Do you think the OGL was a good idea?

[GMforPowergamers]

What, is WotC supposed to be our parent, now? Little Jimmy and Tommy can't play together nice, so Mommy takes the toy away, leaving nothing to argue over?

no of course not, in fact
I don't think that it was at all WotC 'fault' per say, but they did something that wasn't in there or our best intrest (IMO)

The mere existence of another game is not "egging them on".

sort of...

And WotC should not need to set its business policies based on the assumption that its customers are self-destructively jerkish.

well if they knew there fan base (just kidding)

WotC and Paizo don't have orbital mind control lasers, nor do they lace their publications with aggression-enhancing drugs. They don't *make* us do anything. Our basic lack of thoughtfulness and self-control are our own problems.

too true....

So, yeah, critics are not the problem. But those who either maliciously or thoughtlessly insult others are a problem. WotC business choices can't save us from that.

also true...



To put my mind set in perspective

I would have done everything WotC or Piazo did in there place... but I would be wrong, it just wouldn't look that way at the time.

in 1998 I thought D&D was on the ropes and going down fast. I had no faith that some weird CCG company would make anything I was interested in, and even if they did I doubted they could sustain it. I really would have placed money by 1999 that WoD and White wolf in general was about to win 1st place in RPGs and kill D&D and take it's fans (hey in my defiance I was far from the only person guessing that)... I also at my core believe in the goodness of 'just working togather' so in Dancy's place I would have made every move he did... The idea of people taking the ogl and making it a compatation instead of a friendly work togather group would never dawn on me...

Now I'm going to switch gears (please everyone follow me here.) to comics and star trek.

I have been a comic fan longer then a roleplayer. I remember the lead up to Death of Superman and Knight fall, and the Strife stories in X force... In the mid 90's I was reading over $100 a month in comics... almost every DC title and all the X titles and Spider titles... I stopped reading bit by bit... and 4 years ago was down to about a dozen DC titles, Witchblade, and GI Joe, no Marvel at all. I missed the Xmen and Spiderman but I hated every comic I read of there's. I tried to jump in a few times. Then GI Joe got canceled/rebooted and I didn't like it and DC relaunched it's whole universe. In January my pull list hit it's all time low (the min to have a pull list at my store) 6 titles... and 2 of those have been announced to be canceled...

If I could legally launch my own comic company and write about the Captian Atom, and Superman and Green Lantern of ten years ago I would in a second... If I could get stories about X-men from fifteen years ago I would jump up and down with glee. I am bearly a comic book fan anymore, but if I could turn back the clock and read or create for those old ones... witch is what pathfinder did...

I have been a star trek fan longer then a comic fan. I couldn't read a comic when my dad used to watch the old series in reruns. I saw Star trek 4 in theaters... and since I have only not seen 1 in theaters. I watched Next gen and ds9 religiously. I owned nick pickers guides and tech manuals and minis and a phaser TV remote. I remember wanting to love Voyager. I even used to have a pad tracking there Photon torpedoes throught he first season... but It never felt right... I stayed till the bitter end but by that point I didn't even really like it.

When Enterprise launched it lost me really early, and I didn't even see the last season or so. I thought trek was dead.

then came JJ Abrams and it looked like we were getting a new fresh life into my shows... but even though I do love the new movies (saw both in theaters and own them on DVD) They aren't the same. I wrote adventures and idea's for ST games based on continuing after voyager and just forgetting enterprise... If I could get a cool new story post Dominion war post voyager getting home I would love it. I would still go to see a third Abrams trek, but I would be fine with both even...

OK so long road back to D&D... I would in a heart beat make a "pathfinder" for star trek or comics, but doing so would not be in everyone's best interest. (although for some of us it would) Comic and Trek Fandom are both fractured already, but having a compeating source at the same time would make it worse...


so even as the odd man out with the unpopular opion, I stand by the fact the the OGL did more harm then good...


using perfect 20/20 hinde sight I don't think I could have done any better though...

 

[GMforPowergamers]

4e's critics aren't a "problem" per se, but that aside, I don't buy this line of thought at all. Regardless of the licensing issues, the mission statement and many of the pieces of the game itself were simply never going to be accepted. The licensing did not create the divide.

I don't think it created the war, but it made the fire burn brighter and hotter... um I think I just mixed my metaphors...

Maybe at first, but the OGL is still here and plenty of people are publishing other systems now.

100% agree I meant for like the first 6 or so years it stifled, it has come back strong though... and thanks to kickstarter innovation is better then ever today

There would have been retroclones without the OGL, history tells us. Maybe not games as overtly copied or prevalent, but PF isn't really fueling the 3.X community so much as it is being fueled by that community.

no... I do not think so. with no OGL PF wouldn't exsist at all.

As Ryan Dancey said, what the OGL does is it makes sure that no one can kill D&D. WotC tried to kill at least the OGL version. Their mistake. That's where the divide comes from.

I don't think that is the only mistake they made... Ryan Dancey did do a great job of making sure 3.0 and 3.5 live forever... but there is something the matter with a game frozen in time never evolving and that made WotC have to decided to forever open D&D or to never evolve it... they decided the more important part was to move forward...

 

[GMforPowergamers]

My sentiments exactly - while Dancey and company cribbed the license structure from GNU, they didn't crib the mechanisms by which they could continue to guide the process.

Hindsight is 20/20.

a ogl stating that it was only in effect as long as WotC was publishing supliments+13 months and that no one could reprit whole sale a book that would compeate as a core supliment.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I don't think that is the only mistake they made... Ryan Dancey did do a great job of making sure 3.0 and 3.5 live forever... but there is something the matter with a game frozen in time never evolving and that made WotC have to decided to forever open D&D or to never evolve it... they decided the more important part was to move forward...

...and then never moved forward. The 3.5 OGL game effectively replaced 3.0, because it did the same thing, and on the whole was better, and because it was released in the same way. "Moving forward" would constitute another (perhaps more substantial) revision that nonetheless met those criteria. The consequence of the OGL is that you have to either beat it or join it; at the moment neither of those things is happening.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

...and then never moved forward.

weather you liked the direction they went or not. 4e was forward.

 

[Ahnehnois]

weather you liked the direction they went or not. 4e was forward.

They didn't move forward with the OGL.

 

[Ace]

Good idea for whom?

This.

It was good for hobby in general but probably not good for Hasbro/WOTC since it set the tone that games should be open and created a scary new competitor in Pathfinder.

 

[Nellisir]

a ogl stating that it was only in effect as long as WotC was publishing supliments+13 months and that no one could reprit whole sale a book that would compeate as a core supliment.

Which would void the point of the OGL. No company anywhere is going to invest in a product that could be pulled from under them at any time with no warning. The absolute lack of control WotC had once the OGL was released was the only thing that gave people confidence in it, and even then there were legions of people convinced that WotC had clauses in invisible ink that would allow them to take control of their products.

I see the OGL/d20 as something like a grove of trees (it's a poor analogy, but bear with me). First you have one little sapling, and then a few more little saplings, but they're all pretty close together and pretty small (except for one that springs up like a mile away, we'll call it Mutants & Masterminds). The grove gets bigger, the circle gradually expands, but the inner trees are crowded together, crisscrossing each other and growing into one another. Some of them die. Then the center tree, the first tree, gets chopped down, taking with it a bunch of others, and leaving space and sunlight for another one to spring up in pretty much the exact same spot.

So now, 14 years in, I think we're finally getting the hang of the OGL. The grove has expanded, and it's met resistance so it doesn't grow like it used to, but the survivors are older and more mature; better able to exploit and defend their niches. Things aren't so crowded in the center anymore. A few offshoots have spawned their own groves (OSRIC, S&W, etc, etc.)

 

[Hussar]

Which would void the point of the OGL. No company anywhere is going to invest in a product that could be pulled from under them at any time with no warning. The absolute lack of control WotC had once the OGL was released was the only thing that gave people confidence in it, and even then there were legions of people convinced that WotC had clauses in invisible ink that would allow them to take control of their products.

I see the OGL/d20 as something like a grove of trees (it's a poor analogy, but bear with me). First you have one little sapling, and then a few more little saplings, but they're all pretty close together and pretty small (except for one that springs up like a mile away, we'll call it Mutants & Masterminds). The grove gets bigger, the circle gradually expands, but the inner trees are crowded together, crisscrossing each other and growing into one another. Some of them die. Then the center tree, the first tree, gets chopped down, taking with it a bunch of others, and leaving space and sunlight for another one to spring up in pretty much the exact same spot.

So now, 14 years in, I think we're finally getting the hang of the OGL. The grove has expanded, and it's met resistance so it doesn't grow like it used to, but the survivors are older and more mature; better able to exploit and defend their niches. Things aren't so crowded in the center anymore. A few offshoots have spawned their own groves (OSRIC, S&W, etc, etc.)

I'd point out that that's not actually true. After all, En World's 4e adventure paths are GSL licensed, which can be pulled.

Honestly, I'd say that the OGL forest has shrunk to a very small core. At least d20 OGL anyway. Other systems are going with some sort of open license, but, not d20. Name 3 new D20 games that aren't D&D related that have come out in the past two years. For a while there, EVERYTHING was d20 OGL. Now? I looked at the Hot Roleplaying Games list and only 2 of the top 10 games are new D20 - 13th Age and Numenara and those are pretty closely tied to D&D. Everything else is much older or not d20 at all. (Those two games are d20 aren't they?)

The days of OGL games being the forest are somewhat behind us. Fate, Savage Worlds, and others are spreading out now that the shadow of D20 seems to have past.

 

[Nellisir]

I'd point out that that's not actually true. After all, En World's 4e adventure paths are GSL licensed, which can be pulled.

Honestly, I'd say that the OGL forest has shrunk to a very small core. At least d20 OGL anyway. Other systems are going with some sort of open license, but, not d20. Name 3 new D20 games that aren't D&D related that have come out in the past two years. For a while there, EVERYTHING was d20 OGL. Now? I looked at the Hot Roleplaying Games list and only 2 of the top 10 games are new D20 - 13th Age and Numenara and those are pretty closely tied to D&D. Everything else is much older or not d20 at all. (Those two games are d20 aren't they?)

The days of OGL games being the forest are somewhat behind us. Fate, Savage Worlds, and others are spreading out now that the shadow of D20 seems to have past.

Are you using OGL interchangeably with d20? Because the two aren't the same. d20 allowed the user to indicate compatibility with Dungeons & Dragons. And it's dead. WotC could and did pull it, so no, no one is making new d20 games.