D&D 5E Hope for an open GSL?

[SimBloodaxe]

WOTC and the Mervel-Money Cookie team has to have an open license. They need other companies to help make dnd come alive again. When we get the smaller more creative companies making content for the game is when people will really start to get something out of their core investment. The best stuff is not WOTC published. The coolest for 3rd came from elsewhere. I'm hoping the other companies come to build and entertain and its not going to be 1-2 modules every 6 months. We need like 10-20 of them in that time frame if dnd is going to catch fire again!

foolish_mortals

More than one or two yes. Ten or twenty seems extreme.

Is it hard to use people's real names? You really aren't being that creative.

 

[Hussar]

I've asked this same question repeatedly, and no one seems to be able to answer.

How can you have an OGL game and a subscription based model a la DDI? Or, to be more specific, how can anything WOTC could possibly produce compete with a free Hypertext SRD coupled with a free character generator?

Because, if you want an open gaming license of some sort, you're going to have to convince people at WOTC that it's worth giving up about a half a million dollars per month to do so. And, a half a million dollars per month that is growing by about 50% per year.

That OGL must be one HELL of a draw before they'll give up the DDI.

 

[SimBloodaxe]

I've asked this same question repeatedly, and no one seems to be able to answer.

How can you have an OGL game and a subscription based model a la DDI? Or, to be more specific, how can anything WOTC could possibly produce compete with a free Hypertext SRD coupled with a free character generator?

Because, if you want an open gaming license of some sort, you're going to have to convince people at WOTC that it's worth giving up about a half a million dollars per month to do so. And, a half a million dollars per month that is growing by about 50% per year.

That OGL must be one HELL of a draw before they'll give up the DDI.

Sorry if I misunderstood your point, but if they have that now, then why are they giving it up? If their closed model with their subscribtion fees is killing it, why are they letting it go for a new edition?

 

[Hussar]

If you have an OGL 5e, then the core rules are freely available to all via the SRD.

Thus, you could have a 5e Hypertext SRD and a character builder for all core material within weeks (or possibly days) of the release of 5e. Why would someone subscribe to a DDI when they can get tools that are just as good (or at least good enough) for free? We saw this in the early days of 4e when that Italian site, Emma's (?) had a 4e character generator, complete with the exact text from the 4e PHB, available within a few months of the release of 4e.

The DDI and the OGL do not play nicely together. Paizo does it by simply not offering any tools - their subscription is content only. But, I think fans would likely not be very happy if the DDI tools were not available for 5e. A fairly sizable number (at least 67000 users as I type this) use the DDI currently. It's pretty popular. And, because it's pretty popular, it's making a decent amount of cash - 67000*$7/month~$500 000 per month.

An OGL would have to allow for an increase in business to at the very least equal that amount per month. Never mind that the DDI is still apparently growing quite nicely as well - to the tune of about 50% per year, although presumably that will slow down.

So, again, how do you have an OGL and a DDI that play nicely together?

 

[Sanglorian]

Hi Hussar,

Good question. However, I think in reality it won't be a problem for Wizards.

During 3E, there was eTools (the Wizards never-finished character generator) and PCGen (a third party character generator with the SRD and more). But PCGen was slow, at least on my computer. So we ended up using the crippled, demo version of eTools (with less than just SRD content) over PCGen.

If Wizards puts out a fast, well-programmed character generator, it could easily blow its competitors out of the water. People that don't want a subscription can continue with third party products, but I doubt they'd ever be as user friendly as the Wizards offering.

Wizards can also make use of its other assets. For example, giving access to character portraits from official D&D art. Allowing characters created in its generator to interact seamlessly on the electronic gaming table. And content from new products could be available instantly on the Wizards generator, whereas it would take some time for them to be added to third party generators.

And I think the other part of the equation is encouraging third party publishers to participate in the Wizards generator.

 

[Jawsh]

So, again, how do you have an OGL and a DDI that play nicely together?

The OGL and DDI are quite different products. I don't know exactly how WotC would do it, but I know it's possible to make them both work.

For one thing, WotC can declare the rules open content, but decline to release an official SRD accessible outside of the DDI. That means someone else would have to invest the time and money into coding it and hosting it somewhere on the web. Meanwhile, DDI subscribers will have that content the instant WotC decides that it should be released.

It is true that those subscribers could go on to do a whole lot of tedious copy-and-pasting, and produce a competing SRD.

Instant access, relatively fewer bugs and errors, and regular updates are something that no competitor can do, and these things are well worth the price of a subscription to as many users* as WotC needs to keep the DDI profitable.

*Users like me, though, won't be subscribing to DDI. I'll be getting my rules from physical books, like I always have. I will occasionally want to look something up online, if I can, but it's not worth a subscription to me.

The main benefit of the OGL is the ease with which the game can be added onto by 3rd party publishers. And that is what will make or break my support for WotC's 5th iteration of D&D.

 

[avin]

It's a funny thing, while I think OGL is a great idea I used to disallow 3pp stuff on 3E because I had to spend a lot of time houseruling imbalance... on the other hand, used a lot of 3pp fluff and monsters (Creature Collection, Scarred Lands).

 

[Jawsh]

I did the same, sometimes. Looking back though, especially from some of my later 3.5 campaigns, there was never any serious imbalance. 3pp stuff tended to be poorly edited, and could be confusing. But the real offenders, power-wise, were official WotC offerings.

 

[Alzrius]

I've asked this same question repeatedly, and no one seems to be able to answer.

How can you have an OGL game and a subscription based model a la DDI? Or, to be more specific, how can anything WOTC could possibly produce compete with a free Hypertext SRD coupled with a free character generator?

Presumably the same way they were able to sell Core Rulebooks in the 3E era despite the Hypertext SRD and PCGen being out there.

 

[IronWolf]

Thus, you could have a 5e Hypertext SRD and a character builder for all core material within weeks (or possibly days) of the release of 5e. Why would someone subscribe to a DDI when they can get tools that are just as good (or at least good enough) for free? We saw this in the early days of 4e when that Italian site, Emma's (?) had a 4e character generator, complete with the exact text from the 4e PHB, available within a few months of the release of 4e.

The DDI and the OGL do not play nicely together. Paizo does it by simply not offering any tools - their subscription is content only. But, I think fans would likely not be very happy if the DDI tools were not available for 5e. A fairly sizable number (at least 67000 users as I type this) use the DDI currently. It's pretty popular. And, because it's pretty popular, it's making a decent amount of cash - 67000*$7/month~$500 000 per month.

I think you do it by making better tools. While Paizo might not have a character gen tool, there are what appear to be pretty successful character generators out there that people pay to use. I'm looking at you Hero Lab. Hero Lab isn't exactly cheap and contains information already readily available on the d20pfsrd. It even has PC Gen for competition, yet it seems to have a solid customer base despite they repackage freely available rules. It is a very good character generator and people will pay for that.

Add other perks to DDI that people want to pay for. Online character storage in the cloud accessible from a multitude of devices. There are any number of things they could do to steer people towards DDI with enhanced perks while releasing OGL.