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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1642809" data-attributes="member: 10201">That's in part because we're still pretty much in the 1st generation of ogl-licensed RPG products. The *next* stage, which i think we're just starting to get to, is where those many rulesets get culled down to the best versions, or evolutionary/combinatory advances based on them are made. It's always gonna move slower than software evolution, because of the medium: RPGs take longer to find the errors, and books take longer to produce and circulate than code (in terms of production issues, once the creative work is done). Secondly, the RPG market is smaller than the, say, Linux market, so there're fewer brains working on the problem, and less market demand for a good solution. Finally, most open-content RPG development is taking place under the WotC OGL, which misses a couple of very important steps in actually facilitating RPG development/evolution. Namely, there's no requirement to make your work open (beyond the derivative parts), and no requirement to make it easy/practical for others to use your work (such as providing it in digital format). So, if i want to reuse something, my choices are to ask the original producer for the OGC in digital format (so far, pretty poor response in that department, IME); scan&OCR the material, and then trim out the PI, sometimes following fairly ambiguous guidelines on what is OGC and/or PI (and i don't own a scanner); or retype the material, editing out the non-OGC and PI as i go. For most bits of OGC, i can invent it faster than i can type it up. So, i'm not gonna save any time if i have to retype someone else's OGC, over just inventing my own new rules. And that's before we consider issues of changes i want to make. If i'm not using the existing OGC verbatim, whether due to changes in the tone of the writing, or the actual content embodied, i've now got extra work after i have the verbatim transcription (which will be the situation if i use OCR), or i have to change it on the fly as i go. So, for me at least, there is no savings in time, and little-to-no-savings in effort. So why should i do it? Give me digital copy of OGC, and i'll gladly reuse it. But if i'm gonna have to retype it anyway, i may as well just reinvent it, too--no more effort, and i don't have to worry baout unintentionally infringing someone's copyright.Oh, finally, there's another powerful force working against the adoption of "best practices" in the D20 System arena: D&D. So long as D&D isn't participating in the feedback loop, anybody who wants to innovate has to ask themselves which is more important: better rules, or more D&D-compatible rules? Similarly, a 3rd party doesn't want to be compatible with the best d20 System rules out there, they want to be compatible with the current-D&D version of D20 System</blockquote>

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