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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BryonD" data-source="post: 6334739" data-attributes="member: 957">Ok, mea culpa for focusing on "the division" and not "civil war".However...Here I strongly disagree with you (again).4E disenfranchised a very substantial portion of the fanbase.  A divide "like any other edition" fails to come close to expressing the portion of fans that were lost from the start.There was plenty of vocal comments to that effect at the time.  And the 4E response was a combination of (a) players are destined to come around and (b) players who leave will be replaced many times over with fans pulled into the TTRPG hobby.You are back to (a) with the addition that it didn't happen because the OGL was there to create a relief valve.I still consider it more than a stretch of reasonable to assume people would play a game they don't like.You don't even have to go further than this thread to see the opposite: people saying they liked 4E but as time went by they found a lot of the complaints were true.  And 4E did continue to lose fanbase as time went by.So I consider the presumption that any meaningful number of the people who disliked it would revise their opinion to be simple wishful thinking.There is certainly no evidence that makes it a reasonable presumption.And even in your hopeful scenario, you have a huge chunk of fans milling around lost in the gaming wilderness for "a year or three" before they give in.  That is what is known in market terms as "demand".  The OGL DID make an easy path of least resistance and thus reality happened.  But in this alternate no-Paizo no-OGL universe, the demand would still exist.  Maybe someone at White Wolf or someone at Steve Jackson would take heed and give the masses what they want.  Maybe some company that doesn't exist because Paizo beat them to it would have.  May twenty different options would have absorbed the demand in pieces.  We will never know.  But any of these presumptions are more reasonable than "people will give up and play a game they don't like".Yes, the OGL most certainly played a key role in how the "civil war" played out once the divide existed.  It seems we easily and obviously agree on that.  Some alternate universe scenarios may have not had the same civil war feel.  But some of them did.  And with the number of people pushed out of the D&D brand, the potential that something very similar would have happened is quite real.</blockquote>

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