D&D 4E Would you buy 4E if it were not open/had no licenses for 3rd party companies?

[Zelster]

You left off the option for people that will not buy 4E unless it is guaranteed to be closed. Also your interpretation "do you want 307 actual sales or do you want 461?" is laughable and unscientific. It is obvious that there is a huge market for a fresh outlook on an old RPG system, one that transcends people that read this board.

If they can get 1% of WoW players to buy the 4E core books, mission accomplished from a profit standpoint. And if the game continues to be polluted by nickel-and-dime 3rd party publishers putting out crap like they did for 3E, the damage to the brand could prove irreparable.

 

[Zulithe]

To be completely honest I use mostly custom material I made myself, or material made by WotC. I use very little material made by 3rd party publishers. Probably just out of habit, though. So, if the OGL didn't exist I wouldn't mind *THAT* much. However, there are a number of software apps (GMGenie, PCGen, Maptool and tons of others) that rely on the open license. And I couldn't live without some of these programs.

 

[Imban]

Maptool

I don't believe MapTool relies on an open license, because it relies on very obvious things from d20 only like "square grids with 1-2-1-2 movement" and "characters that can be 1x1, 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, or 5x5" in its default mode that would be... difficult to make a legitimate or even halfway reasonable copyright claim on, even if the d20 SRD was not extant.

For that matter, my friends used to play Warhammer 40k over MapTool, and that's certainly not open-licensed. Since gameplay mechanisms themselves aren't copyrightable, especially not in the sense of "options exist in the toolbox of options provided that match up to the ones needed for this specific game, but also many others", the only things that third-party virtual tabletops wouldn't able to legally support without a worry is some sort of proprietary physical mechanism.

And, well, HeroClix (and friends) are the only ones of those on the market that I can think of.

 

[Hussar]

Yeah, I can't see how open/not open is going to affect VTT's too terribly much. Fantasy Grounds, I suppose might have issues since it's so closely tied to 3e. But something like Maptool or OpenRPG are pretty much game agnostic. I can play Battletech on OpenRPG without any problems for example.

Besides, the DDI VTT is supposed to be system agnostic as well. They can't do that if the VTT is too tightly wound to 4e mechanics - ie only allow gridded maps for example.

 

[The Eternal GM]

In all honesty, I would prefer 4th Edition to be closed, just like I would have preferred 3rd & 3.5 Edition to have been closed. I know why everyone at WotC thought the OGL was a good idea, and I know why a lot of publishers and players like it, etc.

But, end of the day, I like my D&D to be D&D, and nothing else. The sheer amount of utter crap that got released over the past 8 years under the wing of the OGL leads me to think that I'd rather have done without. And I'm not likely to be convinced otherwise.

Pre-OGL, a lot of publishers would have had a hard time getting shelf space perhaps. But I've found it beyond me to learn another D&D-alike rules system... Yet have no problem learning a system that is unique to itself. Reading a non-WotC OGL book was like playing spot the difference half the time... "Oh, here's a tiny change, there's another... This hidden one is very important, etc."

Of the good games that did come out on the OGL (and there are a few great ones, don't get me wrong) I do feel that many could have or would have been done in some form of partnership with WotC, or could have happily lived on another system.

 

[Yair]

One could simply say, hey Wizards look at this:...
For every 500 possible buyers, do you want 307 actual sales, or do you want 461?

(heck, even if you presume we cant sway a single "not going" or "unsure', its still 428/500 instead of 307/500).

As you said, internet polls are very bad market research. I LOVE open gaming. But I seriously doubt if those numbers or anything like them would stack up in the real world. Most customers, I believe, don't even know what "Open Gaming" is. I sincerely doubt the numbers of sales lost will be substantial, and it is at least POSSIBLE to think that franchizing will have all the good effects and less of the bad effects on WotC's bottom line as compared to open gaming.

I love Open Gaming, both as a concept and for what it did to me, as a customer and member of the roleplaying community. But I don't think this makes a very compelling argumnet. At all.

[I voted that I'd buy 4e even if it's closed, BTW, which goes to show Mistwell's interpretation that all those who voted that way don't care about openess is not entirely accurate.]

 

[xechnao]

In all honesty, I would prefer 4th Edition to be closed, just like I would have preferred 3rd & 3.5 Edition to have been closed. I know why everyone at WotC thought the OGL was a good idea, and I know why a lot of publishers and players like it, etc.

But, end of the day, I like my D&D to be D&D, and nothing else. The sheer amount of utter crap that got released over the past 8 years under the wing of the OGL leads me to think that I'd rather have done without. And I'm not likely to be convinced otherwise.

Pre-OGL, a lot of publishers would have had a hard time getting shelf space perhaps. But I've found it beyond me to learn another D&D-alike rules system... Yet have no problem learning a system that is unique to itself. Reading a non-WotC OGL book was like playing spot the difference half the time... "Oh, here's a tiny change, there's another... This hidden one is very important, etc."

Of the good games that did come out on the OGL (and there are a few great ones, don't get me wrong) I do feel that many could have or would have been done in some form of partnership with WotC, or could have happily lived on another system.

BIG QFT.
I am not voting in this poll though because polls of this kind IMO do not hold the value they want to get -they are kind of irrelevant with their subject. What it shows is what some members of a particular community are thinking about it right now. And when time comes even for these people to purchase or not things could be 100% different.

 

[mxyzplk]

In all honesty, I would prefer 4th Edition to be closed, just like I would have preferred 3rd & 3.5 Edition to have been closed. I know why everyone at WotC thought the OGL was a good idea, and I know why a lot of publishers and players like it, etc.

But, end of the day, I like my D&D to be D&D, and nothing else. The sheer amount of utter crap that got released over the past 8 years under the wing of the OGL leads me to think that I'd rather have done without. And I'm not likely to be convinced otherwise.

Pre-OGL, a lot of publishers would have had a hard time getting shelf space perhaps. But I've found it beyond me to learn another D&D-alike rules system... Yet have no problem learning a system that is unique to itself. Reading a non-WotC OGL book was like playing spot the difference half the time... "Oh, here's a tiny change, there's another... This hidden one is very important, etc."

Of the good games that did come out on the OGL (and there are a few great ones, don't get me wrong) I do feel that many could have or would have been done in some form of partnership with WotC, or could have happily lived on another system.

Nobody's forcing you to buy the non-WotC products - what benefit to you do you see from having D&D closed? Fewer products to clutter the gaming shop when they could just have one bookshelf of WotC products and then - sell cards or something?

 

[Greylock]

Yea I would buy it if it were only 1st party. We usually do not use 3rd party publications since a lot of them tend to be immensely broken.

Seeing blanket assertions like this bugs the devil out of me. Overall, I've found some of the best and most creative materials to be third party.

And for what it's worth, WotC has given us some of the most easily abused supplements of them all. Vow of Poverty and such. And the third parties didn't give us "power creep".

 

[xechnao]

Nobody's forcing you to buy the non-WotC products - what benefit to you do you see from having D&D closed?

That now some publishers will focus more on innovation and quality instead of trying to make money by exploiting the D&D brand name? And thus we will see more improvement on the shelves?