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Message: <blockquote data-quote="trancejeremy" data-source="post: 2495309" data-attributes="member: 924">I think the OGL has definitely been successful to a degree. But it hasn't been nearly as good as I hoped, and in fact, has sort of fizzled in one big way.  While WOTC played fairly nice with the d20 license thing, other companies have not been nearly so open with their offshoots of d20. Which has crippled the whole idea, I think.For instance, take AEG's recent Spycraft 2.0.  Great game. But much like the original Spycraft, the prospect of any sort of real 3rd party support is dubious at best. Since AEG apparently has no equivalent of the d20 license for companies to use "Spycraft" without a lot of hassle, and their mangling of the OGL makes it impossible to use without possible legal repurcussions (Most notably, including Star Wars in Section 15 of the OGL, which is simply wrong, since Star Wars is not an Open Content book).So, if you like Spycraft, you're basically stuck with buying whatever AEG decides to put out. Which might be a lot or not. Or stuff you are interested in or not.  You don't have much choice.  Which is why ultimately d20 Modern is a better choice for a modern day game, even though IMHO the rules aren't as good. Because d20 Modern will have stuff from a myriad of different publishers.Now, to a certain extent, this is understandable.  Companies don't want to build up a brand name and then have 3rd parties diminish its value.  They also don't want other companies competing with their products.  WOTC doesn't have to worry about that stuff since D&D is already pretty much a household name (and they put up a wall between it and d20 somewhat), and they already operate on a scale that no one else approaches. But for the consumer/gamer, it sort of stinks.Also, as an aside, I don't think the OGL prevents another Rob Repp (and SKR - I still have bad feelings towards him from his days as TSR's net enforcer) thing. The OGL is aimed at books, so there's a lot of vagueness in it's application towards things like websites (and software) that would let lawyers attack, if unleashed. And even with books, there's still a lot of slopiness when it comes to applying the OGL (like in Spycraft). Not that I think WOTC would ever do something like that. Unless the owner of Palladium somehow buys them.</blockquote>

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