Gygax's views on OGL

[Ottergame]

Interestingly, I'd say that, from Wizards of the Coast, we've seen more adventures than in the entire time of Gary's tenure at TSR.

Go to the Free Adventures on Wizards site, go to Dungeon Magazine, go to the Adventure Path and similar.

My quick estimate is somewhere from 100-150 adventures.

Hmm.

Not many adventure modules, as such, but a lot of adventures.

Cheers!

One of the reasons for the OGL, Wizards once said, was so that they DIDN'T have to do modules, since other companies can devote the time, resources, editors, and playtesters to them since they tend to focus on only a couple of things at a time.

 

[Ottergame]

Oh, I think Gary's take on where the game should go wasn't that bad. I do think that his choice of friends and business partners was extremely poor.

Cheers!

We have one friend, Arneson and his Blackmoor game, to thank for the original concept of fantasy role playing though.

 

[MerricB]

We have one friend, Arneson and his Blackmoor game, to thank for the original concept of fantasy role playing though.

Oh, Gary didn't get everything wrong. There were just a few choices there that worked against him.

Cheers!

 

[tarchon]

I think it makes economic sense for modules (etc.) to be done by smaller d20 companies. Extremely high-quality publications can only be produced economically if they sell many copies, which modules and things in the "Flumph Players Handbook" category generally don't. A big fancy company like WotC can't get by with publishing poorly edited and undertested stuff or else people shout "look at this poorly edited and undertested crap that WotC's trying to push off on us!" Thus, it makes sense to cede that market to smaller companies that customers will forgive for having grotesque spelling mistakes in every other paragraph. The d20s also have a lower overhead, I suspect, making them more able to subsist on low-volume products. A public company like Hasbro has a very hard time justifying producing unprofitable products, unlike privately held companies which have much more freedom to put out obvious non-winners just because the owner thinks they should - it's one of the drawbacks to going public. Thus, the OGL system is a fairly reasonable solution, allowing low-volume (and necessarily lower quality) support products to be produced without putting Hasbro-WotC in a difficult bind. It's similar to the tactic of spinning off a separate outlet to publish "adult" material, as White Wolf did with Black Dog. Some things just have to be divorced from the main line if you want them to ever see the light of day.

 

[marketingman]

Interestingly, I'd say that, from Wizards of the Coast, we've seen more adventures than in the entire time of Gary's tenure at TSR.

Go to the Free Adventures on Wizards site, go to Dungeon Magazine, go to the Adventure Path and similar.

My quick estimate is somewhere from 100-150 adventures.

Hmm.

Not many adventure modules, as such, but a lot of adventures.

Cheers!

Merric,

Its apples to organes time. The tech level from 1969 to when Gary left TSR is an informational stone age compared to todays ability to have vertual instant communcation.

WotC puts out more adventure because at three oclock in the morning thier time a person can upload thier project to the editor for appovale who the can upload it to the site.

Garys time was cut and paste with real scissor glue and paper. :ile our communication with you would havre taken over a month via post back in the early 1980's. A web site wad just where you forgot to dust. 64k what would you do with all that memory, or tape boots that took twenty minutes to loads and that fast.

While I have ranted enough time for my hot coco.

 

[johnsemlak]

Oh, I think Gary's take on where the game should go wasn't that bad. I do think that his choice of friends and business partners was extremely poor.

Cheers!

You don't always choose who your friends are, sometimes you're stuck with 'em.

Business partners are different, but again, you don't always have options.

Also, people who know what they're doing can make bad decisions.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

And that is the Crime to RPG players everywhere that is the d20 system. Nobody makes their own system anymore. People that do are pushed out of the market. Look at 7th Sea. That was a TERRIFIC game, and now it is dead, because they tried to d20ize it, and nobody liked it that way.

I really hate to say it, but I suspect that 7th Sea was going to die anyway.

And when I say that I hate to say it I should mention that 7th Sea is my third favorite RPG of all time. First is Call of Cthulhu, second is Ars Magica, and third is 7th Sea. (Changeling: the Dreaming is fourth, Vampire is fifth, and D&D ranks in at number six.)

If anything being able to produce a D20 version of their game world allowed them to hang on for another year or two. Before D20 the business of RPGs in general was dying fast. Distributors were going under or consolidating. (Gonsalves, Wargames West, Greenfield, all gone. Chessex and Atlas merged to form Alliance, which is nearly the only large distributor of gaming materials in my section of the world.

The Auld Grump

 

[Maggan]

Ryan Dancey is the Anti-Gygax

On Gygax: his views are not suprising, they echoe the thoughts he had when inteviewed by Oddities a long time ago. His recipe for bringing D&D to new heights was rerelasing original AD&D (as far as I can remember). He told WotC so and they went with 3rd, d20STL and OGL. So at least he's being consistent.

I think he is wrong on many levels, but is entitled to his opinion. The Od&dities in question are number 9 and 10, and they can be found here:

http://www.tongue.fsnet.co.uk/archives.htm

On OGL being a failure for WotC: Ryan Dancey posted to a thread on RPGnet where discussion on how the OGL had hurt WotC was going on. It's sometimes painful, but overall an interesting read. Ryan's posts are some way into the thread.

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?s=&threadid=118888&perpage=30&pagenumber=1

On 7th Sea: The new books were dual-statted, so the existing 7th Sea players were, as far as I understand, getting new material. It still failed. Probably not because of d20 (there are about 50 or 60 new/revised print rpgs coming out 2004 that are not d20. Which is about the same as during the late 90's and early 00's).

Cheers!

Maggan

 

[Desdichado]

Nevertheless, I think d20 will never shake loose its close association with D&D for as long as the 3E D&D corebooks remain the primary reference for the d20 system.

Naturally that would take some time. The relatively recent publication of a number of games that are not D&D but which are OGL (d20 without technically being d20) like Everquest or Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed for example are the first steps in this direction.

However, quite likely d20 will always have some association with D&D if for no other reason that the vast majority of gamers are only interested in playing D&D.

I personally would like to see a more *neutral* reference document for d20. I don't know if this is possible, but I think it would help in removing that erroneous stigma that d20 = D&D.

You mean like the d20 Modern SRD? That's been out for, what, a year and a half? Two years? And what do you mean by calling the wrong assumption that d20 = D&D a stigma? If anything, that's what's made the d20 brand viable; a far cry from being a stigma.

 

[WayneLigon]

All I see is the early- and mid-80's all over again; lots of people publishing stuff for D&D. Back then, there must have been a dozen or more companies that would put out product specifically for D&D (or 'D&D compatable', with the serial numbers filed off). Some of it was good (City of Haven, A lot of the Role-Aids series), some of it was embarassingly bad and shoddy (Pretty much everything Judge's Guild did after City State, with a few exceptions here and there). I don't see that much has changed, save that it's easier to become a publisher now thanks to new technologies.