D&D 5E So, 5e OGL

[darjr]

Also, to add, if it wasn't for the OGL and the competition it fostered there would not have been a 5e. At least not in the way it came about, and probably not like it at all.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

That's exactly the kind of central-planning thinking Dancey was fighting against when he created the OGL.

The OGL absolutely didn't "guarantee" that a new edition would fail. Rather, it guaranteed that if WotC elected to muscle through a new edition that was judged inferior by a significant chunk of the gaming community and then tried to make obsolete the core books people had purchased, then there would be a way for third-party publishers to step in and provide support for those disenchanted gamers.

wow... just wow...

All WotC had to do to avoid this fracture was produce an edition most gamers would want to play. Instead, they panicked and tried to remove as many vestiges of 3e as they could from the new rules so existing resources like the SRD would be useless, because with their post-Dancey central-planning mentality they had become afraid of how strong third-party publishers might become. Then WotC tried to use its market power and brand name to force the switch to an edition they knew or at least should have known would leave a large chunk of the gaming community dissatisfied, ironically creating the very entity -- Pathfinder -- they were trying to avoid facing in the marketplace.

OMG I am so sick of post telling me how evil WotC twearled it's mustache and made people switch... THEY ARE GAMERS TOO... WEATHER YOU LIKE WHAT THEY MADE OR DID NOT THEY WERE TRYIN TO IMPROVE THE GAME...

The main argument against this seems to be that any new edition would fracture the gaming community unless accompanied by enough strong-arm tactics on the part of WotC to make people move -- but I think this is a gross misreading of history. People embraced 1st edition AD&D because it provided a vastly better role-playing experience than what had come before; they embraced 2e because it fixed some 1e problems while retaining its spirit; they embraced 3e for the same reason. (Of course there are some people who didn't make the switch, but most did.) 4e was the only time in the game's history where a huge chunk was dissatisfied with what WotC had produced, but this dissatisfaction occurred because of WotC's strategic decisions in developing 4e and not because the OGL somehow prevented WotC from "doing what had to be done" and forcing people into an upgrade they might not want. Had they produced an edition people found more appealing, as they did with 1e and 2e and 3e, then there wouldn't even have been a critical mass of gamers from which Pathfinder could emerge.

or every edititon has early and late adaptors, as this was the first time someone targeted late adaptors with "Hey look no need to change and we have the soul of D&D right here" it did change everything... and not just for the better...

I do agree that once WotC decided that they needed centralized control of the D&D marketplace and needed to force everyone to drop 3e in favor of 4e, the OGL hindered their ability to get it done. But it doesn't seem reasonable to blame the OGL for the exceptionally poor strategic judgment that led them to this decision in the first place.

WOTC IS NOT THE ENEMY THEY ARE FANS OF THE SAME GAME YOU ARE AND TRYING TO DO THERE BEST TO IMPROVE IT!!! We can argue results (AKA did they make a better game) but argueing intent and that they had some evil agenda is wrong...

 

[jsaving]

No one is saying WotC is the enemy, or that they are not now genuinely trying to improve the game. Many of us do think they made ill-considered decisions when developing 4e that ended up fracturing the gaming community, but I'd certainly agree with you that the people who made those decisions genuinely believed they were doing what was best for the company.

(Please also note that no one is arguing about whether 4e was objectively "better" or "worse" than what came before -- I use 4e myself in one of my campaigns and like much of what it brings to the table -- only that it wasn't well-received by a large chunk of the gaming community. If you want to talk about how "good" or "bad" you think 4e is, this probably isn't the right place to do that.)

 

[adamc]

This too is an issue of semantics. He did not mean by semantics, what you meant by semantics

That made me chuckle.

 

[MoonSong]

oh, ok lets go at this again...
4e give ME more options then 3.5 did... infact I can make more unquie settings and characters with just phb1 of 4e then half of 3.5 put togather...

Ok, then how about this character (only phb involved, and UA for the illiterateness, but that little detail can be easily ignored)

A weak, sickly, somewhat dizzy and very illiterate gnome sorceress, who barely knows anything about adventuring and only adventures to help a friend with her everyday magic which comes only from within herself without any external source or requirement, since her magic is a reflection of her soul, she doesn't know any single offensive spell. In fact she looks like a misplaced commoner among the group but still manages tobe helpful despite not having any offensive capabiltiy of any kind.

Go ahead, make her with only the 4e PHB1...(If it involves heavy refluffing and mechanical dissociation, that is already a dramatic departure in style, which is the point I'm trying to make).

oh no 1 race gone... replaced with deva...

Which while pretty cool, is just not quite the same. Devas don't have parents, or a childhood, or are looking forward to form bonds.

Darksun was great (not quite stone age) I ran both scifi and modern (based on Dresden files) games with 4e with ease..

Again with heavy refluffing, Yes Dark sun is great but it isn't really sword and sandal, and this wasn't in the DMG as options.

we didn't waste time putting combat stats on them? instead they were just there for there roles??

This is something that borders on badwrongfun, for people like me it is important to have combat stats for non-combatants in the case they get involved in combat anyway -not to mention non-combatant PCs which are something I'm personally focused on-, and there is more to stats than just combat stats.

all of that sounds like the basic sour grapes I couldn't figure out why until I kept reading

I had those when 4e came, and many players had them too, or Pathfinder would have found no customers. You can't just dismiss those.

your analogy is perfect... in that scenero the girlfriend (Piazo) commeted the wrong... not the guy saying 'goodbye'. infact it is the exact type of over reaction we see here

But you can't hardly blame her. If she wasn't betrayed and left down in such a brutal way in front of a loaded gun, she wouldn't have fired any shot. It was a perfect storm.

that is the hight of rudeness right there... you corrected nothing you changed things the way you would to once again throw wotc and it's fans in a bad light instead of trying to see the entire point of view presented... in doing show proveing my point...

Sorry, on hindsight it was uncalled for. But it is a huge grey area we are talking here. Not everybody saw LFQW as a huge deal -or a deal at all-, and not everybody happy with the set-up were powergaming munchkins. This is a huge YMMV thing. Playstyles are very diverse, one player's brokeness was another player's flexibility, one player's balance is another's straightjacket. And don't talk to me as if I had something against WotC, there is a fat pack box sitting in my bookcase, I don't like pathfinder, I took part in the palytest and looking forward to 5e release, and I don't mind playing an out of print game RAW. Heck I even like 4e, a lot, but as I was telling you I also like 2e and 3.5 and they supported playstyles that 4e just don't.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Ok, then how about this character (only phb involved, and UA for the illiterateness, but that little detail can be easily ignored)

we can both go back and forth like this for a week me naming things 4e did (just warlock and warlord is 4-5 concepts off the top of my head) so yes go on... lets reve this edition war into high gear...

Go ahead, make her with only the 4e PHB1...(If it involves heavy refluffing and mechanical dissociation, that is already a dramatic departure in style, which is the point I'm trying to make).

no game can make everything... but 4e make MORE of what I want then 3e... and there were things 2e and 1e did that 3e and 4e could not... what difference is that?

Which while pretty cool, is just not quite the same. Devas don't have parents, or a childhood, or are looking forward to form bonds.

yes like I said 1 race down...

Again with heavy refluffing, Yes Dark sun is great but it isn't really sword and sandal, and this wasn't in the DMG as options.

you said 4e couldn't do stone age... it is pretty stone age.

This is something that borders on badwrongfun, for people like me it is important to have combat stats for non-combatants in the case they get involved in combat anyway -not to mention non-combatant PCs which are something I'm personally focused on-, and there is more to stats than just combat stats.

why?

My noncombatants when in combat just make basic attacks or pull some trick that would not be in there stats anyway...

But you can't hardly blame her. If she wasn't betrayed and left down in such a brutal way in front of a loaded gun, she wouldn't have fired any shot. It was a perfect storm.

YES I CAN BLAME A COLD HEARTED MURDERER.... nothing anyone does makes it ok to pick up a gun a shoot them... if you think being broken up with is "brutal" but shooting someone is OK, we are done...

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

As a side note, I think that tabletop gaming is increasing. However, I think that is driven mostly by Board Games and less by Roleplaying Games. I believe most of those studies combined the two. I agree that RPGing is dying down.

Half my friends stopped playing when the 4e and Pathfinder split happened. Most of them say there is too much drama in the community and don't want to be involved. A bunch switched to Pathfinder. The ones that stuck with 4e slowly stopped attending events over time as it was more and more clear that WOTC didn't want to support 4e and was making a 5e.

D&D Encounters used to have 3 to 4 tables a week at our local store. They have none now since all the DMs got fed up with 4e. Pathfinder society is flourishing but is not as big as Living Greyhawk was in its heyday.

Most people I know have no idea that a 5e is coming out, that there has been a playtest, or have kept up to date on any knowledge of D&D at all. They've written off the hobby as either dead or only consisting of Pathfinder now.

The Edition Warring just above me shows a fairly typical attitude. Either Pathfinder destroyed the industry for capitalizing on WOTC's weakness or WOTC ruined the industry by betraying all their fans and making a game nobody liked. It's hard to get anyone excited about the new edition because no one even wants to be in the same room with the enemy.

 

[Eridanis]

Let's keep the edition wars out of this thread. If you feel threatened, you might want to take a deep breath or two and relax.

 

[MoonSong]

we can both go back and forth like this for a week me naming things 4e did (just warlock and warlord is 4-5 concepts off the top of my head) so yes go on... lets reve this edition war into high gear...

no game can make everything... but 4e make MORE of what I want then 3e... and there were things 2e and 1e did that 3e and 4e could not... what difference is that?


yes like I said 1 race down...


you said 4e couldn't do stone age... it is pretty stone age.

Ok, just remember what I said at the beginning, when 4e came out it was a Huge drastic change for many players. And word for word I wrote "What happened to stone-age, bronze -age and futuristic campaigns?" core 3.5 had those options laid out in the DMG (the core). Yes Dark Sun is technically stone age, but it is closer to Hyboria than prehistoric campaigns and I said "sword and sandal" - bronze age. (And Dark sun is not in the core). This was a core versus core comparison. (Again I like 4e, so much I began working on a possible clone of it, to date one of my biggest griefs is that 4e didn't feel finished, there was too much room left to explore and that is a shame. However the initial shock and so many changes kept me from getting into it earlier, it took me a serious effort of getting at it with an open mind to play it long enough to learn of its strengths. Not many players were this open minded though.)

why?

My noncombatants when in combat just make basic attacks or pull some trick that would not be in there stats anyway...

this is a playstyle thing. I guess you don't get too many non-combatant PCs.

YES I CAN BLAME A COLD HEARTED MURDERER.... nothing anyone does makes it ok to pick up a gun a shoot them... if you think being broken up with is "brutal" but shooting someone is OK, we are done...

By definition a passion crime is the opposite of cold murder, in this situation. An impulsive crime that wouldn't have happened should the break-up had been in more amenable circumstances. Few people have the self control not to respond with aggression when faced with a situation of betrayal and extreme humiliation and a quick mean to deliver on a quick aggression. Wanting it or not, WotC did drive Paizo to work on PF and jump down Wizard's bandwagon,had they handled it better they would have had them working with them instead of competing against them -OGL or not-.

 

[Mistwell]

That's exactly the kind of thinking Dancey was fighting against when he created the OGL.

Yes. I know. I do not think highly of Dancey when it comes to this topic (though I do when it comes to some otherts). I think he was not thinking in favor of the company he was working for as much as he was thinking in terms of outside interests, and that he was not particularly mindful of fiduciary duties. And I think his actions since then, including things he's said and what he's done, indicate those actions were not in the best interests of WOTC, but were in the best interests of Dancey and the fans and third party companies (which is nice for us, but not nice for WOTC, the company he was working for). Is that clear enough? Is it now crystal clear that I absolutely know Dancey was fighting against what I am talking about - and that I think he was not acting in good faith when he did that from the perspective of the company he was working for.

The OGL absolutely didn't "guarantee" that a new edition would fail.

And that is not what I said at all. I said it guaranteed a GREATER FRACTURE in the community. Regardless of how good the new editions would be in the future (and this impacts editions 100 years from now - it's indefinite), there are always those who will like the prior edition simply out of inertia - it's what they are playing now, they want continued support for it, they don't want to disrupt their current game with a new rules said. We have seen that with every single prior edition, not just 4e but 3e and 2e as well, and now with 5e. The OGL makes that worse. That is my point.

they embraced 2e because it fixed some 1e problems

You are deeply unaware of what happened if you think that is how it went down. There was a MASSIVE fracture in the community at the time.

while retaining its spirit; they embraced 3e for the same reason.

Again, this is a view that seems to lack some knowledge of the history of how things happened. There was once more a BIG fracture in the community. Every new edition has a fracture in the community - but the OGL makes it much much worse, because there is less incentive to check out the new edition, and more fuel to complain about it by seeking out someone still supporting the old edition.

4e was the only time in the game's history where a huge chunk was dissatisfied with what WotC had produced,

That is incredibly false. If I had to guess, you were not around on usenet at the time this was happening, where support for 2e was hanging out. There is STILL lots of outrage out there by 2e supporters concerning how horrible they think 3e was. It would have been much worse at the time if major 2e support had continued in competition with 3e simultaneously.