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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4439093" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't want to derail on a terminological point. Here is one of my earlier posts:I stand by that, and have been reiterating it. Those who are saying that the OGL was an unbridled success for WoTC have to explain why I am wrong about this.Eric Andondson and Dmmcoy have argued that WoTC benefits even from people playing such games, because they are still in what we might call the periphery of D&D. I am not persuaded - practically every RPGer is in the periphery of D&D, because it is the game through which nearly all enter the hobby (maybe Vampire runs a poor second here) and the most widely played game, and hence the game to which practically any RPGer might resort if a game in their preferred system is not available.In any event, absent solid data about the rate of movement from such OGL games back to D&D, compared to the rate of movement from other games back to D&D, this remains at most reasoned speculation.There is a second issue, however, as to what Ryan Dancey had in mind when he talked about the OGL supporting WoTC via network externalities. My recollection (admittedly dulled by the passage of 8 intervening years) is that he had in mind unified mechanics (ever-honed by "natural selection" under the OGL) with variant settings and genres. In fact, what has proliferated under the OGL is variant mechanics (OGL Conan, Iron Heroes, Arcana Evolved, C&C, True20 etc) with unified settings and genres (roughly, mainstream fantasy of one sort or another).I regard this as a refutation of this part of Dancey's theory. I'm interested, though, to hear why I'm wrong - either because I'm wrong about what Dancey said at the time, or because I'm misinterpreting the evidence provided by the proliferation of OGL-based games.</blockquote>

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