In contrast to the GSL, Ryan Dancey on OGL/D20 in WotC archives

[Darrin Drader]

No. Publishing products for money doesn't hijack the community. However, turning the community's outputs so that they benefit only a publisher, and indirectly its fans by giving them something to buy, would be hijacking the community.

I think that open gaming would be hijacked if people saw the process Paizo is using for Pathfinder as what open gaming is supposed to be. The Pathfinder process is an open playtest in that anyone can simply show up and take part. The goal of the process is to create a product that Paizo will sell for its own direct economic benefit, and for the indirect benefit of publishers that choose to produce Pathfinder-compatible products.

There's a reason why you can get Firefox, the various Linux distributions, and other open source programs for free. When you remove economics from the equation, you allow the community to better express its needs and dictate the direction of development. The community picks its needs and goals. The publisher's needs and goals are already set: profit by publishing the rules.

There's also an important aspect to open development undermined when you involve a publisher too closely to the process. The relationship between a publisher and participants in the process is unequal. The publisher picks what gets pursued, what gets used, and what the goal is. The publisher is in charge.

In a true open environment, the users are in charge. You have people "in charge" in the sense that they organize things, but if they go against the users they aren't in charge for long, or they're left in charge of a project without users.

So, it would be a pity if "open source development" was hijacked to mean "development that allows for free licensing" or "open playtesting", because it sells the concept short.

I agree with you in principal, though to be honest, I think you're oversimplifying the issues. You cannot compare software to gaming for a couple of reasons. Open source software, created and published by a community, works because the output is electronic. It's difficult to get gaming to work the same way because the ultimate desired goal is a printed product that is useful at the gaming table. Granted, you can always try to run a game from a laptop, but my experience is that this is simply not happening at this point in time. People find it more convenient and more easy to have books at the table they can reference.

If there is a need for printed product, then there is a need for profit-motivated company involvement. Someone has to take a financial risk for printing and distributing the material, not to mention assemble the rules into a cohesive manuscript, put it through editing, add some aesthetically pleasing formatting, and art. If you don't have those elements, then what you have is a jumble of rules, some of which will be more balanced and better written than others.

Since there is currently no way for a community project to turn into a printed product without it going through some sort of company, the RPG model is inherently different than software. That does not make these independently produced projects any less open, it simply means that the only way for them to be fully realized is for money to change hands.

What I see as the real test of open gaming is the extent to which the publishers who benefit from the open license open up their own material. If they open up their new rules for others to use and expand upon as they see fit, then they have added to community content, regardless of whether that content was originally released for profit or not. In that respect, I feel that open gaming has been mostly successful. Right now, the only ones I see trying to claim that open gaming is a failure is the same company that created it because they now perceive it as a threat. Open gaming under the OGL is alive, it is successful, and my belief is that it will outlast the GSL, though in ten years, the open products being released might not resemble the 3.5 rules very much. Evolution.

 

[mearls]

By the way, I strongly disapprove of your insistent distinction between publishers and the community. In most cases, the community includes publishers and some community members ended up becoming publishers because of 1) WotCs reluctance to open its content and/or 2) because the OGL enabled them to become publishers of D20 and OGL material. Dreamscarred Press, which was created as a direct reaction to Complete Psionic's questionable level of quality, is a prime example of a community turned publisher as is EN World Publishing.

Publishers are part of the community, but they are not the community in whole. The community consists of users who may or may not be publishers.

The thing is, a lot of the cases you cite are (IMO) the first step toward creating a viable open design movement. People saw shortcomings in WotC's approach and sought to correct that - that's a hallmark of open source.

What I'd like to see is something of an intermediate step. WotC releases rules for photography that people hate. The open community talks about the rules, why they don't work, and comes up with alternatives, some of those alternatives become popular, others fall by the wayside. Some participants in the process, or publishers tuned into it, sell those rules for profit.

I think this is where we disagree, and correct me if I am wrong. You'd like to see WotC take the results produced by such a community and incorporate them into books.

I don't think that's an important part of the process. To me, the important part is that people talk about design, work together, and learn. A publisher might take part and, once they see useful stuff out there, publish such work, but the measure of success isn't publication. Even if WotC never touches the stuff, users benefit.

 

[xechnao]

No. Publishing products for money doesn't hijack the community. However, turning the community's outputs so that they benefit only a publisher, and indirectly its fans by giving them something to buy, would be hijacking the community.

I think that open gaming would be hijacked if people saw the process Paizo is using for Pathfinder as what open gaming is supposed to be. The Pathfinder process is an open playtest in that anyone can simply show up and take part. The goal of the process is to create a product that Paizo will sell for its own direct economic benefit, and for the indirect benefit of publishers that choose to produce Pathfinder-compatible products.

There's a reason why you can get Firefox, the various Linux distributions, and other open source programs for free. When you remove economics from the equation, you allow the community to better express its needs and dictate the direction of development. The community picks its needs and goals. The publisher's needs and goals are already set: profit by publishing the rules.

There's also an important aspect to open development undermined when you involve a publisher too closely to the process. The relationship between a publisher and participants in the process is unequal. The publisher picks what gets pursued, what gets used, and what the goal is. The publisher is in charge.

In a true open environment, the users are in charge. You have people "in charge" in the sense that they organize things, but if they go against the users they aren't in charge for long, or they're left in charge of a project without users.

So, it would be a pity if "open source development" was hijacked to mean "development that allows for free licensing" or "open playtesting", because it sells the concept short.

Your points have merit. But we are not there yet. A financial input is important to get it running, especially now that the open movement is not strong enough to be able to feed itself. As I told you above D&D attracts the most money of the hobby right now. If open movement had enough recognition to attract as much as D&D then it would be able to be the leading and shaping force at its maximum. For now the closest thing is Paizo's Pathfinder. They invest the capital to organize it. It is a step forward or at least it is trying to keep the rhythm.

 

[WayneLigon]

I think this is where we disagree, and correct me if I am wrong. You'd like to see WotC take the results produced by such a community and incorporate them into books.
...
Even if WotC never touches the stuff, users benefit.

How pronounced would you say is the 'only official sources' effect? If WoTC never publishes these rules, then I wonder how many people would adopt them?

 

[mearls]

Take example of yourself. Didn't financial aids help you in finding the necessary time to work enough so to arrive at the point of being able to develop 4e?

No. Much of my formative understanding of RPG design was derived from the late, lamented Gaming Outpost forums.

Paying people allows them to devote more time to RPG design, and it makes really big, sprawling projects that require full-time effort possible. However, in my experience that doesn't have a bearing on learning better design.

The biggest benefit of working at WotC is that I get to talk to other people full-time about game design. When I was freelance, most of my learning took place off the clock, when I was talking design at GenCon or Origins, or while talking to people on line.

 

[Kristian Serrano]

I think this is where we disagree, and correct me if I am wrong. You'd like to see WotC take the results produced by such a community and incorporate them into books.

Not entirely accurate. While I'd certainly like to see WotC adopt some open content (just for kicks really) I'd primarily like to see WotC open some of its closed content, especially that which updates previously open content, so that the community can update or use it in their open gaming resources. Now, this doesn't mean that WotC has to grant permission to print out a whole class entry from the Complete series, but it could at least allow other the community to expand on those classes with new options legally. The same could be said for content that has acted as errata or updates for material previously published in the SRD.

You seem to have avoided commenting on this point from my earlier post.

 

[mearls]

So why did Dancey say this? Pie in the sky dreamsniffing?

A marketer blowing smoke in our faces?

I think Ryan was looking at how open source benefits software, and expecting the same thing to happen in RPG-dom.

 

[howandwhy99]

The role of Linus Torvalds in Linux's early development really can't go unappreciated either.

Someone must be the decider. To recall a phrase I've heard before.

 

[Nifft]

I think Ryan was looking at how open source benefits software, and expecting the same thing to happen in RPG-dom.

Open Source works in software because software isn't what people actually sell: they sell services regarding software.

For the Open Source model to work with RPGs, game companies have to figure out what service to sell. Earlier, you said companies sell rules, but that's not the only thing a game company could possibly sell.

Owning the rules gives you many advantages in selling setting, monsters, and ... what other things?

Could you still sell those things if you didn't own the rules, but instead were simply the most knowledgeable regarding them?

(I ask without any particular answers in mind. I don't know the game industry at all.)

Cheers, -- N

 

[Kristian Serrano]

In regards to WotC opening some of its own closed content, I'd like to make a point more clearly.

As part of an open gaming effort, I'd love nothing more than to take some or all of the 3.5 materials and combine them into a single resource for the open gaming community to use and expand upon. Now that WotC has moved onto 4e, it's up to the community to continue support for the 3.5 supplements they've purchased in recent years. However, it's unfortunately illegal for anyone outside of the copyright owner (WotC) to publish such material.

Having said that, there seems to be a bit of a loophole in that we constantly see such creations on WotCs forums, but even there posting copyrighted material from the books for reference is against the CoC despite that posting new options that references such copyrighted work doesn't seem to be an issue.

Barring that unique case, unless that content is open, no one can legally compile, correct, or expand upon those materials or distribute them in a legal manner.

For example, I created a new dragon mantle to add to the material presented in Complete Psionic, but I can't reference the ardent or divine mind. Additionally, I'm working on a new campaign setting that references dragon-themed material from WotC's books directly (i.e. - Draconomicon, Races of the Dragon, Dragon Magic, Player's Handbook II, and Monster Manual IV), but I can't share it with the community. I even want to mash all of these materials together with Gem Dragons and the Legend of Sardior articles from WotC's web archive, but I can't share it with anyone. Heck, even RavinRay's gem dragon conversions can't be made publicly available because gem dragons aren't OGC.

These are cases where community members want to take the game, learn design, and share their work with others to better the game they know and love, but legally cannot.