Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8887386" data-attributes="member: 18">Right?I told my dad, when I was like, 15 (1993), because he was complaining (mildly) about how many RPGs my brother and I owned (not that we played them, just how many we had lol - maybe he should have given us less money eh?), that they'd probably become pretty mainstream one day, and we'd still be playing them in our 40s (the age he was at the time).I was right on both counts, but somehow I feel like it's not the "right" I wanted to be, y'know?I disagree.The GSL actually hard-proves the opposite, because it an unmitigated disaster, and they intentionally brought back the OGL. It didn't come back by accident. 5E didn't trip over, fall, and an SRD fell out of its pocket, as you seem to imply. No. WotC intentionally brought back the OGL and made a 5E SRD (two, actually). Because it was a good idea.So it's it's not something that's been on their radar in any continuous sense. It's something that comes up when WotC is pressured to make more money. That's what the cause was both times.4E was the product of WotC being told D&D needed to make more money ($50m/pa to be precise). That's why it had such a broad-spread set of ways to make money, much more so than 3.XE had. Most of them failed, and the GSL was part of that failure, but it was an attempt.5E, as well-explained in [USER=7023840]@Snarf Zagyg[/USER]'s post exists because 4E failed and Hasbro decided they didn't need to push WotC on D&D, and could just make some smaller-scale profit on it. So the OGL came back out, because WotC wanted D&D succeed and thrive and they knew a lot of products necessary for a healthy game wouldn't be ones they'd want to make. That was very intentional.Then 5E entirely accidentally went huge because of cultural factors (and the OGL was part of this, note - being able to Kickstart D&D and D&D-related stuff on Kickstarter helps make fans even more engaged with the brand, even they're technically giving money to some 3PP, as does supporting D&D-related stuff on Patreon, something verboten in the OGL 1.1).And the Eye of Sauron fell on it once again. And once again, Hasbro demanded that WotC make more money with D&D. It was already making many times as much as they'd hoped 4E would make per year, but Hasbro wants more. So once again the it returns to the radar. It wasn't on there in an intervening period. It returned, because WotC is being pushed to maximize profits from D&D.I'm not saying this to let WotC off. It's managed by the same ex-Microsoft goons as the rest of Hasbro, at this point, but you can see a very clear and repeated pattern. D&D needs to do good, OGL, D&D doing good but needs to make more money, GSL. This is just a cleverer, but far more destructive take on the GSL. Even if it's opt-in (best case scenario, and definitely not what WotC's comments suggest), it's the GSL, because the whole point of the GSL was the poison pill preventing you making OGL 1.0a products, which 1.1 features.</blockquote>

Verification