Croesus
Adventurer
Mark, while I personally would love to see a 5E OGL, I’m still not convinced that such a thing is in WOTC’s best interests.
Just last night I was reading Ryan Dancey’s column “The Tabletop Roleplaying Game Hobby Is Contracting” and there were a couple important points mentioned.
“We realized that TRPGs fall into a special class of products & services that generate network effects. In our case, the effect that had the most impact was the concept of the network externality. For TRPGs, the ‘true value’ of the product is not in the book/box that you buy. It is in the network of social connections that you share which enable you to play the game. Without that social network, the game’s value is massively reduced (it becomes literature, and there’s a small market for people who like to just read and never play TRPG content).
We began to view the market not as a series of product pyramids (a core book at the top, and an ever-broadening base of support materials produced over time), but instead as a series of human webs that overlapped and interconnected. Where those webs were strong, the products flourished. Where they were weak, the products failed. The limiting factor to the growth and strength of the TRPG market was not retail stores or shelf space, it was human brains within which these games could interconnect. [emphasis added]
The more segmented those brains became, the weaker the overall social network was. Every new game system, and every new variant to those systems, subdivided that network further, making it weaker. Between 1993 and 1999, the social network of the TRPG players had become seriously frayed. Even if you just looked at the network of Dungeons & Dragons players you could see this effect: People self-segmented into groups playing Basic D&D, 1st Edition, 2nd Edition, and within 2nd Edition into various Campaign Settings that had become their own game variants. The effect on the market was that it became increasingly hard to make and sell something that had enough players in common that it would earn back its costs of development and production…
…We hooked that train up to the engine of the Open Gaming License to help spur consolidation of game systems towards a common core, and to enable publishers who wanted to just make a great world or a cool sourcebook to do so without having to first make their own homebrew RPG (and thus fragment the market), and watched the resulting highly entertaining explosion in creativity and revenues in the market starting in 2000.”
So long as a 5E OGL results in additional content for the 5E rules, it might be a benefit to WOTC and 5E players. But the 3E OGL didn’t limit anyone to simply producing add-ons. It was possible to use the OGL to create competing game systems – including what we now know as Pathfinder. Does it really benefit WOTC to spend time, effort, and money to create a new inclusive 5E, just to have some hotshot designers come along and use their work to create a competing product, one which weakens the social network referred to above? Keep in mind, designing PF as a 3.x clone had significant advantages over designing a system from scratch, not least a huge base of 3.x players already recruited by WOTC.
But let’s assume they can craft the new OGL in a way that (mostly) limits 3PP’s to supplementing the new system, not competing with it.
“And we had to cut back drastically on the number of different books we were publishing to focus spending on individual titles to drive up profitability. It was literally better to sell 7 copies of one book vs. 5 copies of two different books due to the economies of scale involved.”
Say WOTC creates a 5E Book of Fiends. They only produce one, because it’s better to sell a lot of just that one book, than fewer of multiple books. Unfortunately, three other companies produced their own versions of the same book. Sure WOTC will have higher sales, but do the other companies’ offerings really have no impact on WOTC’s sales? Especially since those other companies are likely selling to WOTC’s best customers – the ones who spend the most on books, who are most active on forums. Do they really need those folks telling everyone “Skip the WOTC Book of Fiends, the one by company abc is so much better”?
I think the OGL was an enormous boon to the gaming population, myself included. It may even have been a boon to WOTC, at least in some ways. But let’s not kid ourselves that there are no downsides to WOTC if they publish a 5E OGL. I don’t blame them one bit if they take their time in thinking this one through.
