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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GhostBear" data-source="post: 5948766" data-attributes="member: 6667527">No more so than a for-profit company. A "Not For Profit" Company (and I use that phrase intentionally; it is the true classification for what is often mistakenly called "Non Profit") has a board of directors and a President/CEO just like every other company, and is not automatically beholden to its fans or detractors, just like every other company. It simply has different tax laws. It still needs to make money to operate, otherwise it cannot pay for facilities / workers / product / etc.Design By Committee is the best way to ensure that nothing gets done, or that it gets done in a half-assed way with everyone trying to get their own agenda taken care of. Try looking at the standards bodies for HTML, JavaScript, and CSS for examples of how well it works - and those are people who are trying to get something technical done, something that can produce concrete, measurable results.Imagine the W3C trying to include topics such as "ensuring that these new CSS attributes feel right and enrich the core gameplay experience" down, when such an idea is nebulous and subjective in the first place. It would be a nightmare.No, D&D, like every other gaming product, is best left to a smaller design team that is on the same page every step of the way, with a "Benevolent Dictator" that makes final decisions. Otherwise you'll end up with a lot of inconsistencies, a muddled vision, and ultimately a poor product. Too many cooks in the kitchen, as it were.I'd rather see D&D owned by a small(er) private company that is passionate about the product. Paizo was mentioned, and I'd be okay with that. I'm not fond of what they did to 3.5 on a personal level, but they are passionate about what they do. That is the truly important part. Otherwise, it just becomes a spreadsheet in someone's accounting software.Worse would be putting D&D into the public domain. Now, everyone is entitled to make their own personal version of D&D and sell it. Sounds great, right? It isn't. As an analogy, try to get someone unfamiliar with Linux to pick a good distribution for their needs. They'll go to google, search for Linux, get freaked out by the amount of choice.Then you have incompatibility issues because there is no longer a "standard" D&D. Again, everyone running around and doing their own thing would make for a confusing world between tables. So you don't end up learning or playing "D&D 3.5 or 4". You end up with "D&D According to Company X". And Y. And Z. And A, B, C, D...Choice is good, but too much choice is a problem.Hope some of that made some sense, I'm not feeling too well at the moment. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /></blockquote>

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