WotC Rumor: OGL will not be supported starting with One D&D

[Zaukrie]

For the topic, I'm impressed at the general tone of this thread!

As for the rumor? I wouldn't be a fan of tryouts was true, and not because I make a few hundred a year as a publisher.... But because I love 3pp.

 

[Blue]

You don't understand what I mean by a skeleton.

A skeleton has holes. Spaces between the bones. WOTC designed 5e to have spaces the official core rules don't cover. They'd fill some with optional rules but their intention was not to be the sole creator of the flesh. WOTC put inoffensiveness to all generations of D&D over complete dominance of content creation.

This is different from 4e and it's way of using its nonOGL self. In 4e, WOTC desired to be the main creator of flesh. When the PHB released without gnomes, half orcs, barbarian, bards, sorcerers, and druids, they planned to fill those holes later and make their flesh core.

Gotcha. You were right, I didn't know what you meant by skeleton. Because to me a skeleton is part of a body but not useful without the muscles and everything. That does not describe 5e, since it's a fully functioning game by itself. What you are talking about is more like clothing, where you can get more on top of what is already works without anything additional.

 

[darjr]

I have to say at this point that while I agree with Russ about the video and his conclusions about this rumor I can’t exclude the idea that WotC might try anyway. As Useless and counter productive it would end up being.

 

[Minigiant]

There's a difference between leaving room for rulings, customization and running the game the best way that works for each group.

With 3.x and even more 4e they tried to lock down the game ever more. They decided that was a mistake and I agree.

The game is not incomplete. It's just taken a different direction.

I didn't say 5e was incomplete (and if I did I used the wrong wording). I said it was designed with holes that groups might want filled and DMs and 3PP would be intended to fill.

5e is a coffee machine that sells black coffee and has milk and sugar packs on the side. If you want anything else, you had to bring from some or buy from someone else.

4e sold premade, prepackaged coffee drinks.

The fear of OFL changes doesn't seem funded as you cannot convert a basic coffee machine into a drink dispenser.

 

[Oofta]

I didn't say 5e was incomplete (and if I did I used the wrong wording). I said it was designed with holes that groups might want filled and DMs and 3PP would be intended to fill.

5e is a coffee machine that sells black coffee and has milk and sugar packs on the side. If you want anything else, you had to bring from some or buy from someone else.

4e sold premade, prepackaged coffee drinks.

The fear of OFL changes doesn't seem funded as you cannot convert a basic coffee machine into a drink dispenser.

Sorry if I misread, it was late.

 

[glass]

Of course it's not the "modular system" some people envisioned

"Some people" of course including the DDN design team early on, until they tacitly abandoned that goal.

---

Anyway on the main subject, "won't have an OGL" does not make any sense as said, but is probably meant to mean "will not have its own SRD released under the OGL". Which may or may not actually be true (and probably will be true at launch), but even if it is is a minor inconvenience to 3pp at worst. How minor will depend on how much they actually change, but it is on a range from "trivial" to "a bit of a PITA, but not a real barrier".

To make it a real barrier, they would need to go far beyond even the extensive small changes shown in the playtest packets so far. They would have to make it not just a new edition but a new edition family, and even a pretense of compatibility would have been long since left behind. And even then that would not stop everyone.

I am particularly puzzled by the comment that it would affect Paizo. They've produce what, one 5e product ever?

TLDR: Whether or not there is any truth to this, they have explained it poorly and the sky is not falling.

 

[Corinnguard]

If this rumor were to be true, Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition becomes the new Pathfinder.

 

[Oofta]

"Some people" of course including the DDN design team early on, until they tacitly abandoned that goal.
...

The only reference I could find was a one time quote from Mike Mearls early on in the development cycle. Having been on the development of many [software] projects from their inception, people have a lot of ideas and hopes for what can be done and then reality sets in. You can't always do everything you want, and modularity in D&D is always going to be a sliding scale. I do think 5E is reasonably modular and flexible, it's just never going to be enough for some people. Play with minis or theater of the mind? Your choice. Magic items, feats, what subclasses and options are allowed? Alternate rules like the gritty rest rules that I use or lingering injuries? Up to the DM and group.

As a foundation for other games, the OGL supports 3PP add-ons like Esper Genesis that support an entirely different genre and level up that just modifies and tweaks the core game to make it "crunchier" for those that want it. There are likely hundreds of other 3PP modules that can be tacked on. Those modules exist as well, WOTC just decided it wasn't profitable for them to develop them in house. Which is part of why this rumor just doesn't pass the smell test for me. There's a whole ecosystem of supporting products that are developed with no risk to their core product at no risk to them. It may, in theory, eat into their sales a bit

You can read the article here. He's talking about rulings over rules and some of the options we were delivered. Obviously there could be more, that's where 3PP comes in.

If you don't want to follow the link, I've included the relevant paragraphs. It's really more about ToTM vs grid combat and rulings over rules than anything.

Spoiler: Modularity interview response

CH: When you receive conflicting responses on the survey- half the people are positive and half the people are negative about one thing- how do you handle it? Do you have any examples of rules people are split on?

MM: I think one example is pretty obvious: we’ve seen it with minis and the grid. A good chunk of the audience says “those should be required.” And there’s a bigger but not decisively bigger chunk that says “no, those should be optional.” Not to make this a cop-out – people have said that modularity is just an excuse to say “play with whatever!” and that the game is nothing- it really is about saying that people have different views in what D&D should be, and what is important about D&D.

I think there are some things everybody agrees on. D&D is a roleplaying game. There’s going to be a game master/DM who is in charge of the rules and the world, then there’s people playing characters. But some people would say- oh, here’s one example. I was reading somewhere, probably EN World, where someone was really unhappy with the playtest. He was a 4th edition player, and I was thinking “oh, that makes sense, he really likes tactical combat.” And what he said was what he really likes about 4th edition is that he and his friends are just sitting on couches, and his friends describe what they want to do. He makes up a DC, and they roll a die, and if he rolls high enough, they succeed. And so I was like “huh?” and the theory in the office is that the only book he bought is the DMG and that’s the only book he owns.. But for that guy, that’s D&D for him, and not only that, that’s 4th edition for him.

When you have that approach, where the game is very idiosyncratic in deciding what is important to you, modularity is hugely important. Here’s one example: I have this old Livejournal post that people have been pointing to. I don’t know what people think it means, so I can only say what I thought when I wrote it. The idea is that if you really like combat you want tactical problems to solve, and you’re happier when the DM is making fewer judgment calls and more just applying the rules. So the player knows that if he wants cover from the Orc, he knows exactly where to move. He doesn’t want the DM to say “well, that tree is really thin, so you really can’t hide behind it.” They don’t want to run into stuff like that. They want more predictability. So if the rules are predictable, the tactical challenge is what ability do I want to use, where do I want my character to go, where do we want to force the monsters to go, stuff like that.

If you’re a guy who really wants to just play his character, to play the story, to explore the world, you might think “I want combat to be 5 minutes long” and you’re fine with the DM making calls, and you don’t want to move a guy around the grid: you just don’t care. You just want to say I attack the orc, I cast fireball, and so on. Both kinds of players would describe themselves as hardcore D&D fans, and they want polar opposites in the system.

So that’s really where modularity can come in. We can make the core for the guy who really doesn’t care about combat and is pretty happy because the rules are straightforward. Then the guy who wants rich, tactical combat in battles, he can say “I want complexity.” That way, a game defaults to being simple all around, and you can pick which parts you want to add rules to. I just drop in the depth I want as I go.

EDIT: typos

 

[Dausuul]

If this rumor were to be true, Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition becomes the new Pathfinder.

The end of the OGL was what drove Paizo to create Pathfinder. But it is not what made Pathfinder successful.

Pathfinder succeeded because of two things. First, there was a huge backlash to 4E. And second, 4E was so different from 3E that there was no way for Wizards to adjust course. The core game engine was what players had a problem with, so the issue couldn't be fixed with splatbooks -- it would have required a whole new edition to bring those folks back. Which, in the end, was what Wizards did, and it worked.

I really doubt 1D&D will encounter either of those issues. There's always some backlash to a new edition, but I can't see it happening on anywhere near the scale of 4E; and none of the changes they are currently contemplating (at least to judge by the playtest packets) are so massive that it would be impossible to course-correct.

 

[Corinnguard]

What made 4e also fail was that it wasn't playtested by the fans. WoTC learned this the hard way. As a result 5e D&D was a success after it's debut back in 2014.

Whether 1D&D becomes as successful as 5e D&D remains to be seen.