Do you think the OGL was a good idea?

[delericho]

Yes, because it served its purpose at the time, which was to get many more people playing and continuing with Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition (and its 3PP off-shoots) than it would have if there had been no OGL. I personally believe WotC did much better financially over the 8 years of 3Es run than it would have otherwise without the OGL.

I also personally believe WotC made more money switching to a non-OGL 4E than they would have had they just released a 3.75ish 4E...

I agree with almost everything in your post, including your argument against a 3.75ish 4e.

However, what I'm much less convinced of is that going with a non-OGL 4e was a good idea. There's no reason WotC couldn't have opened 4e up in the same way they did 3e (and equally, of course, absolutely no obligation on them to open it up!), so it makes for an interesting question: would 4e have been better received had it been more open? Would it have been embraced by third-party publishers to a greater extent? Would Paizo have been more inclined to support 4e, rather than take the big risk that was PF? (a risk that's paid off hugely, but they couldn't know that at the time)

Indeed, I'm inclined to speculate we'd have seen a lot of third-party work done grafting the best of 4e onto 3.5e, and the best of 3.5e on 4e, and might well have seen a version of "Essentials" that was itself much more a 3.75e (but a very different 3.75e than Pathfinder) - and that to the benefit of WotC, the game, and the customers.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I agree with almost everything in your post, including your argument against a 3.75ish 4e.

However, what I'm much less convinced of is that going with a non-OGL 4e was a good idea. There's no reason WotC couldn't have opened 4e up in the same way they did 3e (and equally, of course, absolutely no obligation on them to open it up!), so it makes for an interesting question: would 4e have been better received had it been more open? Would it have been embraced by third-party publishers to a greater extent? Would Paizo have been more inclined to support 4e, rather than take the big risk that was PF? (a risk that's paid off hugely, but they couldn't know that at the time)

Indeed, I'm inclined to speculate we'd have seen a lot of third-party work done grafting the best of 4e onto 3.5e, and the best of 3.5e on 4e, and might well have seen a version of "Essentials" that was itself much more a 3.75e (but a very different 3.75e than Pathfinder) - and that to the benefit of WotC, the game, and the customers.

Yeah, the idea of an OGL 4E is so wide open of a concept that I dare not even attempt to speculate what would have happened. There's really no way of knowing what would have happened to the marketplace if it existed.

Your mentioning of a 3.75d 4E or a 4Ed 3.75 is a very interesting one though, and one that I had never actually considered before. An Essentials before Essentials as you speculated on it. That would have made things very interesting indeed, and slammed the door shut on WotC's version of it, because it would have been released a full year or two prior to when WotC did theirs. So there would have been no point for WotC then.

The one thing though I imagine would have happened with almost 100% certainty would be that a Superheroes game would have been made using the 4E engine. Whether Green Ronin did an M&M variant, or HERO systems did a Champions variant... I saw enough of the 4E engine and what was done through Gamma World that the game was primed to have a superhero game attached to it. Especially because it would have bridged that gap between the gridded (or more truthfully hexxed) Champions, and the more TotMish Mutants & Masterminds (and other d20 supers).

Someone would have a 4E supers game. Of that, I have no doubt.

 

[Hussar]

I think that the OGL was a fantastic thing to for a relatively untested hobby games company just starting out with the D&D brand. It got 3e on the shelves in a way that WOTC themselves couldn't possibly have done and built such a huge amount of good will among people who were producing and buying OGL content. And that really can't be emphasised enough.

As far as 4e being OGL, the trick is, IMO, and always has been, the DDi. How do you have an Open 4e and still charge for the character builder and the like. I mean, we had clone 4e character builders out within weeks of 4e's release. With an OGL, WOTC would have to compete with free sites and that would have really hurt.

There's a reason there's no pay version of a 3e character builder. Who would bother? Between PC Gen and the Hypertext SRD, you'd lose a lot of business. And, yes, I recognise that Hero Labs does do a 3e and Pathfinder suite of tools, but, does anyone think that they are coming anywhere near the numbers that the Ddi was bringing in?

 

[Umbran]

I say it was neither good nor bad. Some things resulting from it seem like positive developments to me. Others seem like negative developments. And they seem like apples and oranges, so I can't really compare them to tell which is "more".

 

[Nagol]

I think that the OGL was a fantastic thing to for a relatively untested hobby games company just starting out with the D&D brand. It got 3e on the shelves in a way that WOTC themselves couldn't possibly have done and built such a huge amount of good will among people who were producing and buying OGL content. And that really can't be emphasised enough.

As far as 4e being OGL, the trick is, IMO, and always has been, the DDi. How do you have an Open 4e and still charge for the character builder and the like. I mean, we had clone 4e character builders out within weeks of 4e's release. With an OGL, WOTC would have to compete with free sites and that would have really hurt.

There's a reason there's no pay version of a 3e character builder. Who would bother? Between PC Gen and the Hypertext SRD, you'd lose a lot of business. And, yes, I recognise that Hero Labs does do a 3e and Pathfinder suite of tools, but, does anyone think that they are coming anywhere near the numbers that the Ddi was bringing in?

Build an API that allows 3rd-party (hosted BY those 3rd parties so your infrastructure is immune to their bad code) to plugin their rule sets. Charge the 3rd parties a small fee and/or charge customers who want to use an enhanced subscription fee (like another $1 a year).

A bit sophisticated, but entirely possible.

 

[delericho]

As far as 4e being OGL, the trick is, IMO, and always has been, the DDi. How do you have an Open 4e and still charge for the character builder and the like.

It's actually not as hard as it might seem. WotC have three big advantages:

- Massive name recognition. Here, I'll note that Mongoose used the OGL to produce a pocket PHB that, despite whatever anger WotC may have felt about it, had no appreciable impact on PHB sales. Likewise, an 'official' character builder will always do well against an 'unofficial' one, regardless of content.

- They get to control the release schedule. So, no reason they couldn't release the new books (and material) to DDI, and thus the official generator, a couple of months ahead.

- And, of course, they get to control what gets released as 'open'. Since virutally none of the 3.5e supplements contained any open material, an official generator would have had a huge advantage. (And while existing generators might include material from "Complete Warrior" et al, they do so only so long as WotC don't shut them down; you can bet that if WotC were in direct competition, they would.)

In fact, the bigger difficulty is how (and whether) to include third-party materials into the 'official' DDI generator. Failing to include them, especially if that material becomes popular, reduces the perceived value of the DDI sub, while allowing their inclusion is potentially problematic for legal and technical reasons.

There's a reason there's no pay version of a 3e character builder.

Yes. WotC never managed to get a decent one together, and then they gave up.

 

[Kinak]

Well, good for me, because I like a lot of the variant games that came out under the OGL (Pathfinder and Iron Heroes being the big two) and both my wife and I have done some OGL-fueled freelancing.

And good for the hobby, because it created a garden for small publishers to start in. Some of them branch out later, which is cool, but it's nice to be able to start with supplements about things you care about, rather than jumping in with a core book.

Definitely good for gaming customers, because it set a permanent line for quality. If you can't explain what your game is better at than the OGL content, it'll get drummed out of the market.

I'm not really sure what current WotC management thinks about it. I wouldn't imagine they're happy to be competing against this tide from a decade ago, but it's hard to suss out if any material harm is being done.

But even if material harm is done and they abandon the game, it'll live on in a very D&D form. And that, I think, is the best part of the OGL.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[GMforPowergamers]

in the very short term it was ok, in the few years after it was good, in the long term bad... if it had an expiration date it would stop retro clones from feeding the edition wars.

I know it is an unpopular opionon, and I expect it to be less the 10% of the votes, but I would rathered they not do open source for ever,

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Yes.

Those who vote no will be tracked down, have their OGL games taken away, and be forced to play World of Synnibar for the rest of their gaming careers.

lucky for me then I don't play anything OGL anymore the closest thing is Mutants and Masterminds but the new edition is very much it's own game... although I still want to get a Myth and Magic game someday...and that's OGL...

Right now I play Owod, Rifts, D&D4e, Homebrew steam punk 4e variant, and the playtest of 5e...

 

[Umbran]

if it had an expiration date it would stop retro clones from feeding the edition wars.

I don't see how. The retroclones are of stuff that wasn't covered by the OGL in the first place, so it doesn't apply. They instead depend on the fact that copyright covers specific expressions, but not underlying logic of a system.