Mike Mearls On the OGL

[The Little Raven]

Nothing at all other then time and money stopped anyone from building a OGC wiki.

I don't think this is true. I think the decision to respect the wishes of third-party publishers is the primary reason it didn't happen. Doing it would have generated ill-will between those publishers and the maintainer of the wiki, which would have been a bad thing for the community.

No publisher of OGC material had any ability to do anything but whine once their originated OGC material made it into such a a wiki if properly cited.

No one is disputing that.

The real problem with such a wiki would be the citations, they'd overwhelm the OGC rules on the page for word count. (As i assume would be the requirment since people could link in to each entry and as such each entry would need a readble section 15 )

Nah, that wouldn't be a problem. The wiki format would be able to handle that very easily and neatly. The problem was that if a community project has generated ill-will from publishers, the community will probably suffer for it, because it'll make OGC far less prevalent in the future, to avoid that exact situation.

 

[I'm A Banana]

If you were a tech-savvy user who used d20srd.org or similar, that would be no big deal to add small changes, but would YOU buy the 14th iteration of the core books because they fixed grapple?

Well, regardless of anything else, they don't need to re-publish the core rules with every update they could have made. Just re-publish them once every 7-10 years, somewhere between 3.5 and 4.0, y'know, when they have substantial changes. They could even release it as "PHB II" or "The Next Edition," with a host of new options, saying "Your old stuff still works, and now here's some new stuff using a slightly more cohesive ruleset, add these into your campaign as you go, we will use them going forward."

This would have a similar effect to a new edition without the complete disconnect from the previous edition. A "sweet spot" between 3.5's minor changes and 4e's major changes.

That's a false requirement (regardless of anything else).

 

[Maggan]

No, I'm talking about the proposed OGC Wiki and the 3rd Party Publisher response to it.

Do you have a link for this Andy Collins/Unearthed Arcana incident you're talking about?

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=82908

/M

 

[redcard]

Nah, that wouldn't be a problem. The wiki format would be able to handle that very easily and neatly. The problem was that if a community project has generated ill-will from publishers, the community will probably suffer for it, because it'll make OGC far less prevalent in the future, to avoid that exact situation.

Which would mean that it was all a de-facto closed system anyway.

 

[Henry]

Where's the Mongoose SRD? AEG? Sword and Sorcery? Malhavoc? Green Ronin?

Mongoose did release a SRD, maybe two: http://www.mongoosepublishing.com/pdf/rqsrd.zip

According to the Mongoose Publishing web site, they're also releasing the new Traveller game under the OGL, with an SRD, in July of 2008.

Gold Rush games released the Action! System SRD, but their link to their download page is out, at the moment.

The SRD, JDJ's supposition aside, isn't the important part as much as how much material was opened for playing with under the OGL. For that, most publishers who used the OGL contributed significantly to it, and the pool of available rules.

 

[The Little Raven]

Which would mean that it was all a de-facto closed system anyway.

Like I said, a lot of publishers were perfectly willing to take from the pot, but balked when it came to adding to the pot.

 

[Nellisir]

To say that OGL failed because there was not an iterative design process with a centralized evolving core is not quite correct. It did not develop a centralized evolving core because there was never a system in place to aggregate that core.

For an open project, even in the software world, if you want to receive submissions, you need a method of receiving them. Otherwise you have no choice but to watch your project fork. WotC utterly failed to provide this. If that is what they really wanted, they would have deployed some kind of version control system with an open portal for change/addition submissions. This can be done either manually, by opening a mailbox/email with personel dedicated to reviewing and incorporating submissions into the SRD. or it could be more of an automated system where change submissions are queued automatically and displayed for public review. To be finalized would require sufficient "votes" from the community before being admitted to the "code base". Of course there are other ways of doing this as well.

This post just made my day. It's like "alterna-english" or something. "...deployed...version control system...open portal...change/addition sumissions."

I totally agree with it, btw.

 

[The Little Raven]

http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=82908

/M

Can you be more specific? I don't want to wade through a 28 page thread looking for one or two posts for an incident that happened over four years ago.

 

[howandwhy99]

Does it seem odd to anyone else that one of its executioners is pulling the bell rope for the death knell of open gaming?

 

[The Little Raven]

Does it seem odd to anyone else that one of its executioners is pulling the bell rope for the death knell of open gaming?

No, what seems odd is the amount of people that declare that Mearls is saying open gaming failed, when his blog post concedes that the opposite is true.