D&D, Technology, and Planned Obsolescence

[Croesus]

Er, that's why we were speaking of the OGL material as being immortal, not the stuff WotC stopped printing.

Fair enough, though I still see issues with OGL material.

What happens when the copyright holder dies, or just drops contact with DriveThru RPG? What are the site's legal options for continuing to sell the material? What if someone simply decides, for whatever reason, to pull their material? (Before you say this would never happen, consider Dave Trampier who got out of the industry and has resisted all efforts to be pulled back in.)

I suspect however that most OGL material was never packaged for sale. I recently cleaned out my RPG favorites in IE and found roughly 30% of the sites simply don't exist anymore. I bookmarked those sites because they had something of value, and from my point of view that material is gone. Maybe some of the material is available elsewhere, maybe it isn't.

Over time, as people move on to other interests, more and more such material will simply drop off. Finding it will become more difficult, to the point that it might as well not exist. I'm uncertain what timeframe you are thinking of, but I expect within 5 to 10 years most such material will effectively be gone.

 

[wingsandsword]

Fair enough, though I still see issues with OGL material.

What happens when the copyright holder dies, or just drops contact with DriveThru RPG? What are the site's legal options for continuing to sell the material? What if someone simply decides, for whatever reason, to pull their material? (Before you say this would never happen, consider Dave Trampier who got out of the industry and has resisted all efforts to be pulled back in.)

The survivability of D&D 3.5, as preserved in the OGL and SRD's (and in the same breath, d20 Modern for the same reasons) is independent of any single website, company, or person.

Thanks to the Open Gaming License, it can be put up by any person, any time, any place, legally.

If I wanted to, I could buy a domain and host all the SRD's for download, even put up a nice and user-friendly HTML version. If I wanted to make my own Player's Handbook for a game which was virtually identical to D&D 3.0, 3.5 or d20 Modern, but with the trademark omitted, legally nobody can stop me. WotC can't unring the bell or put the genie back in the bottle.

If WotC tomorrow decided to suddenly switch to a new, incompatible D&D 5e, ended all support for 4e on DDI, took the books out of print, and aggressively enforced their trademarks and copyrights with regards to web material, they could be quite effective at reducing the prevalence of 4e.

WotC essentially did that with 3.5, and years later it thrives and flourishes, and is apparently the largest single competitor to 4e. All future editions of D&D will have to compete against this nigh-immortal version in the marketplace, and that immortal has the advantage of being free.

Will it be around in a few centuries, who the heck knows, but I feel very confident in saying that D&D 3.x will be in circulation long, long after 4e and other "closed" editions of D&D (or virtually any other RPG out there now) have faded to dust. I sincerely believe that only the complete end of the RPG hobby will extinguish it and for that reason a century from now it may be the only RPG from our era still played, if people are still playing what we would recognize as tabletop RPGs.

A single copyrighted product can be pulled from the market, I'm talking about the D&D 3.x engine, aka the d20 System, as made open-source through the OGL and SRD's. That is under an open license and cannot be removed from the web.

 

[GregoryOatmeal]

I really can't imagine any D&D product WOTC sells has higher profit margins than D&D Insider. If I were them I'd do anything possible to ensure their customers keep sending them money monthly. I'd put as much old content as possible behind that paywall and wouldn't care what edition people were playing.

In the short term intentionally removing content to nudge subscribers towards newer editions seems like an awful business move.

 

[S'mon]

Just to be clear, though, legality does not ensure availability. Right now, you can go to d20srd.org, and everything is there at your fingertips.

But, someone is paying to support that site. When they stop paying the site goes away. You may think it unlikely, but it is possible that, some day in the future, you'll look around, and nobody will be hosting such a site. The fans who had the wherewithal and desire may have slipped away into history, and the companies that support their websites dissolved, their servers decommissioned, the date backed up somewhere and stowed in a vault, not served up to the public.

Do remember, the thing we think of as "the internet" where we imagine all data is always available with a few keystrokes in Google is only a few decades old. That's a short time to consider it a basis for immortality. Real immortality comes when you are so super-awesome that someone always thinks to transport you to the new medium that comes along. Shakespeare's plays seem to be immortal (or some of them, anyway). OGL D&D? I dunno.

The actual amount of data involved in the SRD is so trivial that cost of data preservation is unlikely to be an issue, barring a complete civilisational crash - in which case the survivors will have more to worry about that 3e &D availability.

Nor is effort - pretty well all the RPG stuff I had on Geocities was cached & survived Geocities' deletion, and no one cared about preserving that actual data, they merely wanted to preserve the archive in toto .

 

[Pentius]

The survivability of D&D 3.5, as preserved in the OGL and SRD's (and in the same breath, d20 Modern for the same reasons) is independent of any single website, company, or person.

Thanks to the Open Gaming License, it can be put up by any person, any time, any place, legally.

If I wanted to, I could buy a domain and host all the SRD's for download, even put up a nice and user-friendly HTML version. If I wanted to make my own Player's Handbook for a game which was virtually identical to D&D 3.0, 3.5 or d20 Modern, but with the trademark omitted, legally nobody can stop me. WotC can't unring the bell or put the genie back in the bottle.

If WotC tomorrow decided to suddenly switch to a new, incompatible D&D 5e, ended all support for 4e on DDI, took the books out of print, and aggressively enforced their trademarks and copyrights with regards to web material, they could be quite effective at reducing the prevalence of 4e.

WotC essentially did that with 3.5, and years later it thrives and flourishes, and is apparently the largest single competitor to 4e. All future editions of D&D will have to compete against this nigh-immortal version in the marketplace, and that immortal has the advantage of being free.

Will it be around in a few centuries, who the heck knows, but I feel very confident in saying that D&D 3.x will be in circulation long, long after 4e and other "closed" editions of D&D (or virtually any other RPG out there now) have faded to dust. I sincerely believe that only the complete end of the RPG hobby will extinguish it and for that reason a century from now it may be the only RPG from our era still played, if people are still playing what we would recognize as tabletop RPGs.

A single copyrighted product can be pulled from the market, I'm talking about the D&D 3.x engine, aka the d20 System, as made open-source through the OGL and SRD's. That is under an open license and cannot be removed from the web.

While I do recognize, as a fan, that the OGL is great, and wish my favored 4e had such a protection, I do wonder about one thing. No edition of D&D is really out of play. Out of print, sure, but some fans keep the old things going. how long does that last? We're on decades for the first versions of D&D, and I could see it going longer.

 

[Deadstop]

The older editions (0e, 1e, B/X, BECMI, and 2e) are immortal as well, thanks to the discovery that they can be "retro-cloned" legally using the d20 SRD as a base. People who didn't start with those editions have begun to use them, thanks to the online "old school" community and the retro-clones.

It would be slightly harder to do the same with 4e, but when the day of its official demise comes, I fully expect someone to put in the effort and produce such a product, at least as an online freebie.

As for how long players can keep a game alive, "around 40 years" is true so far for D&D, though we have started to lose the original generation of gamers. D&D doesn't have the broad fan base of something like Monopoly or chess, which have lasted longer (centuries, at least, for chess), but those do show that a game can last quite a long time even if it barely changes.

As others have said, keeping the content around should not pose a problem, but future generations will have to include enough gamers who care enough to keep copying and spreading that content in some form.

Deadstop

 

[samcal]

Its great to have planned obsolescence with your appliances. Here's a familiar scenario: the washer or television breaks down, so an individual calls the manufacturer for a spare part. However, they are informed the part isn't really made anymore, so they'll have to just buy a new one. That's called planned obsolescence and it is built into just about any product one can name.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

Interesting that this old thread has come to light again.

Looking at half a room of dead dead-tree RPG stuff I'm rather relaxed on this. See. I own hundreds of RPG books, most of which will probably used never again. Gaming via subscription isn't such a terrible idea for me.

This assessment is still ture for me.

If push comes to shove, the D&D edition changes, and WotC pull the plug from the servers for 4e material, they will have lost me as a customer - probably forever.

With them not pulling the plug (up to now) but reducing the value of the subscription for me, Plan B has been implemented: make sure that we've covered our bases for the next maybe two or three years and play on.

But I'm pretty sure that we won't see an edition changed like in the past. D&D will continue to be developed and changed. But I expect the edition moniker silently being removed from the product. Perhaps in '14 we might see a commemorative edition of the 1e books marked as collectors' items, and a newly edited set of current rulebooks representing the then status of the game. In DDI you'll be able to make snapshots of the rules, representing the version you want to play with. All the tools mind your selection. So you can stay abreast with the ongoing development or alternatively configure your game as you like. You can also send you players a configuration token so that they use the same version for their preparations and character building.

Concerning the labelling of editions, DDN might work in the way I predicted. But there's still an edition change before this scenario becomes true.

The release of collectors' version of old rulebooks did happen, but a year earlier.

For the further development of DDI or any technological, tool-based approached WotC sadly didn't heed my advice.

Well, the accuracy of my prophetisms clearly leaves something to be desired! I should really hone my skills in time for the next edition change after DDN!