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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnRTroy" data-source="post: 4675870" data-attributes="member: 2732">People keep quoting Ryan Dancy's reasons for the OGL.  However, they forget one prediction he made that failed.He predicted that if there was a choice with either OGL products or a closed and different version of D&D, people would choose the OGL version and reject any radical changes D&D's future owners might make to D&D.D&D was massively changed from 3e to 4e.The OGL was not used for D&D rules.It looks like he was wrong.If you guys want to prove him RIGHT, do a mass exodus from D&D and support an OGL fork of the 3e D&D ruleset.  If you want to prove Ryan's philosophy right, I'd like to see over 50% of the market reject D&D and move to the other games.  But trying to make D&D 4e "more open" is not going to work, neither will trying to reverse engineer it, etc.  WoTC made their choice.  Personally, in this day and age, I wonder why people spend so much time working on stuff they know they don't have 100% control over.  A lot of creators for comics learned this lesson and focused on independent publishing.  Gary Gygax never really went back to D&D--while he ended up doing Castle Zagyg, he ended up creating 2 widely-different games, even though he had offers to do D&D stuff with TSR and WoTC--and he walked away from stuff he had no control over.  That's the real model for being creative--make stuff you 100% control.  That's why I take a dimmer view on "fan fiction" or "derivative works".  All the effort going into working on stuff that goes beyond "fair use" tends to make me think these guys are wasting a lot of creative energy that could go to something else.  As far as people "lockstep-defending" WoTC...I think it's a reaction to all the radical statements made in this decade by the moves towards "openness", giving away stuff for free, and turning a blind eye towards privacy.  There's a lot of people who care about raving against "the man", and I think there are some frightening entitlement issues from the masses.  People forget "the man" sometimes is a little guy like you and me who has rights.  If I was a novelist of childrens books and discovered "slash fiction", I could see myself engaging in a lawsuit and attempting to shut things down, because I don't want my work corrupted by fan-fiction.  While I am critical of WoTC's rather lax attitude towards the fan community with this release (the GSL situation should have been handled a lot better), I am also critical of reactionary people who take the OGL too far and focus more on how the game is licensed and should be released.  There are no "thought police", we are free to create our own campaign settings, rules, and adventures in our own homes.  Publishing derivative works--even for free--is a right reserved for the creators to control, and even in this day and age of people having blogs, message boards, etc, I defend the right of authors to have this control--from Disney to my friend who has written his own novella.</blockquote>

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