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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 1599891" data-attributes="member: 19675">Emiricol, Maggan, I'm not saying that there aren't new games being produced that are non-OGL, nor am I asserting that designing a new system is the only way to be creative within the industry.  Nor, for the record, am I bashing D20- its my 2nd favorite system.If I may reformulate for clarity:Any given game store has a limited amount of shelf space that must be divided between the various products.I live in a major metropolitan area (Dallas/FW Metroplex, Texas, USA), and there are stores that only carry D20, GURPS, and perhaps one or 2 other systems, usually HERO or Palladium.  Why?  Because 1) those systems have a proven track record of sales, 2) brand recognition by even the newbies to the hobby, so they get asked for by name, and 3) no one wants to stock a game that doesn't sell.Any other system is facing a HUGE uphill battle for survival.  Those games are coming out, but they aren't being seen by most gamers.In fact several games of note have virtually dissapeared in their original forms and are stocked only in a D20 or GURPS version- Traveller, Deadlands, the Trinity System, Silver Age Sentinels,and Call of Cthulhu are all damnably hard to find in original form.  I haven't seen too many of the White Wolf Storyteller games on the shelves lately, either.In addition, many games that have had excellent reviews are being edged out by the flood of OGL products- In Nomine and Godlike, 2 well recieved games, are virtually invisible.I cannot agree that 30 years of gaming has exhausted the creative mine of possible systems.  I have personally playtested some systems that have not made it to market that were pretty good (though more were bad than good) and unlike anything currently out there (that I know of).  The designer of one such decent system felt that that there was no point in trying to get his product to press because he couldn't find a place to sell it.Development of new systems matters because in the process of "reinventing the wheel," the game designer may come up with a more elegant or simply better way of doing things than has been done before- thus advancing the hobby by forcing other game designers to rethink their creations.  If it wasn't for games like Talisantha, Runquest or Palladium, many of the changes in D&D in the past 15 years might not have happened.  Remember the ads for Talisantha-  "NO ELVES!"  And while the concepts behind diceless or classless systems didn't make it into D&D, they still exerted a conceptual pressure on other designers-  Are classes neccessary?  Are dice?I'm also seeing a different but related problem in my own groups.  Because D20 is ubiquitous, people aren't playing anything that isn't D20.  Whereas before OGL, if you wanted to play a sci-fi game you probably had to learn a new system, there have been at least 6 D20 sci-fi games released in the past couple of years.  While this is definitely making it easier to get people to try new genres, it seems to be stunting their growth as gamers, and that mentality makes it that much harder for a non-D20 game to succeed.Once again, I'm not bagging on D20.  I'm just worried that its doing as much harm as good within the hobby.</blockquote>

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