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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lizard" data-source="post: 4136097" data-attributes="member: 1054">I'm just wondering who on this list has read Dacey's extensive essays on the why of the OGL, beyond the simplistic "Uhm, it's supposed to sell PHBs" bit. The real point was that studies howed the main reason people left the hobby was because of no one to play with, and one thing driving that was system diversity -- too many systems, too few players to support them, people just quit gaming and never came back. So by spreading one system -- D20 -- as far as possible, the "no one to play with" problem was reduced. Whether you wanted sorcerors, spies, superheroes, or spacemen, you could do it with the same core rules, suitably varied and tweaked for the genre (as opposed to a true 'generic' game like Hero or GURPS, where the genre is pounded into the rules).If D20 keeps people playing, it serves WOTC, even if they're not playing WOTC games, because the success of WOTC is served by a strong hobby base overall. (And if WOTC had not been stricken with a case of 'not invented here', it could have helped them a lot more, since they could have used the best OGL material in their work and even made money supporting games like M&M or Spycraft. What if, instead of D20M, WOTC had decided to latch onto the Spycraft base and released core rules based on that? The OGL would have let them. Instead of trying, and then failing, to release a supers game, what if they'd adapted and built on M&M? It would have been interesting...)</blockquote>

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