Mearls' Legends and Lore (or, "All Roads Lead to Rome, Redux")

[pemerton]

Excellent point - and I would also like to hear someone explain why WotC offering their PDFs would help them grow 4E and DDI, because that is what they are primarily interested in doing.

I can offer one thought: It would create goodwill among those not interested in 4E who might feel more inclined to buy an occasional 4E product because they aren't apoplectic about WotC's latest PR blunder. But in the larger scheme of things, I think this is a very small group of people.

I agree that it is probably a small group of people. I don't know how widespread it is beyond posters on these boards, but many of those postsers seem also to have bought the 4e "core three" rulebooks - which means, from WotC's point of view, they have not been lost to 4e at all.

What WotC needs is for those who currently don't play 4e to start games that will grow the 4e market. And the mere goodwill of releasing the PDFs won't do that. In fact it has the opposite effect, of making it even easier to run Pathfinder or a retro-clone. (At least if we take for granted that conversion among pre-4e versions is easier - a view that seems to be fairly widely held among those who want the PDFs back.)

 

[Mercurius]

The worst part about the GSL wasn't the GSL itself, but how late it came out coupled with the $5,000 early entry fee. If I remember correctly, it wasn't until after the release of 4E and a ton of 3PP went under because they couldn't ante up the $5k and/or wait the period of time (six months) when it became free. But I could be mis-remembering.

But yeah, I hear you about the difference between viewing WotC as a commercial entity and looking at this as a player. Forgetting the former, it is all too easy to take a "What have you done for me lately" attitude. But it is also nice to have more options and the D&D world seems a lot more barren under the GSL.

That said, Sturgeon's Law applied quite forcefully to d20 products as a ton of what came out form 3PP form 2000 to 2008 was pretty crappy. For every one great product like Book of the Righteous and Wilderlands of High Fantasy there were a hundred or more mediocre (or worse) products that just clogged the shelves. I remember feeling that shopping the d20 shelves at game stores was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Actually, it still is as a lot of stores still have the same books they had on their shelves in 2002.

 

[Mercurius]

I agree that it is probably a small group of people. I don't know how widespread it is beyond posters on these boards, but many of those postsers seem also to have bought the 4e "core three" rulebooks - which means, from WotC's point of view, they have not been lost to 4e at all.

What WotC needs is for those who currently don't play 4e to start games that will grow the 4e market. And the mere goodwill of releasing the PDFs won't do that. In fact it has the opposite effect, of making it even easier to run Pathfinder or a retro-clone. (At least if we take for granted that conversion among pre-4e versions is easier - a view that seems to be fairly widely held among those who want the PDFs back.)

Pemerton, you're dangerously close to convincing me that it was/is actually a smart business decision to keep the PDFs under lock-and-key. I'm still teetering, though. I have a hard time getting around the goodwill thing, and I just don't think that selling the PDFs would dilute the 4E market all that much. I suppose it would probably be a zero-sum game.

As I've said, at this point I think 90% of the Pathfinder crowd are lost to WotC, at least until 5E comes out. Now if they offered the PDFs at least they would have something to sell to those folks, but let's be honest - most folks wanting a PDF of, say, Tyrants of the Nine Hells just goes and downloads it off some torrent. As I've been saying, the PDF issue is more a matter of PR than actual economics.

 

[pemerton]

Mercurius, I'm not trying to do that! I've bought some of those PDFs in the past, after all, and might buy some more if they became available.

I'm just trying to offer suggestions of what WotC might be thinking, given that they're acting at least somewhat rationally from their point of view. And the brand dilution/support to competition aspect is the main thing that I can see.

The worst part about the GSL wasn't the GSL itself, but how late it came out coupled with the $5,000 early entry fee. If I remember correctly, it wasn't until after the release of 4E and a ton of 3PP went under because they couldn't ante up the $5k and/or wait the period of time (six months) when it became free. But I could be mis-remembering.

You're misremembering. I can't remember the precise sequence of events, but the whole "early adopter for money" scheme was abandoned as the relevant deadline for availability of the GSL and the draft SRD was missed by WotC.

What I think is more telling about the GSL saga is not that it shows how stingy WotC has become (as I've already posted, and posted back at the time that the GSL thing was happening, it's unrealistic to expect an entertainment company to give away its IP merely out of generosity - and WotC obviously feels commercially burned by the OGL, and so is not inclined to go the OGL+SRD route again). Rather it is an early sign of WotC's inability to come up with a clear strategy in relation to 4e. First they dithered over the GSL, couldn't agree on the best version, and ended up losing the cooperation of at least some 3PP who might have been 4e supporters (Necromancer in particular comes to mind). Then there seems to have been dithering and a lack of clear direction over the DDI, which by all accounts is still continuing (I'm not a subscriber myself). Then there is the dithering and lack of clear direction over the print publications.

WotC seem to me to have a good game - 4e - but a great deal of uncertainty about how to get it to sell in sufficient commercial volume.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

What WotC needs is for those who currently don't play 4e to start games that will grow the 4e market.

True...and speaking as one of the only 2 people out of a group of more than 10+ who have purchased some 4Ed*, putting certain things- like alternative builds for classes- behind the paywall isn't ncessarily drawing 'em in. (By way of comparison, only two people in the group don't own any 3.X stuff.)





* only one of us plans to run any 4Ed- I'm never going to, so I'm only buying player-centric releases.

 

[pawsplay]

I am not a lawyer. The following is just some information I have picked up along the way. Please consult a lawyer before considering any action based on the information here. Hopefully, you know better than to regard off the cuff comments on a message board as researched legal advice, but just in case: don't.

That said,

I think this is a bit unfair. Even with the so-called "poison pill", the GSL was a very generous sharing of commercial IP.

The OGL + SRD was an experiment. From the point of view of WotC it must surely count as at best a mixed success.

Actually, the original GSL was incredibly stingy. It was in almost every way worse and more legally risky than using no license at all. The OGL+SRD thing was an experiment but not a risky one. From the beginning, the OGL served the interests of WotC, but not simply in establishing market dominance. The OGL protected WotC by decreasing the chances they would end up in a costly legal battle with a third party publisher.

Let's review a few basics about IP.
1. You can't copyright rules or ideas, only expressions of ideas.
2. You can't copyright or patent prior art or trivial inventions.
3. Not only can you claim compatibility with other people's products, it's restraint of trade for them to unduly interfere with you producing compatible products.
4. Fair use covers a lot of things, including a lot of stuff that many corporations wish or think it doesn't. However, there's a big gray area in implementation, and no one wants to go there, unless they just want to spend lots of money and be worse off than they were. That is why big companies resort to IP fraud; if they can intimidate people into staying away from their properties, they can avoid the costs of actually going to court.
5. You can't copyright simple lists or information.
6. You can't copyright titles.
7. You can't copyright ordinary phrases.

Think about how much that covers in a roleplaying game. As long as you don't plagiarize sentences or paragraphs, there's a lot you can do with that. Many people don't realize this, but Kingdoms of Kalamar began as an unauthorized AD&D campaign sourcebook. Not only did they not get sued, early in the 3e lifecycle Kenzer got a license to produce official D&D Kingdoms of Kalamar.

So, a merely average GSL would grant at a minimum, free and clear, all the things you can already do without a license. A generous license? We have never seen such a thing from WotC. The GSL was intended for one purpose only: to limit and restrict access to WotC's IP. In exchange for capitulating, WotC agrees not to frivalously sue you. Unless they feel like it, or unless it's Wednesday.

 

[pawsplay]

Excellent point - and I would also like to hear someone explain why WotC offering their PDFs would help them grow 4E and DDI, because that is what they are primarily interested in doing.

I would like to hear how keeping old PDFs legally unavailable is helping them grow the D&D brand. Do they want to turn fans of their vintage products into pirates and then sue them out of the hobby?

 

[pemerton]

True...and speaking as one of the only 2 people out of a group of more than 10+ who have purchased some 4Ed*, putting certain things- like alternative builds for classes- behind the paywall isn't ncessarily drawing 'em in.

I'm also a non-subscriber to DDI, and so miss out on some stuff for the same reason.

I think the tension here is between the "new" model - of subscription-based RPG material - and the "old model" - of books and boxed sets.

The fact that this tension gets caught up in various ways with the "new" D&D/ "old" D&D tension is just another complexity of WotC's current market situation.

Another interesting qusetion (for me, at least) is what it is about WotC that appears to making it institutionally incapable of tackling Paizo on Paizo's home turf (ie adventures). If WotC could do this, then perhaps it would be able to do what you (ie Dannyalcatraz) have suggested in the past, namely, support both 3E and 4e.

But WotC seems to take for granted that fighting on the OGL+SRD front is hopeless. Which means that it is (apparently) taking for granted that it can't beat Paizo on adventures. Why not?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Anyone can write an adventure. Not everyone can write an adventure worth buying.

I can't tell you about WotC's internal structure, their politics or what they're willing to pay writers as opposed to Paizo or other companies. But if they can't find quality adventure writers, it's on them.

 

[Mark CMG]

Another interesting qusetion (for me, at least) is what it is about WotC that appears to making it institutionally incapable of tackling Paizo on Paizo's home turf (ie adventures).

Asking many of the Paizo employees where they used to work might glean your answer.