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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Eternal GM" data-source="post: 4142304" data-attributes="member: 52760">I just look at it like this...  What did the OGL really achieve?  A boom/bust for a couple of years, a lot of otherwise good games shoe horned into a rules system that didn't suit them, a few genuinely good games that likely would have succeeded without being part of the OGL or in some other form of collaboration with WotC.With the concept wasn't bad, the intentions noble and some of the response by publishers (many of whom did come to prominence during this time) it also opened a quite literal floodgate of utterly horrible products that filled gaming shelves in very gaming store I looked in.I know my opinion is mostly my own and not shared by a great many.  Online publishing allows any old Joe to put something out and call himself a rpg publisher, I know more than a few folks who do just that...  But the glut of pointless, ugly, stupid or just plain needless d20 books actually seems to hurt our hobby far more than it helped.  The books were confusing, often woefully imbalanced, quite rarely professionally done (or even close) and in the worst cases they were truly offensive articles designed to either fluff the ego of the 'writer' or merely to offend for its own sake.How is any of this to be lauded as a success?Mutants & Masterminds isn't a success because it's d20...  It's so far removed it may as well not be d20 and would have succeeded on it's own system or another.  Likewise most of the other few true OGL successes.  Other companies had good relations with WotC or would have been able to seek some kind of licensing for the rules if it mattered (Paizo, Necro, etc.) it would have cut out the penny publishers, who in most cases were only pitching their own house rules to a tiny audience anyway.I don't mean to come down hard on anyone here who is a small d20 publisher, in fact I hope most are honest enough to agree that they really don't own a niche in the rpg market space outside of curiosity or niche appeal.  There is some good stuff, but it comes pretty close to impossible to find amidst the junk, even now, long after the bubble burst.The 4th Edition license is more restrictive, which is good as I see it.  But also has divided those publishers who were waiting for it.  So that's fragmented the audience between those now making disparate 3.5 variants and those hoping to hop onto 4th Edition.Once again, is this good?  Honestly?</blockquote>

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