So..um..how's that GSL coming along?

[justanobody]

(All of which has little to do with when the GSL is coming out, except to speak to the question of why WotC decided to go GSL over OGL in the first place. It still seems to be an attempt to close the barn door after the cows have already escaped to me.)


RC

Pretty much, and also how the OGL/STL/GSL itself is affecting the market and the gaming community through pure branding, ie the D&D compatibility/d20 logo.

Thanks for clearing my earlier point, yet again. Are you living inside me head by any chance? There has been more rattling around up there lately.

 

[CapnZapp]

Well, for a thread supposedly on the GSL, having to listen to this fast food prattling is fairly depressive...

Oh, how I would have wished the initiative to release a 4E-compatible ruleset under the OGL would have taken advantage of Wizards' patent disinterest, and actually become finished by now!

 

[Raven Crowking]

Thanks for clearing my earlier point, yet again. Are you living inside me head by any chance? There has been more rattling around up there lately.

TSR used to hire imps to watch over gamers' shoulders and steal their best ideas. Since TSR went down, and the Interweb has made gamers' ideas a lot easier to find, many of those imps are now unemployed. Except Charlie. He works for me.

 

[Storm Raven]

You'd sooner go to an Applebees then a British pub, in Britain?

It depends on context. If I am traveling and looking for "local color" then a local restaurant is where I'd end up. If I'm traveling and don't care about the local color (or the local color is simply not interetsing to me), then a chain offers reliability and dependability that I can't get by looking at a local place.

McDonalds and other chain restaurants offer reliability, If I am in an unfamiliar area, I will have no idea which local place is good, and which serves sandwiches that taste like sawdust. I have a pretty good idea what I will get at a McDonalds, a TGIFridays, or any number of other places. Even in Britain, I am sure that some British pubs serve food that is nigh inedible - and if I am not in the mood to guess which one's those are and avoid them, I may choose the reliable chain place.

In my town we have several local restaurants. Some are good, some are bad. I know which is which, because I live here and I've tried them. But you probably couldn't tell me if Main Street Wings, or Kate's, or Magnolia's are any good, because you haven't tried them.

 

[ExploderWizard]

In my town we have several local restaurants. Some are good, some are bad. I know which is which, because I live here and I've tried them. But you probably couldn't tell me if Main Street Wings, or Kate's, or Magnolia's are any good, because you haven't tried them.

Well...........................spill the beans man!!!!!!! Some of us are local and want to know. I work here in Reston and loves me some wings

 

[malraux]

The other advantage of a big brand is the network effect. The more people that play that system, the larger the pool of people you can game with. And since the major factor in enjoyment of a game system is getting people together to actually play, arguably the brand name has an inherent value that is at least as large as any other factor.

 

[El Mahdi]

TSR used to hire imps to watch over gamers' shoulders and steal their best ideas. Since TSR went down, and the Interweb has made gamers' ideas a lot easier to find, many of those imps are now unemployed. Except Charlie. He works for me.

TSR didn't hire Imps, they Enslaved them. They also made pacts with Demons . . . uhmmm, I mean Lawyers to suppress competitors.




*meant entirely as humor. I have absolutely nothing against Dem....Lawyers. No really, I mean it!

 

[RogerWilco]

To me the srd3.5 was one of the main reasons to switch from AD&D 2e to 3/3.5.

Why? Because it allowed Copy&Paste and tools like PCGen to be created.

I have since bought about 60 books and the PCGen datasets for 49 of those from CodeMonkey Publishing.

I have gotten addicted to using PCGen to create my games, and have willingly shelled out several hundreds of dollars to enable the tool to legally use WotC published materials instead of just the SRD3.5 material.

But PCGen would not exist without the SRD, at least not in it's current form.

When WotC made it impossible for CodeMonkey Pusblishing, to provide datasets for PCGen, I stopped buying books because I knew I would be able to use the material in PCGen. I am still very disappointed that some of the books published in 2005 and 2006 never were allowed to be provided with support for PCGen, Like the Magical Item Compendium.

4th edition is just not an option for me without similar options to create and modify characters, items, feats, skills, templates, trade them with the players and so on and so forth.

My point is, that the combination of CMPs legal status and the srd 3.5 availabilty to PCGen allowed me to have the contents of nearly 50 WotC published books at my finger tips in an organised way. Without it, I would not have purchased as many supplements and would have stuck to the core 3.5 PHB/MM/DMG like, I did with ADnD 2e and I might do with 4e, if I even switch to 4e at all given how much more convenient 3.5 is to use.

Edit: P.S. Oh, and it runs on my Mac.

Edit2: And about the DDI, I basically have very little confidence in WotC's ability to support and develop software properly over longer periods of time given their history. The way they pulled support for e-Tools/PCGen still leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Do't they say: burnt once, twice shy?

I wish I would be able to get exited about 4th edition, I want to buy WotC books, as I want to support them in developing one of my favourite games, but currently they're forcing me to stick with 3.5 and scavenge second hand copies of ebay for those books I am still missing. It also means my local FLGS hasn't seen me a lot lately.

Edit3: And the SRD also made it easy to Copy/paste together a list of all the monsters I can summon and similar such things that are much harder if you only have a hard copy of a book.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Well, Roger, the Character Generator from DDI is in closed beta now (only accessible to DDI subscribers) and pretty good so far. But of course, it will never run on a Mac (unless .NET is ported over there, which I would very much love to see.)

 

[RogerWilco]

Well, Roger, the Character Generator from DDI is in closed beta now ... and pretty good so far.

Thank you for replying to me.

As I said, given the history WotC has with their various past software venues, I'm very reluctant to trust them to get it right this time. Not so much their initial effort, but more how long and well they'll support it during the entire lifetime of the product. They have a history with the interactive atlas, MasterTools/E-Tools, Gleemax, MtGO.

(only accessible to DDI subscribers)

Well, that would be problem one. I'm not interested in 4e, until they have at least the Druid class included, so I'm currently not signed up for DDI.

But of course, it will never run on a Mac

This would be an even bigger obstacle. If you use a Mac, do you have to pay less for the DDI as you can't use the Character Generator?

My point was, that under the old SRD3.5, if you could not use or didn't want to use the tools provided by WotC (E-Tools), you could write your own. Through CMP, you could even buy the datasets legally for the books you owned. With the new system, you have no options, if you can't use what WotC provides, you're out of luck.

I have no insight into how much datasets CMP sold, and if WotC made any money of those, but I wanted to make it known that the availability of both the tool and the datasets in a legal and supported way, has made me buy a lot more books and spend several hundreds od dollars in datasets.

I appreciate CodeMonkeyPublishing a lot, that they have continued to support and bugfix the datasets over the past two years, without making a dime, as WotC didn't allow them to sell anything anymore already 1.5 years before the release of 4e. Unfortunately even that's going to end now.

The way WotC pulled the plug on E-Tools and PCgen support almost overnight has left me with very little confidence that they\ll do a better job supporting their new tools. "Once burnt, twice shy" I tihnk they say in America?