Mustrum_Ridcully said:
That was not the part that failed he is talking about. He was talking more about the "feed-back" cycle.
There is Arcana Evolved. But there are no products re-using the concepts of Arcana Evolved from other publishers.
There's Iron Heroes. There is no one that re-used its mechanical elements and build upon that.
All these True20, Modern20, Arcana Evolved, Iron Heroes, Grim Tales, they didn't build much upon each other. They didn't refine the game. They created new, individual games. They stand on their own, and have their unique appeal.
Excuse me?
With all due respect, MR, you don't know what you're talking about.
Grim Tales was an attempt to do
exactly what Mike is grousing about. I'm not going to single GT out because I think it's the best, it just happens to be the one I am most familiar with.
Grim Tales used rules elements of 3e, 3.5, d20 Modern, Spycraft, several PDFs from The Game Mechanics, MMS:WE, and... oh hell, just read the goddamned Section 15. To put it in a nutshell, I used every single good d20 resource I could get my hands on and did the best I could to make them into a cohesive whole, adding new material where I could to fill in the gaps.
And when you are done, look at the S15 for the latest iteration of True20. They did the same thing-- they rolled up every good idea they could get their hands on, and improved upon it (through Steve Kenson, no less, I assume!).
As new things were released
after Grim Tales came out, I incorporated those ideas into rolling improvements published in other works or in PDFs, or updated existing GT pdfs.
It's not my fault that, as publishing houses go, I am a fart in a hurricane.
We never saw a sustained effort to improve the fundamental rules of D&D, and it's debatable that any such improvement would be embraced as such by enough end users.
Mike Mearls is completely, staggeringly wrong here.
Nobody tried to improve on the rules of D&D? What the hell was Mike doing all those years he was writing Dungeoncraft and Monstercraft and Book of Iron Might and Iron Heroes and...
The entire life cycle of 3e was populated with a sustained effort to improve on the fundamental rules of D&D.
Maybe Mike doesn't want to count his own work, but it's incredibly insulting for him to discount the work of his fellow designer/publishers. There are so many examples I can only assume it's Mike's specific intent to piss all over everybody else.
So... Where did it break down?
WIZARDS OF THE
ING COAST.
They are the ONLY player in a position to grab the best of all that work and incorporate it into the fundamental rules of D&D and ENSURE that those improvements were embraced by the end users.
It was WIZARDS who dropped the ball. They and they alone are responsible for this perceived failure of the OGL.