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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1831483" data-attributes="member: 10201">[BTW, i'm just presuming that several instances where you say "OGC", you mean "OGL", as in the WotC OGL. If not, i don't understand your above passage.]  And the day that WotC starts doing that wholesale, is probably the day i start buying their products. Unearthed Arcana was a step in the right direction--but i really wish that D20 Modern (and Unearthed Arcana) had both credited Spycraft, and used a system more like it, for action dice, frex. And neither of them is D&D--they're both "fringe" products from WotC--optional rules that don't define the baseline or have the staying power of D&D.  As is, D&D is the millstone around D20 System's neck: the powerful incentive to remain compatible with teh current version of D&D often works against the incentive to innovate and improve.   Frex, in a recent interview Monte Cook says that, based on fan response, he might've made AU even more divergent from the D20SRD, if he'd known how much fans would relish the changes he did make. The magic and class and race bits of AU are vast improvements over D&D3E, IMHO--some true innovations, combined with good old-fashioned iterative refinements. But the combat system is still the same old slow albatross. I'd've loved to see him build a system that's designed for armor-as-DR, or used some of his other more-radical ideas that he's hinted at. Or, frankly, almost anything that diverged as much from D20SRD combat rules as it does from the magic rules. And, if we knew that D&D was going to continue to grow and incorporate the best, cherry-picked ideas from all the other D20 System stuff out there, the D&D and innovation incentives would synergize instead of fighting each other--you'd want to come up with the New Cool Thing, because then D&D would incorporate it, too, and you'd be The Innovator, who had it before D&D did. But D&D3.5E makes me think that WotC isn't willing to be beholden, even to the degree the WotC OGL requires, to external creators. So i don't have much hope for D&D4E to be any more community-driven than D&D3.5E was. And while cool OGC-derived products like Unearthed Arcana are great, they're still "fringe" optional products (within the context of the best-selling RPG producer, of course).</blockquote>

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