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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5607865" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.  There was a serious risk that if TSR died that the game would end up in limbo with no one who owned the game publishing, and no one who didn't own the game able to support it.   The OGL made D&D essentially irrevocably a possession of the fans, ensuring it could never die and would (IMO) never lose its preeminance among RPGs because it doesn't matter now how the property is mismanaged or not - we can still keep the game alive.   Even if Pazio dies because they decide to produce a million one legged dwarven minatures and it kills the company, D&D in some form can't die now.The house is open, we can all play.WotC tried to get out of that commitment, and they paid for it.  It isn't just that they gave up on the OGL and went to the GSL, it's that they deliberately tried to make a game that wouldn't be compatible with the game the OGL provided for and per force also abandoned the most popular game on the market and the dominate game over the last 30+ years.  I don't think so.  Some people jumped on the 4e bandwagon and some people have legitimate reasons for likeing it better.   But for the most part, I think what 4e taught most people is that they really liked the old game of D&D better than they thought that they did.  More groups and more players in my area seem to be going back to 3e (or switching to Pathfinder) than I see 3e players switching to 4e.  Early 2e was like that too, and turned me away from adopting it as a system for the same reasons.  Second edition made me feel like the designers didn't want me to play the game I was playing, and were openly mocking me for doing so.  It was like they were calling their previous enormously popular edition 'badwrongfun' and telling you that you'd have more fun playing there way instead of yours.My relationship to the games designers and publishers has always felt to me like it ought to be peer to peer.  I don't like being dictated to by what is essentially some other DM.  If you do the hard work to provide me with content, I'll probably send money your way.  But don't tell me how to run my table or try to take the game I'm playing away from me.  Don't act like your game is a lot better than mine just because you are published or hold an official position, because TSR and WotC have published alot of embarassing crap over the years and even good published designers who have products I own have at times printed things I'd have been embarassed to put my name to.  Act like I'm a respected and valued customer, and maybe I'll be one.   Talk to me like a fellow gamer, and stop running down the game I bought from you just to get me to buy something new.I mean ultimately it comes down to this: why the heck should I care more about what Mearls thinks the core of D&D is than what I think the core of D&D is?  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 (and maybe before the beginning, as Arneson's approach always appeared to me to be distinct from Gygax's).  It said, "Not only do we like that you all play the game in your own ways, but we are going to help you do that and help you help each other make the game we are mutually invested in more fun."   It validated and encouraged the community of DM's that are at the core of D&D's success.  No DM's; no game.  That's the core of D&D and any one who wants to make money off of the game better never forget it.</blockquote>

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