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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Delta" data-source="post: 4003060" data-attributes="member: 40269">Dancey's analysis here is unconvincing; I'm pretty skeptical. Among other things he has a very personal stake in this argument (he started OGL/d20), and he seems overly defensive, IMO. The fact he thinks that there can be a glut of "badly designed, poorly marketed" products and have "no impact on most retailers" doesn't pass a reasonability test, IMO.It seems like every FLGS was hit hard by the rise & fall of d20. The argument that every FLGS store is poorly run, and therefore it's the managers' collective fault, also seems highly unreasonable. More likely is some endemic flaw with the publishing industry itself.Personally, I place the lions' share of the blame at WOTC introducing d20 under Dancey, and then rapidly about-facing and rejecting the OGL/d20 philosophy after he was gone. In regard to 3.5E, they made a a lot of changes, they didn't warn publishers, they didn't warn retailers, and they rolled it out years earlier than their initially declared plans. The whiplash effect is what caught all the 3rd-party publishers & retailers. I think if either WOTC hadn't introduced d20 in the first place, or hadn't intentionally tried to cripple it shortly thereafter, the effect would have been far less pronounced.</blockquote>