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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 8903438" data-attributes="member: 5142">However, I'm not sure if it was needed, and that seems to be one of the legal opinions about the OGL: i.e., mechanics can't be copyrighted. So whose interests does the OGL actually serve? According to Ryan Dancey, the OGL served WotC's self-interest because it encouraged people to support D&D's ecosystem. Moreover, during the d20 system days of 3.X a lot of those designers couldn't pay their bills and a lot of bubbles were burst. A lot of OGL designers and publishers that made it were those that already had connections designing for D&D or WotC. There were a lot of designers in the design scene before and after the OGL, and some of its most prominent designers were designing games that didn't use the OGL at all. It's not like an OGL was necessary for Jonathan Tweet to design Over the Edge, or Mark Rein-Hagen to design Vampire the Masquerade, Greg Stafford to design Runequest and Pendragon, or Sandy Peterson to design Call of Cthulhu, or Mike Pondsmith to design Cyberpunk, or Ron Edwards to design Sorcerer, Robin Laws to design Gumshoe, or Shane Hensley to design Savage Worlds, etc. IMHO, one of the biggest game changers with tabletop RPG design had less to do with the OGL and more the explosion of online fan communities. There were, for example, a lot of indie designers who cut their teeth not with the OGL but as a result of the Forge community: e.g., Vincent Baker, John Harper, Luke Crane, Paul Czerge, etc. It seems like the primary designer beneficiaries of the OGL prior to 5e may have been the OSR community as they realized that they could reprint most materials from older editions while making minor tweaks to the pre-existing systems.</blockquote>

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