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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kerrick" data-source="post: 4747375" data-attributes="member: 4722">I dunno. If, all of a sudden, everyone stopped charging for their products, we would almost definitely see an immediate stop to print products - it simply costs too much to do that for free. Online pdfs and netbooks would keep going strong, though the quality would probably take a dip. In the days of 2E, the net was flooded with netbooks. Sure, most of them were crap, but there were some gems in there, made by people who cared nothing but the love of the game they played, and their wish to share their stuff with others.Many computer games like Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, and Oblivion have huge communities of people who spend hundreds or even thousands of hours making mods for free to share with others.You still see it these days, though not nearly as much - the OGL enables anyone with the wherewithal to publish and sell their product. It's also a lot less restrictive for fansites, which lets people put any old thing they want on the net without fear of reprisals from the folks who make D&D, so the free content community is still going strong.So, would it be a bad thing for the hobby as a whole? Maybe - with the lack of new print products, fewer people would be drawn into the hobby, and eventually it would be reduced to the folks who spend a good deal of time online and can find/download netbooks and free content from sites. Even then, most people (myself included) have a preference for dead-tree material vs. electronic. D&D has a huge amount of inertia, though; it's been around for 30+ years, and there's a ton of material for it - enough to keep people playing for many, many years even if it vanished tomorrow. With all the spinoff systems we've got now, everyone can find something to suit them. So, it's really hard to call.</blockquote>

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