Mearls: The core of D&D

[Imaro]

I am not sure that WoTC intended this as much as you think they did. Here is an alternate construction of the events of the past few years.

1. WotC released the OGL with the intent of allowing people to make modifications on top of the rules. The hobby would have a common rules base, but third parties would be free to make adventures and settings and other minor modifications.

2. Instead of following this path, most third parties started altering the rules themselves. Instead of a common rules base, the game was evolving into several incompatible rule systems that descended from the common OGL.

3. Fearing fragmentation of the playerbase, WotC tried to pull back from the full OGL, and come up with a more limited structure that preserved a common ruleset.

4. Unfortunately, they were too late. The alternate rules had enough mind-share to survive. Additionally, the creation of 4e accelerated the fragmentation of the community into two camps. But this fragmentation would have happened anyways under the OGL as the modified rules grew farther and farther apart.

Well one thing I think needs to be kept in perspective is that Peter Adkinson/Ryan Dancey WotC was/is not Hasbro WotC. Even though it was the same company, WotC, I can guarantee that "WotC" looked at the business differently depending upon what time period one is speaking of.

 

[13garth13]

I am not sure that WoTC intended this as much as you think they did. Here is an alternate construction of the events of the past few years.

1. WotC released the OGL with the intent of allowing people to make modifications on top of the rules. The hobby would have a common rules base, but third parties would be free to make adventures and settings and other minor modifications.

2. Instead of following this path, most third parties started altering the rules themselves. Instead of a common rules base, the game was evolving into several incompatible rule systems that descended from the common OGL.

3. Fearing fragmentation of the playerbase, WotC tried to pull back from the full OGL, and come up with a more limited structure that preserved a common ruleset.

4. Unfortunately, they were too late. The alternate rules had enough mind-share to survive. Additionally, the creation of 4e accelerated the fragmentation of the community into two camps. But this fragmentation would have happened anyways under the OGL as the modified rules grew farther and farther apart.

While I suspect that indeed the latter points on your list are an accurate portrayal of the general thinking within WOTC in the later years of the grand OGL experiment, I also seem to recall (quite strongly, i.e. I'm bloody positive I haven't misremembered it) that Ryan Dancey in particular was quite explicit about his intentions regarding the OGL, and that one of them was to put D&D into the hands of the gaming public so that it (or at least the 3rd edition) could always remain open and available no matter what happened next.

In other words, while cynicism and fear of the OGL may well indeed have been the mindset among some/many at WOTC towards the end of 3.X, in the beginning of the OGL the mindset (at least officially...no doubt there were dissenters) was more in line with the feelings evoked within Celebrim.

I know that I certainly saw it as a huge step forward in public relations, and a wonderful opening of the game that delivered it into the hands of all who played it, rather than the way it felt in those not-so-wonderful days of 2e and TSR's initial web presence (ask poor Sean Reynolds what it was like being the internet enforcer.....sheesh.....).

Cheers,
Colin

P.S. Yes, I'm also aware that the OGL was intended to sort of virally take D&D/d20 into the market place, driving further dollars towards WOTC's coffers. One can accept cynical, economic gamesmanship and pie-in-the-sky, isn't-it-great-that-we-can-all-get-along-and-share-our-game-without-lawsuits optimism too

 

[Celebrim]

I am not sure that WoTC intended this as much as you think they did.

"I also had the goal that the release of the SRD would ensure that D&D in a format that I felt was true to its legacy could never be removed from the market by capricious decisions by its owners. I know just how close that came to happening. In 1997, TSR had pledged most of the copyright interests in D&D as collateral for loans it could not repay, and had Wizards of the Coast not rescued it I'm certain that it would have all gone into a lenghty bankruptcy struggle with a very real chance that D&D couldn't be published until the suits, appeals, countersuits, etc. had all been settled (i.e. maybe never). The OGL enabled that as a positive side effect." - Ryan Dancey

While I don't intend to go to the work to dig up all the similar quotes by former WotC employees, I've seen that sentiment echoed by a lot of the people who were part of creating 3e D&D and the OGL. I believe it was a labor of love by fellow gamers who were close enough to product to know just how close it came to dying. Sure, they also wanted to make money, but there is nothing wrong with that either. Everyone has to eat.

WotC released the OGL with the intent of allowing people to make modifications on top of the rules. The hobby would have a common rules base, but third parties would be free to make adventures and settings and other minor modifications.

Instead of following this path, most third parties started altering the rules themselves. Instead of a common rules base, the game was evolving into several incompatible rule systems that descended from the common OGL.

Let me state that the majority of companies and publishers that thought the way to make money off the OGL was primarily to sell rule books are now either out of business or entirely or almost entirely out of the RPG business. It's not entirely impossible that WotC will soon be one of them.

The companies that stayed healthy used the OGL to make adventures, settings, and apply the very basics of the rules set to completely different generas. So even to the extent that it is true that WotC didn't foresee exactly what sort of products would be created, I totally disagree that the third party rule books ever represented a threat to WotC. They were almost always supplemental, and the ones that weren't (mostly offered by Monte Cook) never seemed to gain wide following.

What really represented a threat to WotC was modules, and WotC in no period ever really recognized that. WotC thought modules had poor profitability and that the could use the OGL to outsource them. And to a certain extent they were right. Paizo and Goodman games created probably stronger adventure lines than WotC did.

The problem with that thinking is that its adventures that in my opinion ultimately drive a game system because its adventures that create and sustain new RPG groups more than rules do, and which IMO have ultimately led to D&D's dominant position (and which will eventually lead to Paizo's dominate position if it hasn't already) because its adventures that create the most valueable thing that any gaming company really owns - original intellectual property. The most valueable aspect of D&D isn't the iconic rules set, it's the iconic intellectual property - Strahd and Ravenloft, Acererak and the Tomb of Horrors, White Plume Mountain, Against the Giants, Drow Elves, Beholders, Mind Flayers, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and on and on and on. Rules are important, but if you want to talk about the core of D&D in terms of what WotC has to sell, that's the core right there.

Paizo is busy creating the IP that will sell games for the next two decades, and WotC is busy creating rule sets. Paizo has a line up of the best most exciting story tellers and artists in the business, and WotC has a bunch of guys that have survived the corporate culture.

I hate to tell you this Mearls, but alot of the core of D&D you are searching for has done walked out of the building.

Unfortunately, they were too late. The alternate rules had enough mind-share to survive. Additionally, the creation of 4e accelerated the fragmentation of the community into two camps. But this fragmentation would have happened anyways under the OGL as the modified rules grew farther and farther apart.

The basic problem with this is that the stuff that it is published as FantasyCraft and Pathfinder and Conan D20 and so forth is readily compatible with not only the core 3e rules set, but my own esoteric take on the rules set. To the extent that I can buy Pathfinder material and either mine it for ideas or incorporate it outright in the game I'm playing, the community hasn't actually fractured. It will be a very long time before that's not true, and frankly it might never be true. Conceivably I could not change my game system at all, and yet 20 years from now I could still be adopting material from Pathfinder into my game. Afterall, the reverse is also true. My game system is markedly different from 1e AD&D, but I still incorporate material from that game almost directly in to my 3e inspired game.

4e is so far removed from what I'm doing though, that mine it though I may, I just can't come up with enough from it to justify the purchase. And since I don't want to leave my game behind, I'm not moving on to 4e. It's its own beast; it's own branch on the D&D family tree. And frankly it looks to me like a shoot rather than the trunk.

I want to again restress that the OGL didn't create the diversity of rules and play that was out there. The OGL only recognized and legitimized it. Play diversity under 1e was so high that there were probably no two tables playing with the same rules.

 

[pemerton]

One of the biggest problems with 4e, from my perspective, is the GSL.

With 3e, they tried "Welcome to our house! Come in and play!" with the OGL and it really, really worked.

<snip>

I suspect that a return to the OGL would gain 4e market share.

<snip>

WotC can choose to be inclusive, as Paizo has done

I don't really agree with this.

Paizo doesn't choose to be inclusive, for a start. Because Paizo is publishing its material under the OGL - because the material is derivative of the OGL-licensed SRD - it has no option but to come up with strategies that make that open-ness a strength, rather than a weakness.

And this also illustrates, to me at least, why from WotC's point of view the OGL was not a success - namely, how is it a success for WotC that its tabletop RPG business is being lost to Paizo/Pathfinder, which wouldn't exist but for the OGL, and the SRD licensed pursuant to it?

What puzzles me - and I'd be surprised if WotC doesn't wonder about it from time to time also - is how it has come about that Paizo can make a success out of an SRD-based game when WotC couldn't? For example, it must have occurred to WotC that they had the option, in 2008-9, of doing what Paizo has done, namely doing a 3.5-style reboot by launching 3.75. Presumably, though, the projections for this looked bad. Did WotC miscalculate on those projections? Or does Paizo have some ability to spin gold out of (perceived) straw that WotC lacks? (What for WotC might have been slammed as "edition churn" is, in Paizo's hands, "saving D&D".)

Likewise on the issue of whether releasing a 4e SRD under the OGL would boost sales of 4e - WotC, assuming that it is complying with its legal obligations, must have reached the conclusion that in fact its interests are better served by not doing this. (It's not as if the option will never have occurred to it!) Whether that is because it doubts such a move would boost sales, or whether it believes that the gains from the increased sales that might accompany such a move would be offset by losses of value elsewhere (eg dilution of a valuable brand identity), I don't know. And perhaps its data is wrong - maybe it is miscalculating on its sales projections, or maybe it is overvaluing its undiluted brand.

But I don't think one can simply point to Paizo and say "Look, that shows that an OGL can help!" Because not only is Paizo in a completely different position with respect both to its relationship to the OGL, and its brand, but also, if WotC had reason to think that it could do what Paizo is doing, then it would already have done so in 2008-9!

Which brings us back to the question that I find most interesting - what exactly is this difference between WotC and Paizo?

For which we should be immensely grateful to the 3E design team because they deliberately set up the OGL to ensure that it would not be possible for a company to do exactly what WoTC tried to do, and that's take the game away from the fans.

<snip>

WotC tried to get out of that commitment, and they paid for it.

I personally don't find this a very persuasive analysis of the legal or (narrowly) commercial character of the OGL. Apart from anything else, it seems to ignore that, in becoming a party to the OGL, a person (via clause 7) acknowledges product identity rights on the part of WotC that go beyond - arguably well beyond - what it would enjoy under copyright and trademark law. So the same licence that "opens up" the mechanics of the game also "closes down" use of many fictional elements that otherwise might be able to be lawfully used by third party publishers.

I personally see the release of the SRD under the OGL as doing two things. First, it creates a stable licensing relationship between WotC, on the one hand, and producers of adventures and new campaign settings, on the other, without the need for a fee to be paid, or licensing terms to be negotiated each time. The 3PP can be confident that the stat blocks in its products won't lead to a suit for breach of copyright or infringement of trademarks, and WotC can be confident that if the fictional elements it wants to retain control of are used, it has a clear legal recourse under the law of contract, rather than an ambiguous (at best) legal recourse under IP law.

Second, it permits the printing of (retro- or non-retro) clones. Dancey was explicit about this at the time, but expressed the view that WotC would always be able to corner that market, due to its ability to print higher-quality books at a viable cost due to its ability to finance and distribute large print runs. I think that it's turned out that Dancey was wrong about this. And because this was wrong, it seems to me that the first thing the OGL does isn't such a clear-cut win for WotC either, because the OGL is allowing 3PPs to build those stable relationships with its clone-printing competitors.

The reason that the OGL was so ingenious and so successful is that it recognized the actual state of the game. The OGL didn't create the diversity of play and rules. It merely validated the existing divesity of tables and approaches to the game that had existed almost since the beginning

<snip>

It validated and encouraged the community of DM's that are at the core of D&D's success.

I don't think that this is true of the OGL from a legal or (narrowly) commercial point of view. It may be true of the OGL from an emotional/marketing/branding point of view.

For me, there have been times when I have felt that TSR/WotC's official position on your rights to the game as a DM were such that it was illegal to make house rules. Not merely that they discouraged it, or that they stated in the rule book that these were the official rules and that if you caught someone departing from them with so called 'house rules' that you should by all means shun them but that taken literally, that they'd take you to court for having house rules.

Can you give particular examples? I didn't get this feeling from any 1st ed AD&D materials - and Dragon magazine, at least through the early 90s, was a handbook of house rules (both in the articles and in The Forum) being published by TSR.

The 4e DMG has a page discussing how to design, implement, and correct house rules.

I can't remember the 3E DMG as well, but I think it addressed the issue of house rules design too.

Was this a 2nd ed thing?

That is to say, there were times when I felt like TSR/WotC's official stance was that you could buy the game, but that it was illegal for you to play the game.

That is, they seemed to suggest that if I wrote my own modules, or made up my own rules, or adapted any of their material in some derivitive manner that depended on there IP that I was infringing on their IP.

Given that the typical GM is not trading, trademark law can I think be set to one side. (There might be complications for a convention, but we'll pass over them - and those complications would still arise in the OGL-era if a convention game featured a mind flayer or beholder.) I think the key issue here, then, is the use of copyrighted material.

Given that products like PHBs, MMs and DMGs are sold in order to play a game, I don't think there is a very strong argument that using the material therein to play the game in question is a use that breaches copyright. There could be different ways to reach that conclusion - for example, it is arguable that preparing a scenario, and then GMing it, is not an adaption (for the purposes of Australian law) or a derivative work (for the purposes of US law). Or that, even if it is, there is an implied licence to do so inherent in selling the work for the purpose of creating such adaptations/derivations. And I think there are other analyses possible also.

at other times it felt like the very act of playing the game was supposed to be in some fashion breaking copyright laws because I was distributing copyrighted content to my players!

If you are photocopying parts of their rulebooks and distributing them (and they're not the bits that have the fine print at the bottom saying that it's OK to do so) then yes, you are.

If you're distributing notes that you wrote yourself, then on balance I think not.

And heaven help you if you made something up, like rules for sailing ships or whatever, then photocopied it and gave it to another DM!

<snip>

The OGL to me felt like a big step toward legitimizing and welcoming how the game was actually played, and encouraging DMs to go ahead and form communities - like at EnWorld here - where it was safe to just make crap up without fear of bringing down a 'Cease and Desist' notice because you know, technically, at some point in the future they might want to make money off their own sailing rules and this talk about sailing house rules was infringing on the future viability of that product.

Given that most material published on these boards is not licensed under the OGL, this seems to me to some extent an illusion.

My intuition is that material published on these boards is in fact more suspect than material prepared and distributed the old-fashioned way, if only because it is being distributed far more widely.

I just wanted to feel like the freedom the game books seemed to offer was something I actually had in fact and not just theory.

Which reinforces my view that this is an emotional, rather than a legal or narrowly commercial, consequence of the OGL.

To the extent that the OGL had/has this emotional effect, and that this emotional effect in turn has implications for the sale of products, then WotC seem to me to have been caught between a rock and a hard place when they formed the view that (i) they couldn't make money by rebooting 3.5, and (ii) they couldn't successfully go into the future with a core product hostage to competition by others who might be capable of outflanking them in just the way that Paizo has managed to do.

EDITED TO ADD:

its adventures that in my opinion ultimately drive a game system because its adventures that create and sustain new RPG groups more than rules do, and which IMO have ultimately led to D&D's dominant position (and which will eventually lead to Paizo's dominate position if it hasn't already) because its adventures that create the most valueable thing that any gaming company really owns - original intellectual property.

<snip>

Paizo is busy creating the IP that will sell games for the next two decades, and WotC is busy creating rule sets. Paizo has a line up of the best most exciting story tellers and artists in the business, and WotC has a bunch of guys that have survived the corporate culture.

I hate to tell you this Mearls, but alot of the core of D&D you are searching for has done walked out of the building.

Now this may well be true. Which takes me back to the question that puzzles me - why is WotC unable to do what Paizo can?

It also suggests that the key to growing/resuscitating 4e is not the OGL, but better adventures. As I posted upthread, my intuition is that WotC should try to write adventures that bring out the strengths of 4e. But that intuition is probably not worth all that much.

 

[billd91]

Paizo doesn't choose to be inclusive, for a start. Because Paizo is publishing its material under the OGL - because the material is derivative of the OGL-licensed SRD - it has no option but to come up with strategies that make that open-ness a strength, rather than a weakness.

I do not believe this is completely true. Paizo doesn't need to be as open as it has been, particularly now that they're multiple rule supplements past the core rules that incorporate the OGL material. Just how much open content did WotC produce after the core rules were in shape? Not much. The splat books weren't included in the SRD. They had already come to the conclusion that openness wasn't the route they wanted to take. Paizo may be working on the strategy that openness is a strength but I think it's more because they believe it than they really have to follow it with the Advanced Player's Guide and Ultimate Magic (and Ultimate Combat and a few other books to come).

And this also illustrates, to me at least, why from WotC's point of view the OGL was not a success - namely, how is it a success for WotC that its tabletop RPG business is being lost to Paizo/Pathfinder, which wouldn't exist but for the OGL, and the SRD licensed pursuant to it?

This conclusion that the OGL wasn't a success is dependent on one important thing: that WotC moved away from the OGL in both message and method. Could WotC have continued to have success with the OGL? I think they probably could have. Since Paizo has been successful with it with their strategy, I think it's certainly possible.

What puzzles me - and I'd be surprised if WotC doesn't wonder about it from time to time also - is how it has come about that Paizo can make a success out of an SRD-based game when WotC couldn't? For example, it must have occurred to WotC that they had the option, in 2008-9, of doing what Paizo has done, namely doing a 3.5-style reboot by launching 3.75. Presumably, though, the projections for this looked bad. Did WotC miscalculate on those projections? Or does Paizo have some ability to spin gold out of (perceived) straw that WotC lacks? (What for WotC might have been slammed as "edition churn" is, in Paizo's hands, "saving D&D".)

Now you get into the territory where individual characteristics really matter. Why did WotC look at the D&D market and make one decision while Paizo looked at it and reached another? Because they're run by different people with different perceptions and experiences with different goals. It's as simple (yet complex) as that. It's the same reason that two people, experiencing the same economy and political situation, will vote for opposing candidates at election time. They're different people and they weigh what they witness around them in different ways and reach different conclusions.

But I don't think one can simply point to Paizo and say "Look, that shows that an OGL can help!" Because not only is Paizo in a completely different position with respect both to its relationship to the OGL, and its brand, but also, if WotC had reason to think that it could do what Paizo is doing, then it would already have done so in 2008-9!

And, looking at my paragraph above, that's why your last sentence here is wrong. It doesn't follow that that WotC would have pursued more OGL if they thought they could have done so successfully like Paizo is doing now. They may have thought they could have had success with 4e on the OGL, but concluded that another strategy was better for some variety of reasons that made sense to them (even if it doesn't make sense to other some others). In many cases, A + B = C for one person, but A + B = D for another.

Which brings us back to the question that I find most interesting - what exactly is this difference between WotC and Paizo?

I can't speak for other people but one thing Paizo has going for it, in my opinion, that WotC does not is: they get me. They seem to be able to reach into my brain, distill what I generally want out of D&D, and give it to me. It's uncanny. Maybe it's because enough of the people in charge at WotC come from the same upper-midwest gaming culture as I do. Maybe they've got the mind-control lasers pointed at me and I don't wear my foil hat enough.

I could also speculate on the differences in corporate culture, including differences between being part of a massive publicly held vs privately held smaller company. The view can certainly look different from either perspective.

Ultimately, I'm not exactly sure what specific differences in the companies were the deciding factors in why they have chosen the strategies they've chosen. I'm content that Paizo has proven sufficiently different because my preferences have been far better served as a result.

 

[pemerton]

Billd91, thanks for the reply. There's only one bit that I wanted to respond to:

I do not believe this is completely true. Paizo doesn't need to be as open as it has been, particularly now that they're multiple rule supplements past the core rules that incorporate the OGL material. Just how much open content did WotC produce after the core rules were in shape? Not much. The splat books weren't included in the SRD. They had already come to the conclusion that openness wasn't the route they wanted to take. Paizo may be working on the strategy that openness is a strength but I think it's more because they believe it than they really have to follow it with the Advanced Player's Guide and Ultimate Magic (and Ultimate Combat and a few other books to come).

Copyright law is not my field (neither Australian nor US) - but my intuition here is that you're wrong, and that those other books (APG, UM) are derivative works of OGC, and therefore Paizo is obliged to release them under the OGL.

This is why I say that Paizo has no choice.

If I'm wrong in my legal analysis, I'm happy to be corrected!

 

[Raven Crowking]

I don't really agree with this.

Oddly enough, I'm not surprised.

Paizo doesn't choose to be inclusive, for a start. Because Paizo is publishing its material under the OGL - because the material is derivative of the OGL-licensed SRD - it has no option but to come up with strategies that make that open-ness a strength, rather than a weakness.

And, yet, Paizo consistently chooses to go beyond what the OGL mandates.

And this also illustrates, to me at least, why from WotC's point of view the OGL was not a success - namely, how is it a success for WotC that its tabletop RPG business is being lost to Paizo/Pathfinder, which wouldn't exist but for the OGL, and the SRD licensed pursuant to it?

You're right; WotC saw into the future, and decided to pull their game from the OGL because they knew that, if they did that, Paizo would make a better selling game. Sheer genius.

Or, perhaps, Paizo is only in this position because 4e is not OGL?

I know what seems most likely to me. I remember how many publishers were eager to jump into 4e with both feet, until the GSL cooled their ardour. There is no doubt in my mind that 4e with an OGL would have rendered Pathfinder moot. For one thing, Pathfinder was a direct response to the GSL!

What puzzles me - and I'd be surprised if WotC doesn't wonder about it from time to time also - is how it has come about that Paizo can make a success out of an SRD-based game when WotC couldn't?

Strong fluff, a desire to make the mechanics match the fluff (rather than the other way around) and listening to what the customers want (rather than telling them what they will want).

3e was a rousing success -- WotC, as a point of fact, could and did make a success out of an SRD-based game -- but a combination of a few substandard follow-up products late in the cycle, a revision designed to promote their mini line, sucky adventures, and (IMHO) a failure to understand the elements of the original game, drove enough people away from official products and to better 3pp products.

Some of which were written by the same folks! No one wants to be told how to play. No one wants to be told that what they enjoy is wrongbadfun. No one wants the producers of D&D to speak to them "from on high".

4e continued this same trend.

For example, it must have occurred to WotC that they had the option, in 2008-9, of doing what Paizo has done, namely doing a 3.5-style reboot by launching 3.75. Presumably, though, the projections for this looked bad. Did WotC miscalculate on those projections?

Obviously so. Or, perhaps, better to say that the D&D WotC wanted to produce was not what enough people wanted, and the D&D Paizo produced was based on what people wanted first and foremost.

Or does Paizo have some ability to spin gold out of (perceived) straw that WotC lacks?

I play fantasy games; I do not believe in Rumplestiltskin.

Likewise on the issue of whether releasing a 4e SRD under the OGL would boost sales of 4e - WotC, assuming that it is complying with its legal obligations, must have reached the conclusion that in fact its interests are better served by not doing this.

And look where it got them. The 800-lb gorilla has left the building.



RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

You can talk about WotC being "corporate culture" as much as you want - Pathfinder only exists because WotC did all the work for them.

Huh.

WotC wrote their adventures? WotC wrote the interesting fluff? WotC wrote that campaign setting? WotC garnered that goodwill?

I don't play Pathfinder, but I do buy lots of Pathfinder materials. I can tell you as a fact that I am not buying them for the rules taken from the SRD. Nor would I need the SRD to create the game I am running as a home system.

Frankly, if people were paying Paizo simply because of WotC's work.....well, the SRD is free.

Of course, WotC can then be said to have simply built off of Gygax, right? No credit is therefore due, save that of the pocketbook, right? And like the Ship of Theseus, one wonders how many planks the Ship of Wizards still has in common with those who designed and promoted 3e.


RC

 

[Raven Crowking]

WotC wrote the system that all of this was built in, so yes.

If you want to see it so, I suppose that's fine. Be aware that others disagree. Moreover, whatever WotC built its house from weren't simply new ideas pulled out of the air. At all. There's nothing AFAICT in 3e that didn't appear somewhere else first.

Kettle, meet pot.


RC

 

[ExploderWizard]

WotC wrote the system that all of this was built in, so yes.

Which you can get from the internet without paying anyone so I guess Paizo is just so good that they could sell ice to Eskimos.