Let's be clear about the motives behind the original OGL

[GMforPowergamers]

It's also impossible to know how 3E would have fared without the OGL. It is entirely possible that it would have been a flash in the pan and then just fizzled and there never even would have been a 4E.

that's 3 possibilities... without a time machine we will never know though.

 

[Bedrockgames]

it’s not a given but it was a possibility. D&D was in the doldrums. WotC approached White Wolf with this proposition. That was the bargain they made with the TTRPG publishing community of the time.

I remember towards the end of the 90s, there was a period where I really thought D&D was going to vanish with TSR having so many problems (you could feel it when you walked into a book store, comic store or smoke shop: some of the last books I bought were compilation books of the Van Richten guides, and something about them just felt like a brand that was on its way out).

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I remember towards the end of the 90s, there was a period where I really thought D&D was going to vanish with TSR having so many problems (you could feel it when you walked into a book store, comic store or smoke shop: some of the last books I bought were compilation books of the Van Richten guides, and something about them just felt like a brand that was on its way out).

I was a 'kid' in college in the time that WotC bought out D&D... and I will be honest even with the buy out I thought at the time Vampire was going to overtake D&D

 

[Bedrockgames]

I was a 'kid' in college in the time that WotC bought out D&D... and I will be honest even with the buy out I thought at the time Vampire was going to overtake D&D

Didn't Knights of the Dinner table have a storyline about BA Felton's losing players to Vampire?

I remember it similarly. Can't recall the timeline exactly, but I do remember Vampire being quite big at one point in the 90s and seriously challenging D&D (and I also recall some of the Ravenloft books at the time appearing to respond to that). There were also things like Everquest threatening to take players away. And magic was a huge drawn locally on some o fate campaigns I was in (I remember hemorrhaging players to magic at one point). Then TSR went under. Then WOTC bought them out (and I just assumed the Magic people were going to sit on the IP or make it more like Magic the Gathering). When 3E did come out, a lot of us were very skeptical (I remember swearing to continue playing 2E). But within a year everyone I knew was playing 3rd edition and it brought a lot of stuff back to D&D that, in hindsight, it really needed.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Didn't Knights of the Dinner table have a storyline about BA Felton's losing players to Vampire?

I remember it similarly. Can't recall the timeline exactly, but I do remember Vampire being quite big at one point in the 90s and seriously challenging D&D (and I also recall some of the Ravenloft books at the time appearing to respond to that). There were also things like Everquest threatening to take players away. And magic was a huge drawn locally on some o fate campaigns I was in (I remember hemorrhaging players to magic at one point). Then TSR went under. Then WOTC bought them out (and I just assumed the Magic people were going to sit on the IP or make it more like Magic the Gathering). When 3E did come out, a lot of us were very skeptical (I remember swearing to continue playing 2E). But within a year everyone I knew was playing 3rd edition and it brought a lot of stuff back to D&D that, in hindsight, it really needed.

I don't expect 6e or its proprietary VTT to bring back anything that D&D really needs.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't expect 6e or its proprietary VTT to bring back anything that D&D really needs.

I'm not sure we knew what D&D even needed in 2000. But I remember opening the 3E book and seeing half-orcs and thinking "I need half-orcs" and I remember seeing lots of dungeon content in the DMG and thinking "I need to go back to more dungeons". I had a similar feeling when I went back to some of the older editions.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm not sure we knew what D&D even needed in 2000. But I remember opening the 3E book and seeing half-orcs and thinking "I need half-orcs" and I remember seeing lots of dungeon content in the DMG and thinking "I need to go back to more dungeons". I had a similar feeling when I went back to some of the older editions.

I mostly played 1e back in those days, with 2e stuff as additional content, so we still had half-orcs and dungeons.

 

[Alzrius]

Didn't Knights of the Dinner table have a storyline about BA Felton's losing players to Vampire?

Yeah, though it was a LARP, and happened because Bob and Dave were desperate to be noticed by Bridgette, the absolute knockout who was running it (and mostly using her "thralls" to do things like pick up her dry cleaning, mow her lawn, wash her car, etc.).

 

[Staffan]

Out of curiosity when did DTRPG and POD become widely available ?(by the time I got into in 2009, POD was definitely an option, and while it wasn't consolidated into one platform, Drivethru and RPGnow were both around).

RPGNow started in 2001 and DrivethruRPG in 2004 They merged into OneBookShelf in 2006 (maintaining both storefronts), and started doing POD in 2010.

I remember it similarly. Can't recall the timeline exactly, but I do remember Vampire being quite big at one point in the 90s and seriously challenging D&D (and I also recall some of the Ravenloft books at the time appearing to respond to that).

I don't know that Vampire was ever an actual threat to D&D's dominance, but they did grow big enough to eat a noticable amount of market share.

Wizards conducted a marketing survey in 1999 and released parts of the result publicly. One of the results was that among active TTRPG players (playing monthly or more), 66% played D&D, 25% Vampire, and 15% Werewolf (multiple choices were allowed).

 

[Clint_L]

It's also impossible to know how 3E would have fared without the OGL. It is entirely possible that it would have been a flash in the pan and then just fizzled and there never even would have been a 4E.

I'm a 3PP skeptic in the sense that I actually don't think 3PP have had much impact on the success of D&D with one huge exception: Pathfinder 1.0. I buy 3PP but I think it's a niche market and D&D's recent success is largely built on:

1. Demographics, with the original mass D&D cohort of the 80s reaching an age where they had the time and disposable income to get back into the game, either for themselves or the teen children that they now had.

2. Pop culture, with shows like Stranger Things giving us old nerds the nostalgia buzz and reminding us of our D&D glory years, and YouTube providing a space for the actual play shows that made the game understandable to new players.

However, I mentioned Pathfinder, 1.0. I do think it made a massive contribution to 5e because it basically preserved D&D in its more traditional form and forced WotC to reassess the design choices they had brought in for 4e. If not for Pathfinder providing stiff competition, WotC might not have course corrected and 5e would not have been as comfortable for the old nerds to come back to. And no OGL, no Pathfinder 1.0.