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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5248032" data-attributes="member: 55271">There's another reality out there where the original D20-derived games worked the way Ryan Dancey intended them to: Inter-compatibility between systems. Take your D&D monsters and use them as space aliens (and vice versa).This vision died when Slavicsek's Star Wars put a bullet in its head and gave everyone a completely wrong-headed "model" for building their D20 games. D20 games needed to be either bold departures (Mutants & Masterminds) or strenuously loyal. The tepid middle-ground Star Wars D20 mapped out and everyone rushed to follow was literally the worst of both worlds: It took all the disadvantages of building your game engine around D&D, but then tossed out every advantage by making a couple hundred niggling changes that not only render the player's system mastery irrelevant but turns it into an actual liability.Of course, it didn't help when you had companies like PEG who admitted that they hated D20 but flooded the market with crappily designed D20 products in an effort to cash in. (They didn't actually say "crappily designed", but what else can you expect from people who don't like the game system they're ostensibly designing for?)This doesn't seem to be true for any other entertainment medium on the planet. I don't see any reason why it needs to be uniquely true for RPGs.I can think of two other examples with a dynamic similar to what the RPG industry has: When the Atari 2600 dominated the home video game market. And when SSI dominated the wargame market (albeit their dominance was weaker given the existence of Avalon Hill).In both cases, the strong reliance of the entire industry on a single industry leader to pull in new customers ultimately made those markets unstable and vulnerable to the poor business decisions of their market leaders.The trick here is that I don't want WotC to be any smaller than it currently is. I just want somebody else (and preferably several somebody elses) to be just as big or at least nearly as big.Not that I actually have any plan for seeing that happen, mind you.</blockquote>

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