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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mattcolville" data-source="post: 5334952" data-attributes="member: 1300">Advocates of the Open Source movement often blame a lack of "true openness" when their pet project fails. If only they'd been more open, more fully open, more openly open open open, then it would have been a hit.I think the Third Party Market was essentially an illusion created by the absence of real e-tools, such as we have now.If you sum over the history of D&D3, you'll see that WotC was constantly putting out more product, more rules, more options, than any group of players could possibly exhaust in a lifetime of play. And their designers are among the best in the industry.In other words, I don't think there was a market for innovation. I think there was a market for ease of use, and since there WAS no ease of use, since a S&S product or a Green Ronin product was just as easy to use as a WotC product, it created a false equivalence between the products. If D&D3 had the same robust e-support D&D4 has, I think that what we think of as the third party market would never have evolved. Not because it wouldn't be compatible with the e-tools, but because customers would conclude "why buy another company's product? I don't have time to use all the crap I've already got!"</blockquote>