D&D 4E Interesting Article on OGL and 4E

[Betote]

WotC can't stop someone from making a set of OGL rules that mimic 4E. If there is a "Nature" skill in 4E, then there's nothing to stop someone from writing up a new skill called "Nature" under the OGL and - so long as the text isn't identical - giving it the same set of bonuses, making it usable under the same set of conditions, etc.

Even if WotC is aware of this, they have no recourse for stopping it (they can try to take it to court and hope they win via attrition, but that seems extremely doubtful). The only thing that couldn't be used would be protected intellectual properties, such as names of specific characters or names of brand new monsters (e.g. if they have a 4E monster called a "megataur," then someone could make an OGL version that matches all of the statistics, but would have to call it a "mega-minotaur" or something similar).

And, finally, we can see a meaning in having feats and powers named "Golden Wyvern Adept" and stuff like that. It's hard to defend a "Nature" skill as PI/Copyright, but if the trait's name is something not naturally attached to its function, it becomes much easier.

 

[LightPhoenix]

I think the problem I have with the whole OGL is that I don't feel much of what was released was particularly innovative at all, save for a very few instances. I think it's great a bunch of publishers got to put out campaign settings, and I think there was some good stuff in them, especially fluff-wise.

I think the intent of the OGL was to allow for third-party publishers to take on risky projects and products that WotC wouldn't. While I'm not a fan, I think the BoEF is an excellent example of what I perceived as the intent of the OGL. An endless stream of campaign settings trying to become the next FR wasn't what I imagined the intent to be. Based on the new license, I dare say I think WotC agrees.

 

[Nellisir]

I think the problem I have with the whole OGL is that I don't feel much of what was released was particularly innovative at all, save for a very few instances. I think it's great a bunch of publishers got to put out campaign settings, and I think there was some good stuff in them, especially fluff-wise.

How much 3rd-party stuff do you have? This'll be one discussion if you've got a little, or some, and another if you've got shelves and shelves and harddrives full.

I agree, at least a little. I'd have a hard time pointing to a single setting or book and saying "that bends all the rules in a really good way". I'd have a very easy time, though, pulling 20 books off my shelf and saying "add pages x through y from these books, and the sum of them will be incredible". That's the beauty of the OGL - that approach has finally become possible.

 

[mxyzplk]

So here's the real concern behind the "closing" of the licenses.

I work for a tech company. We have created some fairly major tech standards. We specifically open them up and offer them as open standards. (We do have patents on our specific implementations of course, but we strive for openness in the standard.) Why do we do this? Because we see it as being in our long term best interest for there to be a lively ecosystem of products and companies around that standard. Do some companies produce products that directly compete with ours using the standard? Sure. But we have confidence that we're going to produce the best and most innovative products in that sector, and that further that sector will grow much more quickly overall if powered by an entire industry.

The original OGL obviously achieved a lot of this goal. RPG companies weren't doing great back when 3e came out. A whole industry built around d20 and variations of d20 grew, as well as "support" items (mini/mat products, software, etc). There was somewhat of a crash, but that was more due to the economy tanking overall than the mythical "d20 glut".

The only reason to try to create a new standard and make it NOT open is if you don't have confidence in your ability to produce the best and most innovative products in that space. I'm not sure why WotC thinks this of themselves, but it's a warning sign for sure. It's a kind of "turtling" that doesn't have regard for the overall industry they're in, which means problems ahead. We'd only do that if we didn't see much of a future in that sector or again, if we felt like we couldn't compete in it for some reason. Is this a sign of WotC saying "RPGs aren't the future, let's bet on something else (e.g. minis, CRPGs)?"

 

[SteveC]

So here's the real concern behind the "closing" of the licenses.

I work for a tech company. We have created some fairly major tech standards. We specifically open them up and offer them as open standards. (We do have patents on our specific implementations of course, but we strive for openness in the standard.) Why do we do this? Because we see it as being in our long term best interest for there to be a lively ecosystem of products and companies around that standard. Do some companies produce products that directly compete with ours using the standard? Sure. But we have confidence that we're going to produce the best and most innovative products in that sector, and that further that sector will grow much more quickly overall if powered by an entire industry.

The original OGL obviously achieved a lot of this goal. RPG companies weren't doing great back when 3e came out. A whole industry built around d20 and variations of d20 grew, as well as "support" items (mini/mat products, software, etc). There was somewhat of a crash, but that was more due to the economy tanking overall than the mythical "d20 glut".

The only reason to try to create a new standard and make it NOT open is if you don't have confidence in your ability to produce the best and most innovative products in that space. I'm not sure why WotC thinks this of themselves, but it's a warning sign for sure. It's a kind of "turtling" that doesn't have regard for the overall industry they're in, which means problems ahead. We'd only do that if we didn't see much of a future in that sector or again, if we felt like we couldn't compete in it for some reason. Is this a sign of WotC saying "RPGs aren't the future, let's bet on something else (e.g. minis, CRPGs)?"

I just wanted to say that I think this is a very insightful post, and one that WotC would do well to consider, because it seems like a lot of what you've said has been forgotten by them over the last couple of years.

The D20 License and the OGL were tremendous boons for WotC. There is simply no question about it. WotC puts out books that sell one or more orders of magnitude over what smaller publishers do. This happens even when they directly compete with smaller publishers, such as in the case of the environmental books.

I simply cannot fathom how they can believe that abandoning the concept of Open Gaming is going to make their situation any better for them. All that's going to happen is that the market is going to fracture.

Maybe the thought is that they're going to bring in many new players who've never heard of D&D. If that's the case, the game needs an entirely new marketing campaign that reaches those people. Is their any evidence that this is happening in the slightest?

I play a lot of different games, and over the last few years I've mostly played D&D and OGL games, because my groups have found that these games are similar enough so that the time you have to invest to learn a new set of rules is drastically less. As a result, when our group went through its Iron Heroes phase, we still picked up D&D books that we thought might be relevant to what we were doing. Ditto with Mutants and Masterminds, True20 and BESMD20.

In the new edition, all of that is going to be gone.

I'm excited about the new edition, but I also know that it means I'm going to end up going and playing a lot of games that have less and less crossover with the new rules. That means less money goes to WotC.

I'll also predict that either an existing company or someone entirely new will make a version of D&D using the existing OGL that is 4E with the serial numbers filed off. That company will make a tremendous amount of money.

--Steve

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

So here's the real concern behind the "closing" of the licenses.

I work for a tech company. We have created some fairly major tech standards. We specifically open them up and offer them as open standards. (We do have patents on our specific implementations of course, but we strive for openness in the standard.) Why do we do this? Because we see it as being in our long term best interest for there to be a lively ecosystem of products and companies around that standard. Do some companies produce products that directly compete with ours using the standard? Sure. But we have confidence that we're going to produce the best and most innovative products in that sector, and that further that sector will grow much more quickly overall if powered by an entire industry.

This makes me think of a question I don't know the answer to. How many people working for WotC were able to have jobs in the RPG industry because of the "sector" of publishers that were producing OGL material and attracting gaming dollars to RPGs under the collective banner of the d20 system? In other words, what does the current state of industry talent owe to the OGL and its effects on the industry? How many of these people would be running shipping companies or selling hospital equipment instead of running gaming companies and selling RPGs? How many of these people are now working for WotC instead of doing something else?

 

[Hussar]

So here's the real concern behind the "closing" of the licenses.

I work for a tech company. We have created some fairly major tech standards. We specifically open them up and offer them as open standards. (We do have patents on our specific implementations of course, but we strive for openness in the standard.) Why do we do this? Because we see it as being in our long term best interest for there to be a lively ecosystem of products and companies around that standard. Do some companies produce products that directly compete with ours using the standard? Sure. But we have confidence that we're going to produce the best and most innovative products in that sector, and that further that sector will grow much more quickly overall if powered by an entire industry.

The original OGL obviously achieved a lot of this goal. RPG companies weren't doing great back when 3e came out. A whole industry built around d20 and variations of d20 grew, as well as "support" items (mini/mat products, software, etc). There was somewhat of a crash, but that was more due to the economy tanking overall than the mythical "d20 glut".

This is a bit untrue. The crash had a lot more to do with the move to 3.5 than with economics. And, there really was a huge glut of material that was certainly not mythical.

The only reason to try to create a new standard and make it NOT open is if you don't have confidence in your ability to produce the best and most innovative products in that space. I'm not sure why WotC thinks this of themselves, but it's a warning sign for sure. It's a kind of "turtling" that doesn't have regard for the overall industry they're in, which means problems ahead. We'd only do that if we didn't see much of a future in that sector or again, if we felt like we couldn't compete in it for some reason. Is this a sign of WotC saying "RPGs aren't the future, let's bet on something else (e.g. minis, CRPGs)?"

I would say its more of a sign that WOTC is tired of d20 publishers piggybacking on their design and development to go ahead and make products that directly compete. Take Scarred Lands. It came out the second 3e hit the shelves. It actually had a monster book out BEFORE the 3e Monster Manual. That's not helping WOTC at all.

So, basically, you have a number of companies that took the millions of dollars that WOTC spent on developing 3e and turn around and produce, not complementary products which is what WOTC assumed that they would do, but directly competitive products.

It's a pretty bad business plan to give ALL of your goodies away to the competition. And that's what the SRD did. Other than a tiny handful of elements - half a dozen monsters and some proper nouns, every bit of Core D&D was open.

You are saying that you allow parts of your standards to be open. Do you allow all standards to be open?

With respect to Pramas, I think he's mistaken. The d20 publishers never really did modules. He pointed to Freeport and a couple of others. Compare that to the number of titles that weren't modules. SSS produced dozens of titles, with a grand total of three modules. Green Ronin's own module production is absolutely dwarfed by its other d20 products.

All this makes me wonder if a consortium of third party publishers might band together to release a kind of "next edition" SRD: not based on 4e D&D, although perhaps drawing inspiration from the things that seem to really work), but of their own devising.

Last time I mentioned this on these boards, several prominent game designers called me a thief who just wanted their material for free. The chances of seeing a 3rd party SRD is slim to none because everyone else wants to suckle on the teat but no one wants to pay.

 

[Alzrius]

On a tangential note, I also want to mention that I think the "glut" is something of a myth.

I say "something" of a myth because, while it's certainly true that there was a point where d20 products became less valuable than they had been previously, I don't think that was because of an overabundance of (bad) products.

The creation of the OGL was something that the RPG industry had never seen before. It essentially created a new opportunity for everyone by allowing cross-compatibility on an unprecedented (for the RPG industry) scale. By creating a new type of product that anyone could take advantage of, WotC basically expanded the market for publishers, and for consumers as well. This is called the "blue ocean strategy."

As with any successful use of that strategy, there was a flood of people rushing to both put out products for this new, wide-open category, and there was also a rush of people eager to purchase these new products. In other words, it was a bubble, rapidly expanding to accommodate everything that filled it. Bubbles, however, inevitably burst. Eventually the new market space ("d20 products") became more and more full, with an ever-widening pool of products competing for buyers' attention, along with purchasing slowing down as many of them bought enough products to be satisfied. Suddenly d20 products weren't the sure-fire moneymakers they had been previously.

The thing is, all of that is what's supposed to happen. In any industry, when a new field opens up, it's going to have a period of rapid expansion that'll pay off richly for the first people to deliver products in that area, followed by diversification among companies and a general slowing of growth (though if the growth rapidly stops, it can seem like the new market suddenly bombed). In other words, what happened with the d20 industry wasn't due to the OGL being "too open" or because too many "bad products" flooded the market; the market simply course-corrected after a while. d20 products were more valuable a few years ago than now because their value hadn't leveled off at that point, but now they have. In essence, current conditions are what the d20 market "should" look like.

There were other factors, of course. I honestly think that the 3.5 revision was the single biggest contributor to the bubble bursting. It lead to a lot of materials that were still on the market being perceived as being valueless (or at least, of less value than they were) and bringing down the worth of d20 products as a whole because of that. While it may have stimulated sales of new 3.5E materials, that wasn't nearly as great as they had been for new 3E materials three years previous; I think more was lost than was gained, overall, from 3.5E.

Another was the general decline of the U.S. economy. Depending on who you ask, the American market has been in decline for the last two or three years, and smaller companies are usually the first to feel that. While the smallest companies don't really have any overhead to worry about (the guy making PDF products in his living room probably has another job that pays the bills), ones that did felt the devaluing of the dollar most keenly. Combined with the bursting bubble for d20 products, and it was easy to see how a lot of publishers felt like the rug had just been pulled out from under them.

In short, the d20 industry hasn't failed, and I don't believe that the OGL (which is the basis for that industry) has either. It just enjoyed a meteoric rise followed by a very jarring return to earth. But while that landing may have been a hard one, it wasn't a crash, and I certainly think that the market could keep on existing as it does now for years to come.

The GSL, I think, doesn't really change that, since in function it's very similar to the OGL (a license that allows for a system-unified RPG industry). I expect it will have some effect, but it's too soon to tell exactly what it'll do.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Last time I mentioned this on these boards, several prominent game designers called me a thief who just wanted their material for free.

Did you report them? That sort of behaviour is against board rules.

 

[Sir Brennen]

Couple of thoughts:

While a 4E-like game might be possible under the OGL, marketing it as 4E compatible might be another matter entirely.

What I'm getting from the conversations around the new GSL is that WotC does have an interest in protecting their profits, AND promoting new, creative content based on/supporting D&D. I think they do want to reduce the type of material that competed for shelf space for 3E, which often was nothing more than compilations of SRD and OGL content, with little actual innovation. I'm really looking forward to the material produced by 3rd party companies willing to rise up to the challenge of producing good game products under this new license.

Of course, there probably will be a truncation of full-blown non-D&D games using d20 rules. If you want to make material to supplement D&D, fine. But if you want to make a new game, WotC expects other companies to go spend their own design and development sweat to achieve that from here on out. Makes good business sense to me.