Is the Unearthed Arcana SRD online?

[Sledge]

I feel the need to chime in here. People bring books to the table. Right now I'm thinking most people that use materials in a game prefer to actually have an original book, complete with the descriptions and context that may or may not make it online. Putting stuff on the internet hasn't caused trouble yet, and I doubt it will. I prefer the computer and have found that the majority of this information on very old books hasn't been put up yet. The only ones you can find are the lame rip offs of actual books scanned in fully. I get my pdfs by paying for them. I will get new hardbound copies of the core books in the near future, because even I, who does everything on the computer and have character spellbooks and feat descriptions all printed out, still want those original books available. So posting online seems unlikely to me to hurt sales.
With regards to copying, I've seen production schedules of small time companies. By the time the book has been published, converted to OGC only, layed out and sent to the publishers, the first three months will likely be over. I would expect such a book to only maybe go to the distributors 4 months down the road. The distributors may not even carry it as they will still have sufficient stock of the original. Clearly even at their best republished books just won't have any effect on the originals.
I think that if someone today released a full online reference document of UA it wouldn't keep me from buying the book. It's only real influence could be to get me to buy the actual book.
I think if publishers would take a breath and let it go they would find that having their ideas published online would only do them good. My evidence is simple. I own numerous pdfs and print them out. One such is Crimson Contracts. This book is almost completely open content. I could have asked someone out there to just e-mail me the whole thing, but the company still got my money. You tell me why I bought it? I may only use one or two spells, but the book as a whole is very important. Just reading the stories in it gives me insight into the ideas behind the prestige classes and other items. Having a simple list merely isn't sufficient. I need the books.

 

[Voadam]

Generally speaking print books sell an order of magnitude greater than a pdf. whereas for a small publisher 2,000 book sales is good, 200 pdf sales is huge for a small publisher. In general a majority of people prefer a physical book over a computer file.

The one time I have heard of online content being a detriment to physical book sales was when Atlas games put their Ars Magica (4th edition I believe) core book free on rpgnow at the same time they announced they would be releasing a revised 5th edition. Lots of people downloaded the free pdf but sales of the print book went down over what their predicted levels were for if they had not released the pdf and made the announcement.

John Nephew the president of Atlas games was very open about his number on that marketing experiment but even he could not isolate the impact of having it 100% free as a pdf or the announcement that it would soon be made obsolete by a new edition that drove down sales of the physical book. He did conclude that the two combined drove down sales of his print book and he did not plan on releasing the 5th edition book free as a pdf.

 

[woodelf]

snip

 

[woodelf]

If you strip out all the loaded words in your description of the second publisher, all they're doing is what the OGL, which the original publisher agreed to of their own free will, clearly and explicitly gives them permission to do. They're not exploiting an obscure loophole, they're doing something that the OGL was deliberately designed to allow, that the people who created the OGL (by which I mean first and foremost Ryan Dancey) have been clear about allowing from the very beginning, and that according to comments in this thread, is very much in keeping with Dancey's own intentions and vision for the OGL. [snip]

There is even a case to be made for the view that the only unethical one in your examples is the original publisher, who agrees to the OGL but then seeks to, in effect, back out of this agreement by trying to stop people from doing what their voluntary agreement to the license quite clearly allows them to do. When politicians do this we call it "talking out of both sides of their mouth" or worse. In more concrete terms, if WotC or Green Ronin don't want people to use their OGC, why are they releasing it under the OGL in the first place?

What he said. You can hardly complain about people reusing material according to the terms of the WotC OGL, given that you entered into it voluntarily. Don't like the terms? Do without the D20SRD, or negotiate a separate license with WotC. But if you want the advantages (the cachet of "open content", reuse of others' content, and/or the market muscle of the D20 System logo), you get the "disadvantages" (OGC and/or D20STL).

Sorry this is a bit of a "me too" post, but i really think jeffh's statement needed emphasizing.

 

[woodelf]

Yes, but what I think will be the consequences of this will be that publishers will start being more limited in what parts of their products become released under the OGL. I guess it's wrong to trust humanity to not be greedy and exploitive.

Or optimistic. Tomato, tomahto. Heck, i'd say there's even an element of self-fulfilling prophecy going on here, given the level of communication between publishers and consumers, and their significant intermingling: I suspect that the more you bitch about people "stealing" your work, the more it'll happen, if only because of some malicious/mischievious/contrary sorts doing it just because you had the temerity to tell them not to. Likewise, if you simply expect people to follow their nobler impulses, IME they more often do.

Basically, you are saying that it doesn't matter if the gaming industry goes bankrupt because Wizards was stupid for releasing such a license agreement. Well congratulations then. This short term thinking will be the death of the hobby.

Worrying only about WotC's survival is what i'd call "short-term thinknig". I can't speak for the person you were responding to, but IMHO those supporting open-content RPG development are the ones thinking about the long-term survival of RPGs. Sharing content, thus minimizing effort for new producers to contribute the New Great Thing, combined with the relatively low barrier to entry of PDF publishing are the two things saving the RPG, IMHO--not WotC/D&D3E. If you're concerned about the long-term fate of RPGs, you should be considering how to keep them alive in the face of increasingly-interactive computer/console games, and certainly not throwing your eggs in one basket (i.e., company).

If anything, WotC is working against this by, until Unearthed Arcana, not having D&D participate in the feedback loop of open-content development. And, IMHO, one of the best things that could happen to the RPG industry right now is if the D&D brand name disappeared--i honestly think that WotC is resting on D&D's laurels, getting sales disproportionate to the quality of its products because of the D&D label, and if they didn't have that mindshare advantage, they wouldn't have nearly the marketshare dominance they currently do. If the playing field were leveled in that regard, i think that *all* RPGs, but most especially D20 System ones, would become better.

 

[jeffh]

What he said...
Sorry this is a bit of a "me too" post, but i really think jeffh's statement needed emphasizing.

It's he! (My full name is Jeff Heikkinen - you may, or may not, remember me from RGFD and/or rpg-create.) And thanks.

 

[woodelf]

It's he! (My full name is Jeff Heikkinen - you may, or may not, remember me from RGFD and/or rpg-create.) And thanks.

I make it a policy not to assume gender online based solely on handle--you just never know. Anyway, yep, i recognize the name.

 

[JohnRTroy]

What he said. You can hardly complain about people reusing material according to the terms of the WotC OGL, given that you entered into it voluntarily. Don't like the terms? Do without the D20SRD, or negotiate a separate license with WotC. But if you want the advantages (the cachet of "open content", reuse of others' content, and/or the market muscle of the D20 System logo), you get the "disadvantages" (OGC and/or D20STL).

All I know is that if a publisher asked me not to copy everything wholesale and post it on line, I would respect their wishes. Maybe it doesn't qualify as a breach of ethics, or morals, but I would call anybody who actually did that sleazy, and I feel no guilt in stating that. It's just common sense and curteousy.

I have yet to see anybody defend this other than quoting the letter of the agreement, justifying it by saying "they won't lose sales", or some weird noble sense that the games should survive above the people who create them, or free and open sharing is for the good of mankind.

Worrying only about WotC's survival is what i'd call "short-term thinknig". I can't speak for the person you were responding to, but IMHO those supporting open-content RPG development are the ones thinking about the long-term survival of RPGs. Sharing content, thus minimizing effort for new producers to contribute the New Great Thing, combined with the relatively low barrier to entry of PDF publishing are the two things saving the RPG, IMHO--not WotC/D&D3E...And, IMHO, one of the best things that could happen to the RPG industry right now is if the D&D brand name disappeared...

I was not talking about WoTC, but rather the entire gaming industry.

If the gaming industry can't make a buck because people provide all the content for free, it will not get new people into this hobby. If the for-profit companies die, gaming will become a more underground role. It will end up becoming a much smaller sub-culture, and I suspect more people will leave than join.

If WoTC dies the hobby will take a huge blow and they will be consequences. People have been wishing for the death of D&D/TSR/WoTC ever since they "made it big" and had the major market share. If this ever were to come to pass, it won't be pretty and it will hurt the whole industry very badly.

 

[DaveStebbins]

I do think the OGL is going to be a failure for Wizards. That's what's happening. I doubt they will use such an open license anymore, because what's happening is the great experiment is starting to fail.

Once you get past the invectives, I actually could see this happening. When 3E was released OGL there weren't many real third-party supplement sources. 3E has since created many viable third-party publishers. I could definitely see 4E being closed, with licenses available to third-party publishers. It would be a way of creating another revenue stream and also keeping the flow of new materials at whatever WotC considers a reasonable level. It might also be a way to keep third-party publishers from stepping on Wizards' toes by publishing a specific type of book which is on Wizards' drawing boards. I would hate to think of losing some of the awesome stuff that has been done by tiny publishers, but I could definitely see this scenario coming to pass.

How people behave will probably determine the future of this license.

I doubt this. The future will depend on the numbers people come up to justfy their vision, and the credability behind those numbers. Peoples' opinions and feelings will color how they come up with their numbers, but that sort of stuff is notoriously easy to see through. The final decision is usually based upon whatever biases the head decision-maker has. And who is in charge is usually just corporate roulette.

(not that I'm cynical or anything... )

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

4th edition

You know, I have to wonder if maybe this 4th edition thing isn't just a bugbear dreamed up to scare the kiddies (is bugbear OGC? Yes? Okay.).

The success of the 3rd edition has been in a large part due to the widespread availability of nifty stuff to buy to go along with it, as is obvious, and has been discussed. But what would a move to a 4th edition look like? Wizards would make announcements, Dragon would do a countdown, and everyone would be really curious...and then go back to playing 3rd ed, I wager.

To use another gaming paradigm, I look at it like a video game system. If you release a brand new gaming box with a fast processor and sweet graphics, but there are no games for it, no one will buy it. I remember that no one I knew bought a Nintendo 64, because the Playstation just simply had a better selection of games. Nintendo 64 never did well, and they've done a much better job on the Gamecube in regard to third-party products to make sure that there's a robust software library for it. Because without the support, the thing is just a little plastic box.

So that's what I see a closed 4th edition ending up as: a useless plastic box. If it's not backward compatible with 3rd edition (and to be closed, it will have to be), it'll render useless hundreds of supplements, adventures, magazines, web content, and other miscellaneous publications that we've built up since 2000. We'll have to start over again from scratch, junk our books, and start forking out for the new edition core books, splatbooks, supplements, adventures, etc. Most of us did this already in 2000 (and again last year, if you count 3.5), so we're getting a bit fed up with it (and skinny of wallet). Not to mention we'll have to learn an entirely new D&D system if the game is going to avoid being Open Content. Not to mention that many of the non-rule items that make D&D what it is (Magic Missile, anyone?) are already permanently Open Content no matter what they do with the 4th edition. They can keep their mind flayers.

Even if a 4th edition comes out, the excluded publishers (and probably the included ones, on the side) will continue to turn out great new D20 products and the D20 community will continue for at least a few years on its momentum, even with its big mover and shaker gone...perhaps for longer than a few years, perhaps for a long time. Will I buy the 4th edition, with its shiny new books? Or will I buy a D20 supplement about pirate ninjas that works with the other books I already have?

I don't know if people will be able to get excited about a 4th edition that's completely divorced from the 3rd edition. I was only interested in the Playstation 2 because it would run my Playstation 1 games as well as giving me new stuff.