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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SpiralBound" data-source="post: 1636595" data-attributes="member: 8396">Um, forgive me if I misunderstood, but now it sounds like you're avocating that d20 publishers BOTH:1) reuse and recycle the good parts of appropriate pre-existing OGL material, so as to contribute to a "best practices" method.  (there's a side issue here regarding the validity of persuing the  One True Method, but I'll refrain from picking two nits at once!) <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />2) wait until they're already invested a significant amount of their (possibly limited) resources of time and money into 'product x' and THEN discover that their new product would break the "best practices" model.That seems unfair to the publishers and I think would end up stifling more creativity than it enhances...Again, perhaps I reading you wrong, but... if there are 3 products that cover the same topic, but in different ways - so different that they are actually incompatible, then what is the likelyhood that you would have wanted to use all three together in the first place even if they had been compatible?  Isn't it more likely that you would have decided that you liked "A", but not "B" and "C" and only used the one set of rules anyway?I don't know about anyone else, but this sounds really critical of the author on a level that is bordering on personal.  This is an undercurrent that I've noticed in all your posts on this topic thread thus far. I don't know the author or the product at all, yet your pseudo-sarcastic tone is instinctively making me want to side with him regardless.  This creates the necessity in me to overcome the emotional bias you're inducing just so that I can continue to reasonably and objectively consider your points.  This style of debate (intentional or not) isn't really conducive to you getting your point across.First off, despite the admittedly huge similarities, the Open Gaming movement and the Open Software movement are not really the same thing and thus not everything translates across when making comparasions.  For instance, one SIGNIFICANT difference is that in the open software world, the end user doesn't usually interact with the open code itself, they use the resultant software.  By contrast, the end user in RPGs are always interacting directly with the open gaming systems themselves.  This single difference alone limits the degree to which one can directly compare them and their patterns of evotution and behaviour as "vechicles of innovation".While I agree (at a basic level) with your assertion that multiple systems will converge into better systems via a near darwinistic system of keeping the good and dropping the bad, I very much disagree with your statements that the RPG industry as a whole is suffering from some supposed slump due to an implied stagnation caused from not having already adopted a "best practices" approach to D20 publishing as a whole.  This makes the IMHO erronous assumption that the current Open Gaming era of the RPG industry is mature enough to have reached the stage where such convergences are due to occur.  I believe that such convergences will occur, that there will be multiple "best practices", and that the net result will be a positive thing for the gaming community as a whole.  As for this "slump"... I fail to see how higher levels of sales per month of rpg material than this hobby has seen for a very long time is a slump.  Perhaps if one looks at the number of poor performers in the industry and neglects to weigh this against the sheer numbers of players in this industry, then I can see how such a conclusion can be mistakenly be drawn.  However, in this time of a literal proliferation of systems, settings, companies, resource books, and even product delivery methods (trad. printing, POD, PDF, etc.) I find it hard to see any supporting evidence for any kind of slump.  We're still in the early stages, the "discovery period" when just what Open Gaming "is" is still being developed.  If you want to see a slump in the rpg industry, cast your eyes back to the pre-D20 endtimes of TSR and the initial years of the M:TG-fueled CCG craze... now THAT was a slump!!! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" /></blockquote>

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