NEWS: OGL and SRD dates/info announced

[Wulf Ratbane]

I'd say the 5k ante to get into the game is designed to curb the junk products that flew out of the starting gates when 3.0 hit. I've got some real stinkers sitting on my shelf that I bought in the first 6 months, some of which I've never even finished reading they were so bad.

Without naming names, if you ran down the spine on those "stinkers" for publisher names, how many of those publishers do you think could have ponied up 5k?

My impression is that most of the "glut" came from companies who were well positioned in the distribution system to take advantage of the gold rush. I never saw a whole lot of "Mom and Pop" d20 stuff in my local store. Just a few recognizable names.

EDIT: I'll give you a start: If the book has a hardcover, 5k wouldn't have stopped them.

 

[Garnfellow]

I think people are forgetting that many (most?) of the junk products that came out of the gate at the dawn of 3e were actually often from the larger, more established game companies. I say this as the still-pissed owner of the sucktastic "Dragonlords of Melnibone."

And some of the better products were from tiny, completely new companies and designers.

So I'm not sure that a $5k license would have dramatically changed the flood of third party materials in the wake of 3e, except maybe to have killed off some of the more interesting and inovative participants.

 

[Piratecat]

1) How can they possibly make rules if publishers don't see the rules right there in their face?

2) When we talk about the SRD in this manner, do we mean what the PUBLISHERS get, or what goes live in June?

Rechan, best to think about it in terms of Phase One and Phase Two publishers.

Phase One (folks who pay the $5K) get hard copies of all the rules, complete. They also get the SRD that says what they can use from them, and what they can't. The SRD doesn't actually contain the rules themselves. These people can start developing product immediately, and can start selling on Aug 1.

Phase Two folks get access to the rules when they buy the core rulebooks at a store in June. They will then have access to the above SRD online, which tells them what part of those books they can use. They start writing product, and are allowed to publish it on Jan 1, 2009.

 

[Sitara]

Sitara, I'm guessing you are not in the small press/PDF business? I think that $5K is a LOT of money to a majority of the companies putting out OGL products. I was a partner at Silven Publishing, at we could have never paid up that kind of cash even in our best period.

Yes but most people do this stuff in their free tie/as a hobby/second job right? Which means they must have a full time job other than this and thus may beable to afford it using the cash from that?

Because if you are doing this as a full time job (only bread earner)and yet cannot afford a $5000 expense (that happened once in 8 years) I find it hard to believe you are earning enough to survive and make enough money to earn a living. (I am assuming usa living standards and expenses just for references sake )

(Didn't mean to sound rude or offend any publishers ofcourse.)

Ofcourse the companies mentioned could easily pay for this (most pay around $0.12 per word to freelance writers which amounts to around $1000-2000per article per freelancer...and thats for minor articles not major written products)

 

[Bacris]

EDIT: I'll give you a start: If the book has a hardcover, 5k wouldn't have stopped them.

Yup.

Sure, not all d20 PDFs are perfect (or even good), but the "glut" of bad d20 products wasn't only small companies. This fee strikes me as punitive to the small press publishers, without making a noticable impact on the big publishers, who might still, or have previously, produced shoddy products.

 

[Mercule]

Err... But if they're open, what prevents them from being published?

That was my question, too.

I can't believe that there is enough open content to make publishing 3rd party supplements even remotely viable without there being enough to reverse-engineer something like the current SRD. Just opening the basic mechanics (DCs, AC, BAB, damage, etc.) would be enough to open it up to a Spycraft or Iron Heroes.

I suppose there could be clauses that effectively add up to "You can't include your own advancement/level/xp mechanics and ours aren't open/re-printable." That would seem like it would just preclude sticking the equivalent of the "d20/OGL" logo on the main Spycraft book. It would seem that there are other ways of signaling "Hey, you already know how to play this game."

 

[Piratecat]

What I'm most concerned about is that fact that new new OGL is going to be tied to the 4th means a that a lot of good ideas are going to be off the table again.

This bothers me too, although 3.5 is still fine for publishers to base innovative games on.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I think people are forgetting that many (most?) of the junk products that came out of the gate at the dawn of 3e were actually often from the larger, more established game companies. I say this as the still-pissed owner of the sucktastic "Dragonlords of Melnibone."

And some of the better products were from tiny, completely new companies and designers.

So I'm not sure that a $5k license would have dramatically changed the flood of third party materials in the wake of 3e, except maybe to have killed off some of the more interesting and inovative participants.

That's my take.

Magical Medieval Society would not exist if it were attempted today, for 4e.

 

[EnglishScribe]

Genre Integration

I think that this also has a very serious affect on publishers attempting to leverage the revised d20 mechanics into other genres. WOTC attempts at this have been discrete not-quite compatible rule systems for different genres.

It also effectively leaves D20 Modern effectively unsupportable by anyone for two years between theD20 license being withdrawn until (and if) WOTC revise D20 Modern as suggested in 2009.

 

[2WS-Steve]

More likely, it's a "Keep crappy products out of the first wave" plan.

Yes, there were some great, great 3.0 products from 3rd party people. But there was also a glut of awful, awful stuff, some of which wasn't even right, rules wise. And I think that a lot of FLGSes got burned on 3rd party stuff because they picked up too much crap from the getgo.

If you're wondering where that glut of awful stuff came from I'll point out that much of it came in a red hardcover -- red hardcovers you can still see clogging up the shelves of too-trusting game stores. FFE could have easily afforded the 5k and I'll bet they're far more responsible for bad-d20-glut that the occasional tiny d20 company that managed to get a Foundation: A World in Black and White, into the distribution chain.

And compare that to what are the biggest successes of d20: Necromancer, Green Ronin, Malhavoc, and Mongoose -- all of which started out as 2 person operations.