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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4547696" data-attributes="member: 2067">This is part of why I cautioned that I was an idealist up above.I think D&D has to blame its success on playing fast and loose with public domain and knock-off trademarks. The "halfling/hobit" issue comes to my mind most prominently, but D&D is chock full o' things inspired from and ripped from and ripped off of Conan and Cthulu and Greek myth and 101 other fantasy sources.D&D never had much of a brand identity, other than being "that game with the dice where your Legolas uses excalibur to slay the minotaur or whatever." I don't think 4e has much of a stronger identity than any other edition, mostly because it's hard to get a unique identity when you're trying to remain flexible enough to adapt to 100 million or so individual DMs who all have their own opinions on what makes fantasy roleplay fun. This "brand identity" is a pie-in-the-sky delusion. The ability to be trademarked and have proprietary IP is stodgy thinking. D&D is at its best when it is broad, adaptable, and half-blatantly culled from other works. The OGL gave back, in a big way. It recognized D&D's rip-off origins and was keen to embrace them.WotC didn't get behind the OGL very much in 3e, but that didn't matter so much. Once it was out there, the rest of the world took it and ran with it and produced some of the best gaming products ever seen. Whatever was "lost" from WotC's brand identity was small potatoes, a raindrop in an ocean, when measured against what was gained for the hobby in general. The PnPRPG crowd is a niche if I've ever seen one.But small and agile would allow better catering to the masses, because it would allow them to continue to do daring and innovative things (like the OGL) rather than putting their heads in the sand and paying attention to nebulous non-entities like brand identity for a game that shamelessly bastardizes every popular fantasy novel of the last 30 years and loves it. All small and agile means is that they're not big enough to care that much about things that aren't really problems except for guys in suits and ties, and that certainly aren't problems for "the masses."The OGL was WONDERFUL for the masses. By the end of 3e, the free market had largely sorted a lot of the problems of quality and non-D&D games out. You had a few contenders for d20 (Paizo, Necromancer, a few others, some PDF publishers like ENPublishing), and you had a few contenders for other games (Mongoose's licensed  products for instance), and you had amazing quality (War of the Burning Sky? Savage Tide AP?). The OGL is an inspiring thing. It's daring and unique. I don't think WotC had any real, valid reason to stop participating in it, other than that they were being told to by guys with law degrees who worked for Hasbro because the OGL is so unusual that it freaked them out. I mean, they TRIED to participate in it -- the GSL is an attempt to recreate the OGL but with the goals of brand identity in place. But the GSL largely fails because of those goals, and because of a few other draconian measures."Loosing Brand Identity" is like the boogeyman to a 4e OGL, but when your core product's appeal is "Hey, like Lord of the rings? Conan? Fairy tales and myth? Want to CONTROL it?!" your brand identity isn't really based on your IP to begin with. Pretending it is works against the strengths of your actual product, and, especially when another way was shown, to reject it out of be-suited paranoia is, in my mind, dumb on a colossally corporate level. WotC usually dodges that bullet (I don't think most of the things that people complain about are very high up the totem pole at all), so it was extra disappointing for me. I mean, it's fair to not really care about the OGL if you like D&D and don't care about playing anything else, but it hardly does you any harm, in that case. I get that not everybody's involved idealistically like I am. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> But I have real trouble buying that 4e needed stronger brand identity than 3e, since the game is based on public domain and knock-off IP to begin with.</blockquote>

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