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: 6305424" data-attributes="member: 16726">I don't agree with your historical take at all.  Sure, diehards for each edition were unhappy and made their opinion known in electronic forums, but highly unhappy people are always the most highly motivated posters so this shouldn't be taken to mean they actually spoke for many people.  And sure, the small number of people who don't switch editions are going to feel outrage even today that their edition  faded into the historical background, but again, these people are by definition the most diehard advocates for their edition and aren't remotely representative of the typical gamer.Would there have been a much worse fracturing of the gaming community in 2000 if there had been a 2nd edition OGL?  The unfortunate fact is that we just can't know.  There is no way to disprove your theory that 2e could have gained a much stronger foothold if third-party publishers had been in a better position to support it.  Nor is there a way to prove my theory that most people would have moved to 3e anyway because of the advances it contained.  But there are some things we do know.  We know that Dancey believed lots more core books were being sold because of the OGL.  We know that many people within the company never believed that a thriving but anarchic third-party adventure marketplace could possibly provide spillover benefits for WotC.  We know the skeptics were firmly in control of WotC during the design and development of 4e, and that they made the conscious choice to make a dramatic break from editions past so they could regain the control Dancey had ceded nearly a decade before.  And we know from sales data that this strategy didn't fare as well as WotC had hoped, though we'd obviously disagree on why this happened and who bears the responsibility for it.The unfortunate thing is that WotC really needs to know the answers to these questions as they decide whether to re-embrace the OGL model today...</blockquote>

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