Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haffrung Helleyes" data-source="post: 4028765" data-attributes="member: 1068">Well, I haven't seen the GSL yet, but they've renamed it due to 'Open' being a misnomer, and it's been said that it will be cast in such a way as to make complete games such as Conan and Spycraft impossible.I think Dancey was right about the whole 'network externality' thing.  And I base that partially on my own experience.For around 15 years, I and my gaming group didn't play D&D.  We played mostly RuneQuest, but we also played Megatraveller, Torg, Ars Magica and a few other games.  We quit playing D&D in the mid 80s because we wanted things like skills that just weren't available in D&D prior to 3rd edition.Because of this, I had basically no exposure to D&D rules.  I didn't know what was going on in the world of D&D, and I didn't care, because I wasn't invested in the system.  When I looked at 3E, it was originally because I had heard that there was a game that was putting Open Source principles to work (I am a software engineer) rather than hearing about how great its rules were.But I'm pretty sure that , had I been playing a game based on d20 during all those years, D&D would have always been in my mind, because of the inevitable cross-polination between the games I was playing and D&D.When I convinced my gaming group to try D&D, it took a really significant effort, because everyone had significant rules mastery in competing systems and didn't really want to switch.  If RuneQuest hadn't been essentially a dead game I am not sure we ever would have -- the main argument that won my friends over was that it would be way easier to get players.Had we already been playing a d20 game,  the barrier of entry for playing D&D would have been way, way less.Ken</blockquote>

Verification