Mark CMG
Creative Mountain Games
From the EN News page said:Ryan Dancey has given an opinion on 4E, marketing and the OGL over on the Open Gaming Foundation listservers:
3.5 will die, no question. Just as 3.0 died. Those labels are 95% marketing, 4% presentation, and 1% actual design differences. In other words, the king is dead, long live the king. The failure of the D20 publishing community to benefit (as WotC did) from the 3.5 transition was a MARKETING failure, not a DESIGN failure.
I think that having gone through this process once with the "3.5" release of D&D, publishers who want to hew close to the core elements of sword & sorcery fantasy represented by D&D will have a much better chance to navigate the transition to a new system than they did previously. They'll know to wind down new releases about 3 months prior to the new game's release, avoid the appearance that they produced products that can't be used post-transition and to pay close attention to the information coming out of WotC as to how the game system will be changing, to anticipate and incorporate that material into their products in advance of the release of the new material. They'll also know that they're being given a platform to go back and to "core" material again - the easiest, most popular content. That's just easy money. (Which WotC knew: witness the swift and successful release of the new "Complete" books right on the heels of 3.5.)
Based on little more than the sneak preview WotC provided at Winter Fantasy prior to the 3.5 release, it should have been possible for the D20 publishing community to do this the first time 'round, but so many publishers were caught up in the focus on getting products edited and published that they missed the larger picture - the danger that consumers really would draw a sharp distinction between 3.0 and 3.5, and apply that distinction even to 3rd party products. I think that happened BECAUSE 3.0 and 3.5 are functionally so similar from a deep-level design perspective. I doubt anyone will make that mistake again.
The kinds of changes we've talked about on this list - the move to a more miniatures centric packaging and design focus, smaller, cross-category integrated releases, changes to alter the need for an impartial DM - don't change the validity of the SRD. Imagine using the SRD to make D&D Miniatures supplements. It would be very easy to do so today, if anyone thought that doing so was worthwhile. The limitation of being able to put the D20 System Trademark on a miniature has apparently scared anyone capable of producing figures and support materials for the system out of the market - but if the whole franchise moves into that space, I cannot imagine that continuing.
With so much of the 30+ year legacy D&D game in the SRD, I believe it is impossible to ever make a game that would be accepted by the fans as "D&D" without it being possible to alter whatever is necessary to make the Open Game version of D&D compatible with whatever product is being currently sold as "D&D" by WotC. A game divergent enough to break that legacy with the SRD is simply not going to be tolerable to anyone vested in the D&D player network. Such a radical break would almost certainly result in a 3rd party version of the game, published under a new brand name, becoming the de-facto inheritor of the D&D player network externality, coming into direct competition with whatever faux "D&D" product is being marketed, and probably crushing it.
How much of this rings true to you?