Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 5445869" data-attributes="member: 8461">I agree with most of what Wicht and Steel_Wind said.Personally, I don't think that the OGL was ever a mistake for anyone. As Wicht noted, WotC flat-out stated that they wanted people to use it to make the sort of products that they didn't care to focus on (such as adventures), and that's exactly what a lot of people did.Now, WotC certainly didn't foresee a lot of the other ramifications of the OGL that came into being. Remember that FAQ on their site dismissively saying "Can someone reprint the entire OGL as a sort of PHB? Sure, if you think you could make money off of it." But this was still in their enlightened self-interest; even if you were playing an OGL game that was d20-based (and thus didn't need so much as the PHB) you were still far and away closer to D&D than if you were playing another table-top game - in fact, odds were good you'd started with D&D anyway.I also agree that the so-called "glut" of products is overstated. Yes, there were a lot of d20 products, and some of them weren't good, but that's the case in any instance where there are multiple companies producing the same type of material - some will be better than others.The "glut" largely happened after v.3.5 was released, which created massive stores of v.3.0 products that were suddenly valueless in the minds of the consumers (and thus retailers), which seriously shook consumer confidence in the game as a whole - it's no coincidence that right after v.3.5 came out was when we started seeing a lot of threads here on EN World about what Fourth Edition would be like.Beyond that though, I think that Steel_Wind's three points are correct. The OGL wasn't a mistake for WotC, but they managed to make it work against them by 1) Licensing the goodwill of D&D out to Paizo, 2) Releasing Fourth Edition much too soon, and 3) Trying to kill the OGL with the GSL.Those things empowered (and indeed, somewhat forced) Paizo to step up and become the "alternative D&D" in the tabletop RPG market. What happened was the natural consequence of WotC's mishandling of the OGL - it wasn't a mistake for them; they just changed their business practice to where they wouldn't let it work for them anymore, instead making it a detriment.</blockquote>

Verification