D&D 5E (2014) Upcoming OGL-Related Announcement!

[Ace]

I don't care much for the term fan created material in terms of modern projects .

It smacks of old line thinking as if somehow there really is a delineation between say WOTC and some guy posting on the 1996 web.

These days almost anyone can put together quality professional product at home and many things that would have been fannish and amatuer are better produced than older material made by large companies not that ago.

Now certainly there are some thrown together things that are shared, I've made some but this is not the kind of stuff found on say Drive Thru RPG and as such seeing 3rd party publishers who are basically just "small presses." as "fans" is snobbish and I think incorrect.

Also I think quality is a just a polite way of saying we want to control the ideology of the product. I suspect Hasbro fears another Book of Erotic Fantasy which again suggest a lack of thinking things things through.

Its not 1981 and the "look at all the kids playing" bubble is unlikely to repeat itself for a lot of reasons that would require a new post to go into. D&D is reverting to where it started, older adults, mostly middle and working class. This is a good thing.

2nd, people don't live in an information bubble. Almost anyone old enough to be interested in sex and D&D or the real world occult or whatever boogeyman the bluenoses and suits fear has unlimited information on the topics on his or her home computer or often phone. At worse something like the hypothetical BOEF 5.0 or "Real world occultism for D&D" is just doing the facts to game stats research for the player. Its meaningless to restrict product to restrict idea exposure.

Lastly, a place where I do agree. Holding off on the OGL till a few splat books are in is a good business practice. Wizards doesn't need to be beaten to the punch by more nimble 3rd party people and would benefit from some lead time..

As it is though, trying an (as others have put it) Apple style walled garden approach isn't going to drive sales. D&D is a great brand and 5e looks like a great product but its not that great a brand and doesn't offer anything that a hundred other games don't . It doesn't have and probably can't regain market dominance in this era of the Internet, video games and yes Pathfinder and OSR

 

[DMZ2112]

The point is that smaller audiences have different variables that go into what kind of license you need or want, so how L5R licenses isn't simply able to be copied over into how WotC should license.

No, my point was that these other products do not have licensed third-party support at all, and they get by somehow.

I see we've entered Argument Clinic territory.

Perhaps being a little less metaphorical would help here: It's something they're offering people in exchange for their time and effort at least (and possibly their money as well).

Oh, you are a slippery one.

Not every D&D-compatible product need be infringing.

Okay, I can agree that this is a balancing act between unmarketability and theft.

That's runaway sales success on the PF side, AND it's a more open license. You can see pretty clearly why Pathfinder's license is more attractive to content creators, why so many more things were created to support PF than were created to support 4e.

Even considering the obvious runaway success of Pathfinder, D&D4 remained competitive, as did the other three games in the 3Q 2010 top five: WHFRPG, WH40KRPG, and... really? The Dresden Files? Okay, well, at least Fantasy Flight does not license to third parties, so that is evidence that success is achievable without a more open license, more attractive license, or larger library of third-party support products.

Any license WotC offers needs to compete with the OGL and Paizo's license (as well as lots of other licenses and other drains on peoples' time). The D&D brand and it's "official" capacity is of great value, but the GSL has shown that there are bad licenses that people will largely ignore if it isn't an attractive product.

See the above. Licenses being ignored (or not existing in the first place) is irrelevant to D&D's success in particular and RPG success in general. Competition not required.

 

[Dausuul]

Present hindsight cannot be used to justify actions in the past.

Now, 4e is running in 2nd place. In the first few months after 4e came out, when folks were annoyed by the licensing, it was not obviously in second place. While there was argument and warring, the game was selling well, leading ICv2 reports, if I recall correctly. So, at the time, it was a good selling game, with a crappy licensing scheme. By the logic suggested, it would have been a prime target for cloning.

Two economists are walking down the street. One of them looks down and says, "Hey, there's a $5 bill on the ground!" The other says, "That's impossible. If there were, someone would have picked it up."

Just because something can happen, doesn't mean it will happen right away. Somebody had to decide they wanted to make 4E content; that the GSL wasn't acceptable; that they still wanted to do it enough to try the OGL route; and then actually do it. And no one could even start going down that road until 4E was released and they had the rules in hand. If 4E had been a roaring success and there had been no Pathfinder alternative, someone might well have done it eventually, but it wasn't and they didn't.

Plus, 5E sticks a lot closer to the 3.5 SRD than 4E did. In 5E, you could very nearly use 3E monsters as written. In fact... I'm not positive, but I think you could use a lot of 3E monsters as written.

 

[GX.Sigma]

See the above. Licenses being ignored (or not existing in the first place) is irrelevant to D&D's success in particular and RPG success in general. Competition not required.

The point is not that D&D can't be successful without a license. The point is, if 5e doesn't have a good license, then all the companies making Pathfinder stuff will keep making Pathfinder stuff. I think the reason people are arguing for OGL isn't because that's bad for WotC (which it is--right now, PF is getting free advertising and D&D isn't) but because it's bad for customers.

 

[I'm A Banana]

No, my point was that these other products do not have licensed third-party support at all, and they get by somehow.

No one's arguing that D&D5e will fail without a good 3rd party license? I mean, their license might fail, and they might fail to get a rich pool of awesome talent contributing to their game, repeating some of the mistakes of the GSL, but that doesn't mean a whole lot for the game's success, really, except in as much as it strengthens their competitors in a broad sense.

Okay, I can agree that this is a balancing act between unmarketability and theft.

It totally would be. Which is part of why the more likely effect of a cruddy 5e license would just be people not making 5e-licensed stuff.

Even considering the obvious runaway success of Pathfinder, D&D4 remained competitive, as did the other three games in the 3Q 2010 top five: WHFRPG, WH40KRPG, and... really? The Dresden Files? Okay, well, at least Fantasy Flight does not license to third parties, so that is evidence that success is achievable without a more open license, more attractive license, or larger library of third-party support products.

The argument has never been that 5e must have a good license to be successful, merely that if they want to have a successful license, they can't worry themselves silly about quality control of external parties. Your licensing scheme doesn't dictate your success, but it certainly influences who uses your license.

See the above. Licenses being ignored (or not existing in the first place) is irrelevant to D&D's success in particular and RPG success in general. Competition not required.

I dunno why you're talking about D&D's success in general. My main concern is on D&D having a good license, which is...at least not directly correlated to its success as a game. Its license IS directly correlated with the folks who take up that license though, and if the license is unappealing, folks won't take them up on it, and their offer will not be a successful offer.

 

[DDNFan]

.

Plus, 5E sticks a lot closer to the 3.5 SRD than 4E did. In 5E, you could very nearly use 3E monsters as written. In fact... I'm not positive, but I think you could use a lot of 3E monsters as written.

I've used 3.5 monsters in Next with some minor adjustments, no problem.

Also, minor nitpick, but D&D is actually third in sales right now. Not for long, surely.

I disagree that anyone can release a good adventure for D&D out of their basement, it needs to be playtested, checked for errors, formatted. Most individuals do not have all the requisite skills to do the A-Z publishing. This is why publishing houses have editors, and probably why it's a good idea for Wizards to maintain a tight grip on what products and companies they'll allow to use their brand name.

This being said, all of this stuff is good news if in the end people get quality products. I'd rather ten good publishers publishing quality material than 100s of random crap that one must sift through.

If "the market" was so great at making quality stuff on its own, you wouldn't need regulations to make sure the wheels don't blow up on the car you just bought. Wizards needs to make sure the metaphorical tires don't explode on the 2015 Nissan Adventure Pack PDF(tm).

 

[DMZ2112]

I dunno why you're talking about D&D's success in general. My main concern is on D&D having a good license, which is...at least not directly correlated to its success as a game. Its license IS directly correlated with the folks who take up that license though, and if the license is unappealing, folks won't take them up on it, and their offer will not be a successful offer.

Okay, I'm honestly not sure how else I could have interpreted the following:

We fans are the ones paying Mearls's rent, because we value what they make for our games. If we find more value outside, we'll go outside. We'll do what we did with the GSL and take our money and our passion and our fandom and go support great works that aren't in their gates, pay somebody else's rent for a while, somebody who maybe doesn't imagine that they get to define what "elf" or what "quality" means for everybody.

I read this as clearly stating, "If Wizards' pulls another boner like the GSL, players will walk."

 

[Dausuul]

Also, minor nitpick, but D&D is actually third in sales right now. Not for long, surely.

Actually, that raises an interesting point. After 5E is released, there will remain a substantial number of hardcore 4E fans who don't want to make the switch. I could well imagine that some of them will try using the OGL to "pull a Pathfinder" and continue 4E in a new incarnation. (Though I suspect the end result would be more OSRIC than Pathfinder.) It'll be interesting to see.

If "the market" was so great at making quality stuff on its own, you wouldn't need regulations to make sure the wheels don't blow up on the car you just bought. Wizards needs to make sure the metaphorical tires don't explode on the 2015 Nissan Adventure Pack PDF(tm).

The way markets work is that producers offer various products. People buy the products. The good ones sell well. The bad ones sell poorly and their producers go out of business. But for that to happen, someone has to buy the bad products and find out they're bad! Regulations exist to ensure that "finding out the product is bad" isn't fatal. That isn't a common issue with RPGs*.

As I said a while back, you can't lawyer your way out of Sturgeon's Law. There will always be lots of crap out there. And there will always be folks coming along with new products to sell, and most of those new products will suck. But under the proper circumstances--lots of buyers, lots of sellers, no major information asymmetries, et cetera--markets work quite well to drive the sellers of bad products out of business and help the sellers of good products thrive.

[SIZE=-2]*Although you might find out the product is FATAL, which is bad.[/SIZE]

 

[I'm A Banana]

Okay, I'm honestly not sure how else I could have interpreted the following:



I read this as clearly stating, "If Wizards' pulls another boner like the GSL, players will walk."

Ah, so, that was more to say that it's not WotC's playground, it's ours. So counter to [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] 's point that they can do what they want with their toys, noting that they don't actually control these things as much as their ownership of the brand might imply. Reinforcing the idea that they don't get to tell us what counts as "quality," in a functional way.

Totally see how that could've been unclear, though.

 

[darjr]

the kobolds press deal is full of cool