Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6212925" data-attributes="member: 27160">The fact that adventures and campaign settings were created by 3rd parties at the beginning actually shows that liberal licensing is a benefit and was, at that time, alive and well. TSR later clamped down on that - as big corporations are (mistakenly, in my view) wont to do.Wee Warriors and Numenera I actually don't agree are competition for D&D. They are part of the "roleplaying hobby", for sure, but they don't really steal sales from D&D IME. They sweep up those seasoned gamers who want something different from D&D - and who, if they still want D&D as well - will buy both. After all, compared to a hobby like golf, roleplaying is cheap even if you buy three or four systems (or, speaking personally, many more than that!)Pathfinder is, indeed, competition for D&D - and, like most competition, I think it's very healthy (even though I have no desire to run Pathfinder or 3.x again, personally).Kickstarter has been a great boon to creative competition all around, but I think that is a separate and not-really-related issue to the OGL.The OGL challenges the manipulation (or "management", if you will) of D&D, rather than D&D itself, precisely because it means older "editions" can be kept alive by fans. This is what I think is profoundly healthy. The OGL enabled the OSR movement as well as Pathfinder, remember.It's not the "generation of new" part of evolution that I think the OGL supports - it's the "fitness for purpose" part. Good evolution relies on two pillars - mutation (i.e. introduction of new ideas) and natural selection. The creator killing off old designs because they are inconvenient to their business plan is NOT in any sense "natural". Once made, creative products should be left available to thrive or die on their own merits - that is the basis of evolution. And it is what the OGL promotes. The tragedy of 4E will be if, instead of being left available to continue or wither according to its continued popularity it is made unavailable and arbitrarily "killed" to make way for DDN.If 3.x was dying it seems to me it was because WotC wasn't being imaginitive about where they could take it. Paizo have done a bang-up job in that department.I suppose part of my difference of opinion with you is that I think we really only saw the early days of the OGL with 3.x. It was a seismic shift in the marketplace and was always going to take years - maybe decades - to really play out, IMV. Sure, early on, it caused a majority of the RPG "industry" to hop on its bandwagon, but that was really coming to an end before 4E was announced. The (inevitable) cruft had been mostly winnowed out and the new enterprises were beginning to branch out into developing new systems of their own devising. Kickstarter has accelerated that by reducing massively the risk inherent in such a move, but it was in its initial stages already, AIR. And Storygames and such were initiated on the OGL's watch, besides.Not a reply to [MENTION=9213]ShinHakkaider[/MENTION], but I see this as evidence for what I'm saying above. Competition to D&D doesn't come from other RPGs - it comes from other editions of D&D. That's simply the way it is; other RPGs are played by those who either dislike D&D or are invested enough in the hobby to play (and buy) multiple RPGs. This really is a case of "I disagree with what you (ShinHakkaider) like, but will defend to the death your right to like (and be able to buy) such stuff <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification