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

[Belen]

WotC left the Open Gaming movement with 4e, and is reaping the results of that. Pretending that, therefore, those who continue to provide OGC materials are somehow "hijacking" the movement is misguided at best.

Why is this about WOTC? He is not speaking in his official capacity as an employee of Wizards.

Would Wizards have left the OGL community if it was more of a fan-controlled rather than publisher-controlled venue? No one knows.

I think he has a point. I am a huge Pathfinder/Paizo fan and I did not become one until the magazines were canceled. I generally distrust Wizards; however, Pathfinder is not an open game. The finals decisions will not be made by the community. It remains publisher-controlled.

I think his point is that the Forge is great for indie games, but no traditional games venue exists. The community is fragmented and those who do choose to design often attempt to sell rather than post it for the community to comment upon. modify, and maybe incorporate.

Some publishers work together and share rules, but that is not the norm. Hell, you even have publishers lamenting the OGL because it was too open and did not give them enough protection. A lot of publishers would have preferred a license that allowed them use the SRD/OGL freely and share amongst themselves without fan access to reproduce them.

While the fan part of the community does have the right to create a rules database or design community, we have not. We have continued to allow publishers to keep control of the games.

I believe that is his point and it applied to Wizards equally.

 

[xechnao]

We posted a version a while back:

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dd/20051007a

This is a D&D rules mastery test. I would not base recruitment of minds for something that is supposed to be the open development movement using a test on some specific project's mastery. It would neither be practical nor in the spirit of promoting opening the field's horizons. It is only good for promoting something specific. It is practical for recruiting people for dealing with a specific project you already know its goals and design. But this is not good for an open gaming movement basis -it's bad instead. It can help to carry on specific projects though.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Why is this about WOTC? He is not speaking in his official capacity as an employee of Wizards.

Because this thread is "In contrast to the GSL....." which is clearly a contrast of WotC policy then and now.

Pathfinder is not an open game. The finals decisions will not be made by the community. It remains publisher-controlled.

Excepting, of course, that it is only the name "Pathfinder" and the art that is not open. If the community disagrees with the publishers, then they are free to use Pathfinder as the basis for another game (as Pathfinder uses the SRD as a basis), simply calling it something else
and adding their own art. Pathfinder is more open than 3.x, simply because WotC kept some things closed to promote the sales of the core books, and the text of Pathfinder (or at least the Alpha version) is 100% OGC.

Some publishers work together and share rules, but that is not the norm.

Link?

Hell, you even have publishers lamenting the OGL because it was too open and did not give them enough protection.

Link?

A lot of publishers would have preferred a license that allowed them use the SRD/OGL freely and share amongst themselves without fan access to reproduce them.

Link?


RC

 

[Kwalish Kid]

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.

First, this is a pretty good post.

However, it is also symptomatic of some of the posts in this thread that absolutely drive me crazy. Perhaps it's part of a greater political issue so this post will get trashed.

Essentially, open licenses are an economic issue and it is plain that the average internet citizen has a woefully inadequate understanding of the basic economics that rule their existence. Copyright is the only way publishers can make money and open licenses are antithetical to copyright. This is why WOTC was very careful in their copyright restrictions in regards to the OGL and what elements of their intellectual property could and could not do. I am quite confident that Paizo is equally careful, though the scope of their copyright concerns may be slightly different.

As it is, the current economic system in North America (where most of the action is) is extremely punishing to companies that are not careful with their copyright. The companies with the most profit-taking ability are the ones that will succeed and supplant other companies. Copyright is a form of government granted rent that allows publishers to gain rent regardless of the quality of the produced physical object. Essentially, this means that publishers can skimp out on the production value and rely on the strength of the intellectual content. If all the intellectual content of Paizo's Pathfinder system was freely available, they would be in serious trouble financially, as any publisher could compete with them in an unprotected market, thus drastically driving down the cost of their books. It is the same for any work. Thus it is a poor investment for a company to throw capital at a project guaranteed to drive down profitability by throwing away government granted subsidy.

What this means is that every publisher, and everyone who wants to keep their employment with that publisher, has incentive to continue to reserve content as the sole intellectual property of the company. This is incentive to keep open content gaming far from being completely open. Every company that gets involved in open gaming has the incentive to impose tighter restrictions on their open content because it increases the scope of their intellectual property. Sometimes, this means that the company choses "closing" content because they see more benefit from that than from continuing to take part in open content. I'm not sure that I would call this "hijacking", but I can see the appeal of the term.

If people really want open gaming, then they have to seriously organize something outside of the normal profit streams of traditional publishing. This may even require significant political action to change laws or even the economic system whereby reward is given for intellectual property.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

Excepting, of course, that it is only the name "Pathfinder" and the art that is not open. If the community disagrees with the publishers, then they are free to use Pathfinder as the basis for another game (as Pathfinder uses the SRD as a basis), simply calling it something else and adding their own art. Pathfinder is more open than 3.x, simply because WotC kept some things closed to promote the sales of the core books, and the text of Pathfinder (or at least the Alpha version) is 100% OGC.

If this is the case, then it may be an extremely foolish decision. Unless there is amazing appeal to the art of the printed books, it is extremely foolish for any consumer to buy any Pathfinder product: they should simply purchase the identical product without the art that is guaranteed to be cheaper (and may even have better production values in paper and binding).

Of course, consumers are often foolish and many fortunes are made expecting consumers to be foolish.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Here's another way of looking at it: The claim that the OG movement failed (despite being ongoing!) requires either a pretty Mickey Mouse definition of "open" or of "failed".

I define "open" pretty clearly: Can I use it, modify it, and publish the results without fear of legal reprisal? The degree to which the answer is "Yes" is the degree to which any material is open.

Likewise, something that is ongoing....indeed, something that is challenging the 400-lb gorilla in the room....can only be considered a failure by some truly labrythine logic or definition.

(And, Kwalish, I assume that Paizo doesn't intend the Pathfinder rules to be a big money-maker, but rather support products, such as adventures. From what I can tell, Pathfinder is pretty darn cheap. It's hard to beat "free" from a price-point perspective!)


RC

 

[Kwalish Kid]

I cannot confirm the author of this quote, but it is interesting:

If the D&D Vs. Pathfinder schism becomes like PC Vs. Apple, then the only question is what the customers will do. Will they continue to follow D&D out of brand loyalty, or will they adopt Pathfinder because of its open source nature and the greater amount of available material for it. To compare and contrast for a moment, D&Ds biggest advantage for a long time was that it did every product in color and most other publishers couldn't afford to do so. Now, not only is that not only not true, but you have Pathfinder publishing full color products on all of their products. D&D will (presumably) have more rules supplements while any Pathfinder player can use any 3.5 rules supplement ever produced by anyone, and they can produce their own rulebooks of their own if they so wish. D&D has a brand that goes back to the start of roleplaying (so did Apple in the computer field), while Pathfinder traces its roots back to the same brand and the same company. One is essentially completely completely open while the other is not. Which one will win in the end?

There is a big difference between D&D4E and Paizo's Pathfinder, especially is everything in Pathfinder is simply in the art. There is a difference in system that some people will appreciate, perhaps enough that they will pay for that difference. However, it is here that we can see the downfall in our current economic system of open content. If all the rules of Pathfinder are open, there is nothing to stop WOTC from offering a higher quality publication of the Pathfinder rules, without the art (or even with stock WOTC art), for far less than Paizo prices their work (it might even sell at less than Paizo's production costs unless Paizo also decides to jettison artwork).

If Paizo is relying on only brand loyalty to survive, then they must overcome the difference in system (at different prices) and the incredible savings that consumers can get by purchasing from another producer. Even if they can compete in this new market, they will not be as profitable as they would otherwise be.

(There are lessons here from the pharmaceutical drug industry in the USA. These companies spend millions of dollars in lobbying efforts to defeat the production of generic drugs because they stand to gain many more millions, if not billions, of dollars from the price controls they get from having intellectual property controls.)

 

[xechnao]

If this is the case, then it may be an extremely foolish decision. Unless there is amazing appeal to the art of the printed books, it is extremely foolish for any consumer to buy any Pathfinder product: they should simply purchase the identical product without the art that is guaranteed to be cheaper (and may even have better production values in paper and binding).

Of course, consumers are often foolish and many fortunes are made expecting consumers to be foolish.

I think he is talking about the rules. Paizo's selling strength is the fluff it creates such as adventures and the like. Besides the D20 generic or basic rules selling market is pretty saturated at this point IMO.

 

[Raven Crowking]

What this means is that every publisher, and everyone who wants to keep their employment with that publisher, has incentive to continue to reserve content as the sole intellectual property of the company. This is incentive to keep open content gaming far from being completely open. Every company that gets involved in open gaming has the incentive to impose tighter restrictions on their open content because it increases the scope of their intellectual property.

Yet, oddly enough, the movement in many d20 sourcebooks (apart from a few publishers) has been toward more open content. Open content adds value to books, and D&D players seem to buck the trend of not buying things because they can get them cheaper or free.

Indeed, let's say that your argument was completely spot-on. It implies that the existence of an SRD not only retards book sales, but completely eliminates them. Perhaps a group will buy one PHB and one DMG to get the XP progression charts, but why bother to buy more? Yet we all know people who have more than one PHB. WotC felt so confident in their ability to re-sell these books that they produced a leather-bound version.

For gamers, there is definitely a value added in having cool materials. And gamers are definitely willing to pay for that added value. And, as a group, we like to reward people whose work we like. It seems important to gamers that, if we like Mike Mearls' work, we see Mike gets paid for it (rather than Bob the repackager). Even if we otherwise like Bob. You just have to examine threads where repackaging comes up to see that this is true. And, even when we might like to have a stripped-down cheaper rules reference, we still want the full blown ruleset. Really, what percentage of gamers actively collect books just to have them? I am guessing that percentage is fairly high.

Where a game fails, it is because (rightly or wrongly) no (or little) value is perceived.


RC

 

[Kwalish Kid]

Some good points there, RC.

However, the collecting aspect may be part of the reason that gaming does not break out into a wider market. (Though, honestly, I think that the current size in the USA may actually be pretty decent.)