Love the Game, Hate the Marketing

[Najo]

This bit is interesting:

Originally Posted by Ryan Dancey
The other great effect of Open Gaming should be a rapid, constant improvement in the quality of the rules. With lots of people able to work on them in public, problems with math, with ease of use, of variance from standard forms, etc. should all be improved over time. The great thing about Open Gaming is that it is interactive -- someone figures out a way to make something work better, and everyone who uses that part of the rules is free to incorporate it into their products. Including us. So D&D as a game should benefit from the shared development of all the people who work on the Open Gaming derivative of D&D.



OGL only partially delivered on this, at least in terms of D&D. We got 3.5, but a lot of people fussed about that. I suppose the best evidence of the above part in action is Trued20 (developed externally) and Star Wars Saga edition (developed internally).

Also, I suppose the splat books positively incremented the design. Swift actions, skill tricks, maneuvers, the Warlock's implementation of arcane magic (non-vancian).

In any event, we already know 4E is going to have annual core book releases. And one of the purposes of Gleemax is to foster a place to discuss and improve the game. So it sounds like 4e is very much sticking with at least the quoted part of the OGL's goals.

Why do you say WotC is moving away from the OGL?

I think the key reason this did not occur with the OGL like it does with open source software is that you can not easily update a published book like you can a program. For the OGL to truely work, you would need the best rules to gather in a centralized place that the majority of the players are using. These rules would have to be supported and distribution controlled in some manner or the model produces no profits for the companies involved. Of course this is not easily possible with a printed model.

Overall the OGL didn't work. Where it did work was giving a fairly solid universal system that everyone knows how to play to the game industry. Many of the companies selling books now are publishing their own version of it, ironically enough. WOTC's new approach of tying the GSL into the D&D rulebooks is the correct way for them to go, although they need to make sure to not force 3rd parties to use their fluff. Publishers should have freedoms to craft worlds and alternatives to the D&D official lore.