NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jsaving" data-source="post: 6305343" data-attributes="member: 16726">That's exactly the kind of 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.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 -- whose creation they were hoping to prevent.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.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.</blockquote>

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