Hypothetical question for 3pp: 5e goes OGL what would you publish?

[dd.stevenson]

It wasn't my intention to leak out this information when it did. I honestly thought a lot of people, including Morrus, knew. Thankfully, someone else has stepped forward which is a relief.

But you were well motivated to do so, in order to clarify the nature of your 5E risks to kickstarter backers. That's something interesting that has come out of Kickstarter, IMO: to some degree insider business knowledge has become the public's business, insofar as the public has moved into the role of business investors.

(Just musing out loud, really.)

Also, congratulations on your Kickstarter!

 

[Dias Ex Machina]

But you were well motivated to do so, in order to clarify the nature of your 5E risks to kickstarter backers. That's something interesting that has come out of Kickstarter, IMO: to some degree insider business knowledge has become the public's business, insofar as the public has moved into the role of business investors.

(Just musing out loud, really.)

Also, congratulations on your Kickstarter!

Except that even if we didn't know DDN was going OGL, we still would have offered it because of our confidence that it would. It just helped that we knew better.
And thanks, this thread generated considerable interest which helped...and then a sudden benefactor appeared and put us over the top. Kinda going nuts on my end here.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Can you clarify?

Sure. At GenCon 2012, I had two different conversations. One with a Wizards person, one that wasn't a Wizards person but was in a position to know (I can't elaborate more than that, I was sworn not to say) that 5e was going to be OGL.

 

[delericho]

A little history lesson. When 3e launched at Gen Con 2000, Green Ronin launched Death in Freeport, an adventure, right along with it. It helped catapult their company from a "who?" to a large well-respected publisher with multiple game lines. And that's without a year of open playtest to dial in on it.

But it was with a draft SRD that had been available for some time, and with Ryan Dancey at WotC, where he was gleefully leaking bits of the game all over the place - as I understand it, Eric Noah's site got most of their information from him - and it pretty much had the core of the game available months before release.

 

[wedgeski]

Well these are interesting revelations aren't they?

I still don't buy that 5E's only route to success is via an OGL-like mechanism. IMO that's still a fantasy cooked-up by the tiny percentage of consumers who actually care (i.e. us).

And if what happened with Pathfinder wasn't enough to seal the coffin-lid on a similar license for 5E, then WotC must *really* be in dire straits. Or maybe they just think the cat's already out of the bag.

But having said that, an open license will be an exciting development, especially with a mature crowd-funding landscape behind it.

 

[mxyzplk]

But it was with a draft SRD that had been available for some time, and with Ryan Dancey at WotC, where he was gleefully leaking bits of the game all over the place - as I understand it, Eric Noah's site got most of their information from him - and it pretty much had the core of the game available months before release.

We pretty much have the core of the game right now a year before release...

 

[delericho]

We pretty much have the core of the game right now a year before release...

Indeed. In theory, at least, it should be possible to do an almost-simultaneous release for 5e if one were so inclined.

Of course, there's a risk inherent in that: When 3e released, Sword & Sorcery (White Wolf) released a monster book on the same day - in fact, beating the 3e MM to market. However, that book was later shown to be full of mistakes, some of them quite serious. I guess that's the risk you take if you work from a draft/best guess, rather than waiting for the real thing.

 

[Morrus]

We pretty much have the core of the game right now a year before release...

A lot can change in a year, though. It only takes one fundamental change to make your product pretty much incompatible - or, if not incompatible, at least buggy and erroneous as all heck.

 

[mxyzplk]

Indeed. In theory, at least, it should be possible to do an almost-simultaneous release for 5e if one were so inclined.

Of course, there's a risk inherent in that: When 3e released, Sword & Sorcery (White Wolf) released a monster book on the same day - in fact, beating the 3e MM to market. However, that book was later shown to be full of mistakes, some of them quite serious. I guess that's the risk you take if you work from a draft/best guess, rather than waiting for the real thing.

Sure. But releasing day 1 with some errors versus releasing months later without them - here's a little business sense quiz, which one is way, way, way better for sales? (Especially when electronic products can be cleaned up easily and people are fairly tolerant of online errata even for print ones?)

People put out like 500 3pp monster books for 3e. I own one - the Sword & Sorcery one. Because they were there first. Green Ronin went from basically nothing to a large thriving company on the back of its d20 adventures, starting with launch. (Well, I think I do have Creatures of Freeport somewhere, that counts as a second monster book.)

As in other venues, fortune favors the bold. Anyone with a product in hand at Gen Con for launch will outsell all others that the hand-wringers provide "late but 100% rules correct" over the next year. That's just business in a new market, it shouldn't be news to anyone.

 

[Morrus]

Because they were there first. Green Ronin went from basically nothing to a large thriving company on the back of its d20 adventures, starting with launch.

I think you're undervaluing Green Ronin. Green Ronin (and it's not a large company) is successful because they consistently work hard and produce good material; they'd be where they are now whether or not they'd released an OGL product at launch because they write good books.