Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="trancejeremy" data-source="post: 7549424" data-attributes="member: 924">The OGL was originally a way for WOTC to deal with two things they saw as potential issues with their new third edition.Firstly, they viewed things like adventures as products that didn't sell all that well to be viable for a large company, but something that some people wanted and probably healthy for a product line.Secondly they remembered what Mayfair had did with their Role-Aids line (being advertised as being compatible with AD&D)The OGL was a way of them to let 3rd parties handle what WOTC considered beneath them, I guess, and because of the clause prohibiting mention of compatibility without an additional license (the D20 System Trademark License), give them some control over the competition. I guess because they weren't sure how well it would be supported, they started working with 3rd parties and had a draft System Rules Document (SRD) for like a year before 3e launched. I think the problem was is they didn't realize that people (and companies) were willing to produce more than adventures. They presumably got something of a shock when White Wolf (under their Sword & Sorcery label) rushed out a monster book before WOTC put out the monster manual. I think the big difference is that when they launched 5e, they held off on releasing the 5e SRD (which is what is "open content" and thus allowable for 3rd parties to use) for at least a year after all the books came out. Maybe 2 years?  This gave them time for their own official products to be firmly planted and put a stop to any sort of goldrush that was found in the 3e days. So instead of startups making 5e products (like in the 3e days), it's mostly established companies moving from PF (or from their own systems, in some cases, like Troll Lord and Goodman) to 5e.  (We've also seen some fairly wholesale adaptions to 5e, like Adventures in Middle Earth)Paizo's problems with PF2 is probably not related to the OGL, but perhaps the 3e rules system. Originally Pathfinder was 3e for people who liked 3e and didn't want to move on from it to 4e. But what's the market for Pathfinder 2? It's far enough from 3e that it doesn't feel like 3e. And for people who don't like 3e to begin with, they have 5e. (Oddly, 4e fans seem to like PF2, though they also have 13th Age)There's also the innate problem with game systems. You have core rules. Then you have splatbooks. Then you do a new edition and sell another core rules and splatbooks with new versions of the same classes/race/monster etc. Paizo avoided this for a long time by simply spreading out the game system, constantly adding new classes and races and monster books. But now that they are facing a new edition, they face the problem that people who liked something from one of the splatbooks might have to wait for years to play that class or use that race in the new edition.Ah, but these days Hasbro licenses IP and brands Monopoly with them.  Like a couple weeks ago at the store I work at, we had someone come in looking for Game of Thrones Monopoly. We didn't have it, but we did have about 2 pallets worth of Fortnite Monopoly.</blockquote>

Verification