Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5910805" data-attributes="member: 22779">Went back through and read this thread and something struck me.  Well, that's not true.  It's the same thought that always strikes me when I hear this argument:  there is so little actual evidence that the OGL has any actual effect on the success of an edition.I mean, you could point to the D&D Miniatures and say that that's the reason that 4e "failed".  After all, DDM was very popular during 3e and 3.5 and quite likely had a pretty strong effect on D&D sales as DDM was strongly linked to 3e books.  They were being sold side by side, advertised side by side and very strongly pushed side by side by WOTC.  How much of an effect did DDM have on 3e sales?Now, 4e didn't have DDM because the bottom fell out of plastic crack.  4e was not tied to any tabletop wargame at all.  The argument that I see goes something like this.  3e had the OGL, 4e didn't.  3e was very successful and 4e wasn't.  Therefore, we should have the OGL in 5e.Yet, you can make almost exactly the same argument for DDM.  Did 3e do well because of 3rd party support externalities, or was it partially (in large or small) driven by the wild success of the DDM line?  Was the death of the DDM line the signal for the release of 4e?  After all, they do coincide.  And, did the lack of some sort of tabletop wargame play a role in the lackluster performance of 4e?See, I look at all the back and forth and I notice a few things.  The people really, really pushing for OGL have a vested interest in it.  So, there's a pretty obvious bias going on here.  Yet, for all the obvious complexities of this issue, we hear time and time again the same old refrain - no OGL=no success.  I'm just very tired of people trying to simplify the issue to such black and white lines without any regard for the changes that the hobby has gone through in the past few years.</blockquote>

Verification