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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5448062" data-attributes="member: 55271">I can say with near-certainty that I would have stopped playing regularly circa-2003 and probably never upgraded to 3.5 as a result. My first campaign was winding down at that point and it was only OGL material that fueled my interest in continuing to run the system at that point.Which isn't to say I wasn't still a WotC customer. In addition to core rulebooks, I spent several hundred dollars every year on WotC products until 2008. But it wasn't WotC producing that "I gotta run a campaign in Freeport!" type vibes (to use one example).And I don't think that was a failure on WotC's part. 90% of everything is crap, and it's even tougher to produce something that really EXCITES someone (and that can be a very idiosynchratic reaction). Few companies in this industry manage that even once. It's why pre- D20 I was switching to a new game every few months and had been doing so for years.The OGL got hundreds of companies producing stuff for D&D. Which meant I had a constant supply of material to get me excited about playing and running the game. Which kept me engaged as a customer for WotC.As long as WotC maintained itself as the core of this little galaxy of support products, they benefitted from it. As 3.5 demonstrated, this remained true across edition boundaries. (3.0 material became obsolete - it didn't fuel an insurgency of 3.0 players using the Mongoose Player's Handbook.)But once WotC decided to abandon that network, they left a vacuum that could be filled. And it was filled. And it's kicking WotC's ass in a way that nobody has ever done.</blockquote>

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