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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dcollins" data-source="post: 1157773" data-attributes="member: 876">Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to reply -- I really appreciate your observations, guys.Let me make a few responses to items that have come up more than once, which perhaps got miscommunicated in the essay. First, I'm not going to discard the emphasis on non-direct-gameplay issues: largely I'm worried about the culture of D&D, its support for past 3.0 products, and its chances to be healthy in the future. There's a lot of signs with 3.5 that WOTC failed to manage it properly, and that bodes ill for the future. The amount of rules changes is fracturing the playing community. The unnecessary rules changes (e.g., spell changes) have broken compatibility with the existing body of 3.0 publications, and I think that's a very damaging issue.Second, the parethetical comment about a changed economic system is just a long-standing "wish list" item on my part. I certainly don't think it should have been part of 3.5.Now, I may have somewhat mangled the part about magic item creation. The thing is, as I've sparred over in the rules forum on occassion, there are two very distinct issues about magic items: (1) crafting of magic items detailed in the book by players, and (2) invention of brand-new items by players. I totally agree with everyone else that the 3.0 crafting rules (#1) are great, and they have not changed with 3.5. The problem is that there's confusion about the distinction between #1 and #2, and I was hoping that 3.5 would rectify that confusion by clearly stating that newly-invented items (#2) have the status of house-rules, are fundamentally subjective in price, and are definutely not "official" (and/or include research pricing as for new spells, etc.) Unfortunately, that didn't happen, they retained the "magic item pricing table" without comment, and that signals to me that in a future ruleset magic items will be entirely a la carte. (It's something Monte Cook, for example, originally argued against on his website but has now further developed in "Arcana Unearthed".) I think that's a really bad idea, and that it feeds directly into the Fantasy-Flavor Removal issue. Finally, I tried to express that my most important point was actually the last one, the Breakdown of Open Gaming. Note that this has nothing to do with the profitability or competitiveness of 3rd-party d20 publishers; that's not part of my concern whatsoever. Maybe it's just that I'm a computer guy who has followed the Open-Source development model of Linux and the GPL very closely -- but in 2000 Ryan Dancey explicitly said that the OGL was put in place to mimic the community development which exists around the GPL. That is, a very public system for community tinkering with the source material, and formal processes for returning changes to the original owner and the next update, strengthening the material as time goes on. It's the failure to do this which is my biggest disappointment with 3.5, and where I once felt excited about the OGL, now I feel deceived. With 3.5 WOTC has demonstrated that they're not interested in putting anyone's ideas in play except for their designated in-house designer, and sure enough, there seem to be per-capita a greater number of errors and glitches in 3.5 than in 3.0. (Consider the errata #1 which admits there will always be contradictions between different core rulebooks.) Use of the OGL doesn't look anything like the GPL, in direct contradiction to what was advertised with the advent of 3rd Edition. That's really a lost opportunity, I think.Anyway, thanks again for reading and your thoughts.</blockquote>

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