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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3813596" data-attributes="member: 4937">Sure, but before the OGL you could only create stuff for yourself.  Each DM was an island, and basically could only distribute his ideas word of mouth or through approved outlets (like Dragon).  The OGL recognizes the right of the fans to create and distribute derivitive works based on D&D, and not only that actually allows you to make a living doing it if you are inclined.  That is new. There was third party support back in the day, but they were in a far more precarious position, and arguably any time a DM wrote something down and distributed it even not for profit he was at risk of prosecution.  (Even after the OGL, some WotC legal papers seemed to imply that this was the case.  I'm thinking of the rules on converting material which restricted not only distributing the IP, which made sense, but on how you chose to do the conversion - which didn't.)The two aren't mutually exclusive.  My best guess is 25-30% of the customer base won't upgrade.  We don't have any information yet, and already we've got 10-15% completely opposed to the changes and polls that suggest that of 3000 or so players (many of the DMs representing groups, and that's not an insignificant portion of the market) the majority are ambivalent to or outright disapprove of almost all the rumored changes to the product.  Fourth edition is extremely ambitious and is IMO a radical departure from past rules sets.  It would be amazing if they came through with even half of what they want to do and had a better balanced game than 3.X (especially considering the short playtesting period being proposed).  However, unless 4e just stinks - and I doubt that will be true - the 70-90% of the fanbase that they do retain will increase thier purchases compared to the past couple of years and sales will spike.  The 3.5 market on the other hand is already saturated.   So to get sales out of the 10-30% that don't go to 4e, you will have to give them something exciting and new as well.  If anything, the backwards compatibility of flavor is even more important because its that that lets you convert over your old material to the new rules set.  If the flavor changes and mechanical changes occur in races, classes, monsters, planes, ect. to accompany those flavor changes, then you are doubly screwed if you don't want to abandon years worth of material.  People keep talking about how 3e was a bigger change on 2e than 4e will be on 3e, but I converted my 1e homebrew material almost transparently to 3e.  Books like 'Tome of Horrors' show just how close the two were, the only difference being some new additive subsystems.  There were a few multiclassed characters that became hard to convert, but basically that was my only real problem.  I would be very surprised if that's true of the conversion to 3e to 4e.  When people talk about how we've seen such minor changes that it doesn't even feel like a new edition to them, my mind just boggles.  No, but there are probably nearly 1000 DMs on Enworld alone that feel much as you or I do, and that represents 1000's of players.  We may not be indicative of the whole market, but sheesh there aren't more than a few million players across the whole nation.  Non-random sampling we may be, but surely it tells you something.  There were a few 2e grognards that didn't like the direction 3e was going in, and there are still a few 1e and OD&D holdouts supporting products like Hackmaster or OSRIC.  But my experience was that by the time 3e came out, the fan base had been largely clamoring for a new edition for years.  The general feeling was that not only was it time, but it was about 5 years past time and that the prior edition had been a mistake.  I don't get that same impression now.  Rather, this is more like the switch between 1e and 2e where - even though the actual changes were tiny (probably too tiny) - there was significant fan outrage because almost noone liked the direction of those changes (taking away options instead of adding new ones).</blockquote>

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