and building a huge list of questions and next-steps in my head.

What will happen to Paizo?
Will the members of the editorial staff land on their feet if the company collapses?
How do we let them know? When?
How in the world am I going to explain this to the readers?
How can we end Dungeon magazine in the middle of the Savage Tide Adventure Path?
Will the prisoners who send me mail every week blame me for canceling the magazines?
Where do we go from here?

In the days and weeks to come, a lot of those answers grew more and more clear. Paizo would go on. Once we came up with the idea behind a "monthly Adventure Path book" (not yet called Pathfinder), the management team resolved to chart a path to the company's survival that kept every employee intact. We'd already experienced a bunch of layoffs, and to transition the company into its new form in 2007, we'd need all hands on deck.
​

That was then followed the very next year by the decision referred to in the your link.

[2007] Sales during the convention were brisk, and the feedback we received from our customers was nothing short of fantastic. And we needed all that good karma, because we were dealt another blow when Wizards of the Coast announced at the show that D&D 4th Edition was coming in August 2008. We had just launched two new lines of 3.5 compatible products, and it seemed that they could already be on a deathwatch towards obscurity. Sometimes it seemed as if every time we got up, there was something to knock us down again.

However, after talks with our colleagues at Wizards of the Coast, we were cautiously optimistic. There was talk of getting together when we were back in Seattle and running through a playtest of the current rules. We were also promised that there would be a third-party license, similar to the OGL, really soon.

When we got back to Seattle, we anxiously awaited the opportunity to playtest 4th Edition, but that never materialized, and the license that eventually became the GSL was delayed month after month. Meanwhile, the more the public learned about 4th Edition, the more our community—and our gut—was telling us not to go there.

One of the largest threads on the paizo.com messageboards began in October, when Erik announced that Paizo Is Still Undecided. The lack of any information from WotC and the seemingly overwhelming support for us to stay put were making us lean towards sticking with 3.5, but it would be suicide to produce support products for a game that no longer has core rules in print. So if we wanted to stick with 3.5, we knew that we'd have to release some sort of rulebook.

As the end of 2007 neared, we still held out hope that things might work out for 4th Edition. But we were already planning the Pathfinder Adventure Path that would begin shipping the same month that Wizards was releasing 4th Edition, and the deadline for soliciting August 2008 products to our distributors was rapidly approaching, so we needed to make a decision, and fast.

As the year ended, our new product lines were well-received, and the new Paizo was looking healthier than ever. But the decision about 4th Edition was now reaching a critical stage and the new year would again test our mettle. Fortunately, Jason Bulmahn had started tinkering on his own time with some ideas he had for a 3.5 revision, a project he had dubbed "Mon Mothma..."
​

For me, the take-home message is that it was not - as some claim - the OGL which caused the creation of Pathfinder, it was the loss of the magazine license closely followed by procrastination on the GSL. Paizo would happily continued producing magazines for WotC; and after that was pulled from them, would have happily produced adventure paths for 4E. The Pathfinder RPG was the result of necessity and being forced into a corner.

 

[Mistwell]

I think you need to think some more about this. Most people that I know if that were not done with 2e kept on playing it. Some even to this day. Many others stopped playing D&D. Some when 2e came out. Me included. If 1e had an OGL and was supported by a third party I would probably have kept playing D&D. Instead I stopped.

Right...your last sentence is proof OGLs extend the life of a prior edition, which makes the community splits more intense and the ability to transition to a new edition that much harder each time. Also, had you continued you would have been a voice to others to stay with 1e, perhaps peeling off others on the fence between 1e and 2e to stay with 2e. You might have also been a voice for edition warring, fracturing the community more. From WOTCs (or in this hypothetical, TSRs) perspective, you stopping D&D at that point is BETTER for them than you continuing with an edition that makes them zero money and also potentially lures others away from buying things that make them money, and making the community more negative in general for discussions of things that make them money. Unification under a edition they make money off of, is always in their better interest than splits between things that do and do not make them money.

You can't force people to play what they don't want to play, stop supporting what they want to play when they want support, they'll stop playing either thing.

Nobody is talking about forcing anyone to do anything at all. Continued support is incentive to continue with the prior game for many.

I have to add I don't understand where you're going. I would have thought you'd be the first person to resist being forced to do anything. I rankle at those kinds of shenanigans. If there was an OGL at the 2e/3e transition and a vast majority of gamers stuck with a 3rd party supported 2e, that would have been very awesome. It would have meant that lots and lots of folks would have been able to keep playing what they liked and enjoyed. That's a good thing.

A person being forced to move on or adopt something not quite to their liking is not.

I don't know where you're getting this idea of anyone being forced to do something, but it is a strawman.

More importantly, you seem to be mistaking my argument that is intended to help people understand WOTCs perspective, as my own opinion as a fan. I don't know how many more times I can say "This is WOTCs perspective, not the perspective of fans or third parties" but I guess I need to keep saying that as long as people confuse it.

Regardless of a 2e OGL I think most of those folks who would have rather played 2e, kept playing 2e, and some just stopped playing.

I think many people like to play a supported game, and that level of support is important to them. So all things being equal they will continue to play the game they are currently playing, but if support ends for it and starts for something new, they will turn to the something new for the support.

I will give you another example - I am just now moving on from Windows XP, because support just ended. I would have stuck with XP for quite a while more, had they not ended support. This is just how many people are - why stop a good thing, unless it's no longer as good a thing?

But it's only really guesses about a 2e OGL and it's possible impact. I just can't see a huge majority staying with 2e because of an OGL because they wanted to stay with 2e as a terrible thing. This from someone who does not like 2e.

Nobody said huge majority. This is all an issue of material numbers of people peeling off with each edition, not majorities. Remember, it's INDEFINITE. It will never end. 100 years from now, this will still be an issue. Each new edition, it will continue to get worse. It never ends, making it a horrible decision from WOTCs position.

 

[Mistwell]

I disagree with the implication that the transition from 3.0 to 3.5 to Pathfinder wasn't smooth, in relative terms. It took time, people tend not to want to switch mid campaign, but the iterative nature of the changes, combined with low barrier of entry provided by the SRDs and other OGL enabled tools, meant that groups could change over at their own pace. And they have.

The OGL only gets in the way when a new edition can be adopted gradually.

You are mistaking what I meant by smooth transition. That point had nothing to do with how easy it was for a group to move from one edition to another within their campaign. I was referring to what happens to the fan community with each transition - it fractures each time, causing fewer people to move to the new edition each time, and causing more strife in the community each time. That's what I meant about non-smooth transitions. It goes easier for WOTC if support ends for the prior edition - the incentive is there for everyone to move to the new edition much stronger.

There are still lots of people bitter about the end of support for 3.5 directly from WOTC, and who do not see Pathfinder as an improvement on 3.5. I don't necessarily agree with them, but there are plenty of them, and that's just with micro-changes to a single edition and not an actual new edition. Each time, there is a fracture - and any time support remains for the prior edition, the fracture is made worse. From WOTCs perspective that is a bad thing.

 

[Mistwell]

Ok, going to step in here. Paizo created Pathfinder as a move of last resort. They were going to move their Pathfinder Adventure Path books from 3.5 to 4e... except WotC kept pushing back the license, and pushing it back, and they were forced to make a decision on what to do.

This seems to imply a basic assumption that there was a gap in the marketplace, and if Paizo had not filled it then nobody else would have.

That's not how markets work. Someone always fills a gap left in the market. If it wasn't Paizo, then someone else would have...and others were already starting to before Paizo did it in fact.

My point isn't really about Paizo - they were just the company that ended up doing it. My point is about the impact an indefinite OGL has on WOTC in the long term.

 

[DEFCON 1]

For me, the take-home message is that it was not - as some claim - the OGL which caused the creation of Pathfinder, it was the loss of the magazine license closely followed by procrastination on the GSL. Paizo would happily continued producing magazines for WotC; and after that was pulled from them, would have happily produced adventure paths for 4E. The Pathfinder RPG was the result of necessity and being forced into a corner.

It's always good to be reminded about just how many of these decisions are almost "by the seat of our pants" kind of things based upon what looks to be the right choice at the time, rather than grand master plans or the utmost in stupidity.

Any time someone tries to just paint with a wide brush saying something like "WotC were stupid and they should have known what would have happened!" just proves how completely in the dark they are about the entire process. It's never one single thing that results in any kind of seismic shift... its dozens upon dozens of little choices made by all sides that don't seem big at the time... but when combined together in the specific order they arrived results in what turns out to be a rather large shift. But its nothing anyone could ever hope to predict whilst in the middle of it.