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Spotted on EnWorld.
Blog post: Has Open Gaming Been a Success?
With the posting of the GSL, I think it's time to look back at the past eight years and assess the impact of the OGL on gaming. I think the OGL had some successes and some failures. In the end, it failed to achieve the same type of success as open source software. In table top gaming, "open source" became a value neutral entry fee to gain access to the D&D mechanics. We never saw the iterative design process embraced by software developers primarily because RPGs lack easily defined metrics for quality, success, and useful features, a big shortcoming compared to software.
In essence, it's pretty easy to tell if a coder improved an FTP client. It runs faster, it has more useful features, it crashes less often (if at all).
The same can't be said about table top RPGs. In the end, the results were something like you'd expect if Lucas somehow open sourced Star Wars: 5,000 permutations and modifications of the foundational material, none of which achieved wide acceptance compared to the original but all of which were embraced by someone.
Successes
The PDF Market: PDFs benefited immensely from the OGL, as they gave publishers a big market to tap into. In addition, the design of 3e facilitated short, cheap, but eminently useful designs, exactly the sort of stuff that helped PDFs establish a foothold in the market.
Sharing: Even if designers didn't improve each other's design, as I talk about below, they did swap stuff back and forth. Admittedly, this sells short the true potential of open source (iterative improvements driven by end users), but it was at least a start. It's possible that sharing is the best that open gaming can offer designers.
Training: This is likely the most underrated aspect of the OGL: it allowed freelancers to better migrate skills from one company to the next. Good freelance RPG writers and designers are in critically short supply. Anyone telling you otherwise has low standards. The OGL made it more likely for writers to build and sustain a skill set useful to a number of companies. By extension, gamers saw better designed stuff come from designers who could spend a few years working on the same game.
Failures
Iterative, User Driven *What* Now? We never saw a sustained effort to improve the fundamental rules of D&D, and it's debatable that any such improvement would be embraced as such by enough end users. That's the key, driving component of open source in software: the people using the software improve it. All those thousands of people, combined, see and fix problems faster and more accurately than an isolated team. Improvements propagate quickly throughout the user community.
In essence, open source finds problems faster, fixes problems faster, and spreads those fixes faster. A "problem" could be anything from a bug (your FTP client crashes when you try to upload a file) to spotting a gap in the features offered by a program (your FTP client can't upload multiple files at once, and your users would love to add that feature).
The crippling problem for open gaming is that no one can agree on what problems need to be fixed, no one can agree how to fix the problems that have been agreed on, and publishers want to profit from offering those changes.
In essence, gaming ran counter to three of the biggest benefits offered by using open source.
There was a time when I pictured an active community of designers, all grinding away on D&D to make it better. I think that happened, but only in a fragmentary manner. Some people wanted levels gone, others wanted hit points fixed (with "fixed" defined differently for each group).
At the end of the day, most people wanted books of monsters, character options, and adventures. Products either stuck with the baseline or created a new baseline for a fragment of the original audience to then stick to.
And So?
I don't think it's fair to say that open gaming was a failure, it just took a different path in gaming when compared to software. The important thing is that it got people to think like open source developers and act like them on an individual scale, even if we didn't see the same network of successive improvements, bug fixing, and distribution.
I think that, in the future, we'll look back at this decade as the time that a broad community of RPG players formally took on the mantle of designers. Open gaming, the indie movement, and PDF sales have made it more possible now than ever for a good GM with a knack for writing to put together a book and get it out there for others to see.
The one advantage of open source that we did leverage was in recruiting a far, far larger pool of talent. We might never have agreed on what needed improvement, and we never did put that OGC wiki together, but there are more people today designing and publishing RPG material than ever before.
That alone makes it a success. Tabletop RPGs continue to survive (dare I say thrive without kicking off a 4e flamewar?) precisely because of their DIY nature. Open gaming made more people into designers and publishers, and that's a good thing for this hobby, because that's the key, defining trait of what makes RPGs what they are.
So, that's my take on it.
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Of course, it might be a bit early to decide whether or not it is a success or failure, seeing as Open Gaming is not yet at its end. The greatest thing about the OGL is that it will be around forever as long as people are there to support it.
As for improving the D&D rules, we've seen numerous attempts, and now Paizo is doing it with the Pathfinder RPG. And who knows what the future holds? If OGL gaming continues to be supported, we might see a fantastic version of D&D in a few years that is so far from 3.5 it seems almost like a completely different system.
Frankly, such things have already sort of been done.
True less, but I think Mearls point is that none of those changes ever obtained widespread acceptance. The OGL market is rather fragmented, with dozens of different game systems built off of similiar, but slightly different, core mechanics.
I mostly think he has some good points there, although he definitely had a different expectation of how the OGL would end up working than I did.
Cheers! :)
Edit: Forgot to say, thanks for the heads up Loc! Was interesting reading, and I wouldn't have found it otherwise! :)
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True less, but I think Mearls point is that none of those changes ever obtained widespread acceptance. The OGL market is rather fragmented, with dozens of different game systems built off of similiar, but slightly different, core mechanics.
I mostly think he has some good points there, although he definitely had a different expectation of how the OGL would end up working than I did.
Cheers! :)
Edit: Forgot to say, thanks for the heads up Loc! Was interesting reading, and I wouldn't have found it otherwise! :)
Very true, there is an abundance of different OGL games out there. I definitely see what Mearls was saying, and it makes perfect sense.
I just think that, unlike computer open source projects, open gaming will need some time to settle. Maybe 8 years hasn't been enough time. What I'm really anxious to see is what the Open Gaming scene looks like in 5 years. With WotC dropping 3.5 with the advent of 4E, I think we're going to finally start seeing some stabilization. I wouldn't be surprised to see a few pillars of OGL content, such as Pathfinder RPG and Mutants & Masterminds, for example, and many other companies supporting these 'pillars'.
If the Tome of Horrors is released for the Pathfinder RPG, that could be the beginning of the OGL that Mearls envisioned in this post.
But hey, it's 5 years! Who knows what'll be going on then? We'll probably all be wearing pants on our heads or something.
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Contributor
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I think it's a bit disingenuous to rate the success or failure of the OGL on how much the mechanics were developed/improved over the life (so far) of the license, for two reasons.
1) One of the stated design goals of the OGL was to reduce change, and keep everyone operating on the same page. The goal was to create a unified game experience, and make game comprehension transferable.
2) The largest player was still WotC, and they were never particularly interested in adopting any other company's material/system changes. They built upon their core, but didn't open those expansions to the OGL (with the exception of Unearthed Arcana, which they then didn't incorporate into their other products).
Truth be told, the OGL has only now been truly freed from WotC's imposed stagnation. The OGL may be a smaller segment of the market now that it isn't in bed with the 500 pound gorilla, but it is really just now about to realize its own potential.
IMO, it's just him taking another shot at pre 3.X people - both gamers and designers. He seems to be arguing that because no one re-invented elements of D&D under the OGL, that the OGL was a failure.
But people did reinvent, I think, at least as far as the OGL allowed. Monte Cook's alternate Players' Handbooks are a good example. IMO, both did a lot of reimagining what D&D could be within the OGLs rules.
He also seems to be attacking 3PPs (and in way WotC itself) for making what people want. What made OGL work was the fact you could get very differing interpretations of elements of D&D and pick the one you wanted.
I, for example, love gnolls as monsters and prefer Mongoose's version of them to WotC, so I use thiers in my games.
How many companies made a drow book? All those different books and takes on the race gave drow fans super amounts of options. OGLs been wonderful for the users of the system and met it's goals. And, I think, thanks to that horrid (for us gamers and 3PPs) GSL, it will continue to do so.
Personally, I'm suprised he's still allowed to talk. I've heard so many negative things from him that it nearly kept me from buying 4E. He seems to enjoy putting the smack down on anyone who is not a 4E fanboi and I'd argue he has a major role in the edition rift which has developed. Not as much as the horrid PR campaign, but a sizeable one.
Failures
Iterative, User Driven *What* Now? We never saw a sustained effort to improve the fundamental rules of D&D, and it's debatable that any such improvement would be embraced as such by enough end users. That's the key, driving component of open source in software: the people using the software improve it. All those thousands of people, combined, see and fix problems faster and more accurately than an isolated team. Improvements propagate quickly throughout the user community.
Well just curious, but what the hell was Mearls expecting? The d20 system is open sourse windows. It doesn't matter how much you change it or improve upon it, the crap sold by Microsoft is the standard. Green Ronin tweeked it greatly to suit their needs (and the needs of their fanbase). Does that mean that Wizards will use any of it, no. If Paizo had published their streamlined Grapple/Bull Rush/Sunder/etc system years ago, would Wizards have used it, no. So what's the point?
He's complaining that someone didn't make a change a few days later every gamer hasn't adopted it? There are still gamers playing OD&D. Things don't change in this industry as fast as software code. If software is his bar, that is unrealisticly high. Hell some describe 3.X as the pinnacle of 1980's RPG design.
He might as well have said, "The OGL was a failure because the largest 3PP are still 'insignificant' compared to Wizards." I think his bar for "success/failure" is way to high. The successes he mentioned are indeed successes and the OGL did infact earn them.
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IMO, it's just him taking another shot at pre 3.X people - both gamers and designers. He seems to be arguing that because no one re-invented elements of D&D under the OGL, that the OGL was a failure.
But people did reinvent, I think, at least as far as the OGL allowed. Monte Cook's alternate Players' Handbooks are a good example. IMO, both did a lot of reimagining what D&D could be within the OGLs rules.
Frankly, now that I think of it, this does seem somewhat hypocritical considering that he helped write one of those alternate Player's Handbooks.
His main point was that the market was spread thin, none of the improvements were ever generally accepted as an evolution of D&D, but that's because (as Rambling Scribe has already said) WotC was running the show when it came to the 3.5 ruleset.
Maybe Mearls is jaded because support for Iron Heroes was not as he'd hoped? ;)
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I concur with the comments on the idea of "OGL" meaning that it's supposed to be improved by all the users.
Changes weren't going to be incorporated into the SRD, naturally. So it almost sounds like he's saying that we were supposed to improve it. We didn't, so the GSL is what we get?
That might be too much of a nutshell summary. I never considered OGL to mean openly improvable, nor did I ever think WotC was expecting someone to submit changes to the ruleset. I accepted the SRD as WotC's system.
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Contributor
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I'm just going to throw something else out there. Comparing the OGL to Open sourse software has another fundamental flaw. When you change software, those changes interact immediately with whatever other software they encounter. When I institute a house rule, the stat-blocks in my adventures don't adjust themselves. The work of implementing and even keeping track of changes is not automatic, so it is a slower process with more resistance. No one wants to buy all new books to fix a few rules, but no one wants to do the modifications on the fly or as prep work.
Pathfinder as a system would have been much harder to sell if 4E had not been announced, and frankly Paizo probably wouldn't have proposed it. There are key moments when you can get away with implementing system changes, and they are few and far between.
Pathfinder as a system would have been much harder to sell if 4E had not been announced, and frankly Paizo probably wouldn't have proposed it. There are key moments when you can get away with implementing system changes, and they are few and far between.
Exactly. I didn't like EVERYTHING about the d20 system, but frankly, if I told my group (for the brief moment that I ran a game) that I was going to incorporate a non-WotC rule, they would have whined and bellyached that they had to buy something and read it. Heaven forbid. Hell they didn't want to spend the $2 to buy the player's guide to rise of the runelords. I even offered to buy it for them with my Paizo discount if they gave me the money, but they didn't want to do that. (mind you, they then whined and bellyached when they only had the player's guide on PDF).
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He might as well have said, "The OGL was a failure because the largest 3PP are still 'insignificant' compared to Wizards." I think his bar for "success/failure" is way to high. The successes he mentioned are indeed successes and the OGL did infact earn them.
Which would be funny because even when OGL was the standard WOTC, like all companies, was working to maintain their share of the market while trying to keep the other companies out of the market.It is the nature of the beast to do so. Since the OGL was designed so that you had to have WOTC products to play there was no incentive or ability to make the type of changes that they are now complaining did not take place.
Well just curious, but what the hell was Mearls expecting?
Mike very clearly says exactly what he expected to happen.
He expected a community of developers to form devoted to improving the basic game of D&D, not to developing multiple incompatable product lines.
He says it clearly, he thought people would look at what WotC printed, say "Wait, this part here is broken. We should fix it." And then as a community, develop a better way of doing things. Since the better way would be obviously better, most gamers would adopt the new rules as a standard way of doing things, and eventually the improved method would make it's way into WotC material and become the offical standard.
Exactly like what happens in open source software, where people figure out new and better ways of doing things ilke FTP, and the Microsoft adopts those standards into their software.
However, because no two people agree upon what makes a RPG better, this simply never happened. Just look at the open playtesting of the PAthfinder RPG. Some people want the skill list to become condenced and streamlined. Others want it expanded, adding new skills to cover a host of things. Some want skill ranks, others don't. No two people agree on the exact same system, and so there is no way to build a 'improved' version of the skills rules that everyone will agree upon.
Mike is not saying that Open Gaming has failed. He says right up front it has had several successes. It mearly did not do what he expected it to, which was unite the gaming community behind a single rule system.
That was always what the folks at WotC thought the OGL woudl lead to. A genearlly accepted and standardized way of playing D&D influenced by the community at large but unified.
Instead, we saw the exact opposite. The community fractured along product and developer lines.
Things like Mutants and Masterminds, Iron Heroes, TrueD20, Spycraft, and a dozen other systems sprang up. They are all excellent games. I love them and have bought books for all of them, but those books and systems are simply not compatable with the Core D&D system.
That is the reason behind the much stricter GSL, which enforces compatability by saying that you must use the rules in the core books and cannot redefine the rules into something other then what they are at the basic level. You can expand on the base system, like building a house on top of a foundation, but you can't change the foundation.
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Frankly, now that I think of it, this does seem somewhat hypocritical considering that he helped write one of those alternate Player's Handbooks.
So, if you're involved in the creation of something, it's hypocritical to later look back and consider that work to have been unproductive, counterproductive, or simply unsuccessful?
Obviously, Mearls' work on OGL material got his name out there enough to get hired by WotC. Perhaps he made the move purely for financial reasons, or perhaps because of exactly what he describes above: he saw that the community was not coming together, but was instead fragmenting, and he saw working at WotC the best way to see his ideas incorporated into the "core" RPG.
Or, hell...maybe he just changed his mind? There's certainly things I believed 3-5 years ago (or 6 weeks ago) that I'm not quite behind anymore.
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Nevertheless, I'm sure Wizards wants to maintain this use of the OGL as a test bed for new innovations to be bought & held exclusively.
It seems worth pointing out that the 6+ month delay in the release of the GSL is a strong indicator that there was disagreement at the executive level over exactly what open permissions would be granted by the new license.
Mearls did want to set up an OGL wiki. He's not anti-OGL.
Considering that Mike has written a fair share of alternatives, add ons for OGL, he has been part of the (his perceived) problem. Many of the d20/OGL systems did improve the game, given a certain set of parameters.
Example: Game of Thrones. The system was tweaked to reflect the harsh realities of a near-medieval world, where a swordstroke could indeed kill quickly.
What's wrong with that? It just ain't "heroic" D&D, the OGL supplied the OS, if you want, and that code was changed to suit the needs of the operator. I highly doubt that stuff like that does not happen in the computer business.
Without Mike's own contributions to "mods" so to speak he prolly would not be in the position he is in now...
He says it clearly, he thought people would look at what WotC printed, say "Wait, this part here is broken. We should fix it." And then as a community, develop a better way of doing things. Since the better way would be obviously better, most gamers would adopt the new rules as a standard way of doing things, and eventually the improved method would make it's way into WotC material and become the offical standard.
Exactly like what happens in open source software, where people figure out new and better ways of doing things ilke FTP, and the Microsoft adopts those standards into their software.
Things like Mutants and Masterminds, Iron Heroes, True20, Spycraft, and a dozen other systems sprang up.
Can't these be considered the very fixes you're talking about? While not everything can be incorporated from these into D&D, sections of each can certainly be added or used as influences.
Mike is not saying that Open Gaming has failed. He says right up front it has had several successes. It mearly did not do what he expected it to, which was unite the gaming community behind a single rule system.
That was always what the folks at WotC thought the OGL woudl lead to. A genearlly accepted and standardized way of playing D&D influenced by the community at large but unified.
Yes, because Pathfinder, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Freeport, City of Brass, Wilderness of High Fantasy are certainly not united behind a single unified rules system. Good point.
If you're expecting the WoD to role over and play d20, that's just unrealistic.
That is the reason behind the much stricter GSL, which enforces compatability by saying that you must use the rules in the core books and cannot redefine the rules into something other then what they are at the basic level. You can expand on the base system, like building a house on top of a foundation, but you can't change the foundation.
So let me see if I understand Mearls correctly. He's saying that because the OG community followed Wizards' wishes and assumed that Wizards' rules were the standard and did not "fix" them for Wizards, Wizards is removing the possibility of it ever happening again. Yes? Do I understand this correctly?
[sarcasm]
We kneel before Lord Zod
[/sarcasm]
He expected a community of developers to form devoted to improving the basic game of D&D, not to developing multiple incompatable product lines.He says it clearly, he thought people would look at what WotC printed, say "Wait, this part here is broken. We should fix it." And then as a community, develop a better way of doing things. Since the better way would be obviously better, most gamers would adopt the new rules as a standard way of doing things, and eventually the improved method would make it's way into WotC material and become the offical standard.
Exactly like what happens in open source software, where people figure out new and better ways of doing things ilke FTP, and the Microsoft adopts those standards into their software.
However, because no two people agree upon what makes a RPG better, this simply never happened.
It's not just that improvements are judged subjectively. In order to have an iterative development process, you must incorporate improvements made in those iterations. It's a progressive process. Aside from the 3.5 update and adding psionics and some Unearthed Arcana, what progress did the SRD (the code base as it were) make? As the keepers of the SRD, it would have been WotC's responsibility to incorporate the improvements and make it a real iterative process. They did not. Any failure of the OGL to meet with Mearls's expectations (and WotC's) can be laid at WotC's feet.
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Mike is not saying that Open Gaming has failed. He says right up front it has had several successes. It mearly did not do what he expected it to, which was unite the gaming community behind a single rule system.
That was always what the folks at WotC thought the OGL woudl lead to. A genearlly accepted and standardized way of playing D&D influenced by the community at large but unified.
Instead, we saw the exact opposite. The community fractured along product and developer lines.
Things like Mutants and Masterminds, Iron Heroes, TrueD20, Spycraft, and a dozen other systems sprang up. They are all excellent games. I love them and have bought books for all of them, but those books and systems are simply not compatable with the Core D&D system.
That is the reason behind the much stricter GSL, which enforces compatability by saying that you must use the rules in the core books and cannot redefine the rules into something other then what they are at the basic level. You can expand on the base system, like building a house on top of a foundation, but you can't change the foundation.
That's my biggest beef with Mearls' post, really. I think that what he calls the failure of the OGL (the fragmenting of the community) is, to me, its biggest success. Why should we all open products have to use D&D as its base? I thought most of these "fragments" to be a breath of fresh air, and it showed how powerful the OGL was in the first place.
I don't want the entire community behind a single rule system. Why remove choice? I can see why WotC would want that (it makes perfect sense, really), since these alternate games based on their system are not bring them any profits. And considering all the hard work involved in producing the d20 system, it's not unreasonable to seek such profits.
But the nature of the OGL that they released opened the gaming community, allowing anyone to design games. It led to a lot of garbage, true, but look at the gems! You named a list of fantastic products made possible by the OGL. I think many of us love these games. Sure, they're not D&D, but I think the OGL is better for gamers as a whole. And really, this is the primary reason I'm worried about the GSL. But that's another matter entirely.
So, if you're involved in the creation of something, it's hypocritical to later look back and consider that work to have been unproductive, counterproductive, or simply unsuccessful?
You're right that hypocritical might have been the wrong word to use there. In my defense, that entire post was sort of tongue-in-cheek.
I don't hate Mike Mearls, I just thought it strange that someone whose success came from developing an acclaimed OGL product is saying that the fragmentation of the community into diverse rulesets (which he had a hand in, let's not forget) is a failure of the OGL. As I mentioned above, to me, that's a success.
I love poop flinging as much as the next poster, but I just wanted to point out that Mearls only references the GSL in passing, and doesn't state that any of his thoughts had any bearing on how the GSL turned out.
Further, I'm not sure on this but I don't think Mearls's position at WotC really had much to do with the GSL anyway.
But don't mind me, just saying is all.
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Example: Game of Thrones. The system was tweaked to reflect the harsh realities of a near-medieval world, where a swordstroke could indeed kill quickly.
Yes, that is GOOODDDD ! (/drools) I love AGOT !
Aside from that, to me the OGL is a success for the very reasons that Mearls describes as a failure : it truly confirmed D&D (3.X) as the standard platform on which to build any possible fantasy universe.
I am EXTREMELY happy that using the same basic set of rules, I can game in FR, In PF, In GH, in Talistlanta, in the Iron kingdoms, In Arcanis, in Freeport ...
And I can mix and match everything I want.
And that's a very good incentive for me to never adopt 4e : I would never find the same richness, the same depth in it.
Yes, that is GOOODDDD ! (/drools) I love AGOT !
Example: Game of Thrones. The system was tweaked to reflect the harsh realities of a near-medieval world, where a swordstroke could indeed kill quickly.
Off-topic, anyone know whats going on with the book series? Did the fifth book ever come out/slated to come out soon? I guess I could look elsewhere but I'm lazy ...
Thanks! :)
Mearl's statement makes a pretty silly oversimplification of open source projects and ultimately skips right over the reason that the SRD never grew or changed, that being Wizards of the Coast themselves. And even the assessment that the core never grew is pretty absurd; what about Mutants and Masterminds, or True20, or Pathfinder? Or does it only count when it's WotC's D&D?
Honestly. These bizarre comments just give me headaches.
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Yes, that is GOOODDDD ! (/drools) I love AGOT !
Example: Game of Thrones. The system was tweaked to reflect the harsh realities of a near-medieval world, where a swordstroke could indeed kill quickly.
Off-topic, anyone know whats going on with the book series? Did the fifth book ever come out/slated to come out soon? I guess I could look elsewhere but I'm lazy ...
Thanks! :)
The last word from the publisher was Sept. 30th, 2008 for A Dance with Dragons.
Things like Mutants and Masterminds, Iron Heroes, True20, Spycraft, and a dozen other systems sprang up.Can't these be considered the very fixes you're talking about? While not everything can be incorporated from these into D&D, sections of each can certainly be added or used as influences.
I'll admit that parts of Spycraft, like some of the feats, are transferable back to the Core D&D game. I've done so in the past. But the game was designed as a significant departure from what the Core D20 system. You weren't supposed to use the Spycraft books with the main D&D game, not really.
Mutants and Masterminds is so radiacally different I don't know why they even bothered with making it D20. It would have been better as a whole seperate game system.
You can't consider them to be fixes to the D&D game because they are thier own game, seprate from the rest and based only loosely on the D20 system.
Mike is not saying that Open Gaming has failed. He says right up front it has had several successes. It mearly did not do what he expected it to, which was unite the gaming community behind a single rule system.
That was always what the folks at WotC thought the OGL woudl lead to. A genearlly accepted and standardized way of playing D&D influenced by the community at large but unified.
Yes, because Pathfinder, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Freeport, City of Brass, Wilderness of High Fantasy are certainly not united behind a single unified rules system. Good point.
If you're expecting the WoD to role over and play d20, that's just unrealistic.
I didn't mention Pathfinder, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Freeport, City of Brass, Wilderness of High Fantasy in my list of problems with the Open Gaming system because they are the Successes of the OGL. They all use a single unified rules system, and that's exactly what WotC wanted.
They didn't expect WoD to convert, they just wanted all the different campaign settings for D&D to follow the same system.
Think back to the way it used to be in 2nd edition, where each setting like Ravenloft had it's own rules and made such big deviations from the base rules that they were almost seperate game systems. Now, they all follow the same basic system. Sure, there mihgt be new classes or feats, but those all follow the basic D20 system. The things you've listed are the big success of the Open Gaming movement.
What I listed were the redefinitions of the base system itself. the super powers of Mutants and Masterminds just don't fit into the base D&D system, where the new gods and setting of Pathfinder and Golorian do.
That is the reason behind the much stricter GSL, which enforces compatability by saying that you must use the rules in the core books and cannot redefine the rules into something other then what they are at the basic level. You can expand on the base system, like building a house on top of a foundation, but you can't change the foundation.So let me see if I understand Mearls correctly. He's saying that because the OG community followed Wizards' wishes and assumed that Wizards' rules were the standard and did not "fix" them for Wizards, Wizards is removing the possibility of it ever happening again. Yes? Do I understand this correctly?
[sarcasm]
We kneel before Lord Zod
[/sarcasm]
Actually DM, you've gotten what I, and I think Mike, said backwards.
(Very good Zod reference by the way. Wel played.)Things like Mutants and Masterminds and Spycraft were the failures of Open gaming, while settings like Pathfinder and Freeport were the successes.
No matter how fun Mutants and Masterminds is, it isn't D&D, or even D20 Modern. Nobody claims that it is. It is a system all to itself, and while terribly fun to play, doesn't need to be updated so that it is based upon 4E.
Pathfinder, before the announcement of the Pathfinder RPG, was simply a setting. It followed all the rules of 3.5, and the things it expanded were true expansions not redefinitions like Spycraft was.
The GSL forces you to make only additions to the game, not radical changes to it. If you want to changes things so much that you get a game like Mutants and Masterminds, which uses whole new systems and radically changes what can be done in a game, then you should just print it as a seperate system not pretend that its somehow truely compatable with 4E when it isn't really.
That means we'll end up with a lot more well made Indy games, and the products which are written under the GSL will be fully compatable with 4E instead of just sort of compatable.
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I would listen to Monte's take on open gaming, or Reynolds, or Mona's before I listen to another word from a 4e designer. I'm confident that between the lines of each statement is a political message, or a defense. And there is no defense for what wotc is doing by trying to shut down the open game movement.
And as to the nature of making things better. Mearls is no clairvoyant to be sure; making things better does not always mean integration, or making things the same. Thats the type of cantankerous thinking wotc is known for... if it doesn't come from their ivory tower, it must not have high quality, or the community is failing to coalesce.
The Gamemastery line is thriving, and PAIZO is now leading the open game movement, albeit years later, because their work is high quality, as good-or better than wotc quality, and this company treats its community well. While Mearls may be "looking back" at something he thinks is over, he is nearsighted for sure because the open game movement is alive and well - thriving at PAIZO.
3.5 Never Dies!
PRPG Forever.
Mearls... stick a Varisian scarf in it.
The last word from the publisher was Sept. 30th, 2008 for A Dance with Dragons.
Sweet. I need to get around to reading book 4 then ... if only I can figure out where I put it ...
That's my biggest beef with Mearls' post, really. I think that what he calls the failure of the OGL (the fragmenting of the community) is, to me, its biggest success. Why should we all open products have to use D&D as its base? I thought most of these "fragments" to be a breath of fresh air, and it showed how powerful the OGL was in the first place.
I agree with you opinon about the various offshoot systems. They helped reinvigorate the gaming industry.
But they didn't fulfill the purpose of the OGL, which was to create a community of D&D products.
It's strange that the failure of the OGL gave way to an amazing resurgance of the gaming industry, and many new and fun game systems.
I don't want the entire community behind a single rule system. Why remove choice? I can see why WotC would want that (it makes perfect sense, really), since these alternate games based on their system are not bring them any profits. And considering all the hard work involved in producing the d20 system, it's not unreasonable to seek such profits.
Then, you can see why from their perspective it failed to live up to their goals. Mike isn't saying that it failed entirely and gave us nothing, just that it didn't go in the direction he imagined it would.
But the nature of the OGL that they released opened the gaming community, allowing anyone to design games. It led to a lot of garbage, true, but look at the gems! You named a list of fantastic products made possible by the OGL. I think many of us love these games. Sure, they're not D&D, but I think the OGL is better for gamers as a whole.
I agree whole heartedly. In the end, while it did not meet the goals WotC wanted it to, the OGL was a stunning success for the gaming industry as a whole. Mike even says that himself.
"The one advantage of open source that we did leverage was in recruiting a far, far larger pool of talent. We might never have agreed on what needed improvement, and we never did put that OGC wiki together, but there are more people today designing and publishing RPG material than ever before.That alone makes it a success. Tabletop RPGs continue to survive (dare I say thrive without kicking off a 4e flamewar?) precisely because of their DIY nature. Open gaming made more people into designers and publishers, and that's a good thing for this hobby, because that's the key, defining trait of what makes RPGs what they are."
So in way we all agree that while from the WotC perspective OGL did not do what they wanted, it has been a great thing for the community as whole. I've added the emphasis, but Mike says it right there. the Open gaming movement didn't do what he thought it would do, but it is a success for what it did do.
And really, this is the primary reason I'm worried about the GSL. But that's another matter entirely.
This is what bothers me so much about people railing against the GSL. The OGL isn't going away. All those great systems I mentioned as failures from WotC perspective will live on long past the end of 3.5 and will continue to enrich the gaming industry.
What the GSL will do is fulfill WotC's goal of having a community of developers writing new and exciting things for the D&D game, while the perpetual nature of the OGL will allow the games which broke away from D&D to continue uninterupted.
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Alright, so we're on the same page here. I still don't think that the OGL failed because it didn't completely fulfill it's original purpose (of course, it did fulfill that purpose to some degree, almost all OGL products use the D&D 3.5 rules as a base, there are just a few exceptions). I think that it just outgrew its original purpose. But at this point, I think I'm arguing semantics, we're both saying basically the same thing, heh.
This is what bothers me so much about people railing against the GSL. The OGL isn't going away. All those great systems I mentioned as failures from WotC perspective will live on long past the end of 3.5 and will continue to enrich the gaming industry.
What the GSL will do is fulfill WotC's goal of having a community of developers writing new and exciting things for the D&D game, while the perpetual nature of the OGL will allow the games which broke away from D&D to continue uninterupted.
I know the OGL will live on. And I totally understand why Wizards wanted to tone back the GSL to not be as open as the OGL was. This is not a big surprise, and if I were in their shoes, I would do the same thing. However, they radically went from one end of the spectrum to the other, from entirely open to practically closed. Although not a closed license, most 3rd party companies would be foolish to sign onto this GSL, they'll have to seek out private deals with WotC, or suffer from having no control over the future of their product.
That's the shame of the GSL. There is so much potential to expand upon 4th Edition that will be lost because 3rd parties will be reluctant to sign on. Of course, time will tell for sure, but unless there is a revision to the GSL, I can't see anyone in their right minds signing onto the GSL without some form of compromise in writing from WotC. I think a slightly less strict GSL would have fostered growth in the D&D game without going too far from the roots as the OGL eventually did.
Comparing pad and paper RPG'd to computer programs is like comparing apples and hand grenades. While gamers come together in online forums to discuss the thegame, when they game is actually played, it's played in small groups (usually) away from the computer. I mean, let's be real. It would be almost impossible for gamers to agree on the same set of 'house rules' even for one problem let alone every little thing that needs tweeking in the system. To imply that it was ever possible is either hoplessly optimistic, or very naive.
What the OGL succeded in doing was draw more people into gaming because of a wider variety of systems, settings , and play styles. It broke the tired stranglehold held over the industry by TSR/ Wizards & Whitewolf. It allowed the game to put out content for any gamer, whether they are a newbee learning to play as a child or one of us old Grognards who wanted something dark, gritty and definatly not for children.
What WotC didn't expect was that once it was open, they would have to work harder to compete with an exploding industry that they helped create. The bad news is that the Genie's out of the bottle and it will be a near impossible fight to put it back in.
Teiran, I think you (and Mearls) are confusing the OGL with the d20STL. The OGL was not and never was designed to create a single unified system. That's the d20STL's job. The OGL was designed to simply be a way to allow for ideas (and text) to be shared. The d20 license said that Supplement A works with the d20 rules. The OGL was designed for fragmentation, because that's what you get when you give people choices. The d20STL narrowed those choices to a single standardized ruleset. The Great RD even commented that you could include chargen info and change rules if you do not use the d20STL (paraphrased).
That's how the OGL/d20STL relationship was designed to work. The real failure is that companies stopped seeing value in the d20STL because WotC used it for D&D/d20modern/d20future and companies relied on their own name recognition rather then the compatability license. I certainly would call the d20 license a failure.
That means we'll end up with a lot more well made Indy games, and the products which are written under the GSL will be fully compatable with 4E instead of just sort of compatable.
Now I know you're not understanding something here. The whole point of the GSL is to prevent indy games from being spawned from the 4E rules. You CAN'T make your own 4E derived games under the GSL and making your own settings are discouraged (since you can never do anything with that setting again once the GSL expires). The most common product you'll see under the GSL is Goodman Games-type adventures, the kind that can take place in any setting and have nothing to do with each other.
I didn't mention Pathfinder, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Freeport, City of Brass, Wilderness of High Fantasy in my list of problems with the Open Gaming system because they are the Successes of the OGL. They all use a single unified rules system, and that's exactly what WotC wanted.Except that most of thse games aren't even open gaming. They're licensed or owned products by WotC. That's a lot like saying 2nd edition Forgotten Realms is proof of OGL's success, or that the original Dragonlance was proof of OGL's success.
You see, no one ever said, up front, that 'the only way for OGL to succeed is that all you guys use the system as WotC wants it, exactly as they want it, and just write fluff'. Yet that seems to be the standard you wish to set now.
Vance, most of those products are open gaming.
Wilderness of High Fantasy was produced by White Wolf,City of Brass was written by Necromancer Games,
Pathfinder by Paizo,
and Freeport by Green Ronin.
Only Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Eberron are WotC properties.
And all of those products are based upon the standard D20 system presented in the Player's Handbook, not upon radical departures from it like Mutant's and Masterminds is.
These are exactly the kind of products that WotC expected to be produced under the OGL. The OGL itself clearly shows that, since you were not allowed to rewrite the charater creation rules. They very clearly expected that the products produced under the OGL would be designed so that people would buy the core books at least and then could buy any 3rd party product they wanted.
And no, nobody expressly said that this was the Only way to use the OGL. They just expect that would be the way it would happen, and got something very different instead.
Now I know you're not understanding something here. The whole point of the GSL is to prevent indy games from being spawned from the 4E rules. You CAN'T make your own 4E derived games under the GSL and making your own settings are discouraged (since you can never do anything with that setting again once the GSL expires). The most common product you'll see under the GSL is Goodman Games-type adventures, the kind that can take place in any setting and have nothing to do with each other.That means we'll end up with a lot more well made Indy games, and the products which are written under the GSL will be fully compatable with 4E instead of just sort of compatable.
DM, that's my very point. Indy games are games are things like Spirit of the Century, games with their unique system not based upon D20.
Because you cannot create anything 4E derived games under the GSL you will have to create your own game system, and thus improve the pool of Indy games.
Goodman Games-type adventures aren't Indy games, they're D20 games.
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There was a time when I pictured an active community of designers, all grinding away on D&D to make it better. I think that happened, but only in a fragmentary manner. Some people wanted levels gone, others wanted hit points fixed (with "fixed" defined differently for each group).
Sounds a lot like what Paizo is facilitating right now with Pathfinder.
The problem with the SRD was that there wasn't really a way to get people's fixes into the official rules, unless you worked for WotC. What Paizo has created is a forum for the 'community of [armchair] designers' that Mearls talks about. Granted, Jason et. al. will still be the final judges of what makes it into the new rules and what doesn't, but the Pathfinder open playtest is a lot closer Mearls' ideal.
And maybe that's the way it has to work. WotC started something pretty cool with the OGL. Now they've walked away from it. And that's good - I think - because it couldn't evolve freely while WotC was in charge of it. And it couldn't evolve without an edition change. The question is whether the OGL can continue to exist or even thrive now that it has truly been given over to gamers. The success of Pathfinder may be exactly the metric that Mearls was looking for.
Teiran, I think you (and Mearls) are confusing the OGL with the d20STL. The OGL was not and never was designed to create a single unified system. That's the d20STL's job. The OGL was designed to simply be a way to allow for ideas (and text) to be shared. The d20 license said that Supplement A works with the d20 rules. The OGL was designed for fragmentation, because that's what you get when you give people choices. The d20STL narrowed those choices to a single standardized ruleset. The Great RD even commented that you could include chargen info and change rules if you do not use the d20STL (paraphrased).
That's how the OGL/d20STL relationship was designed to work. The real failure is that companies stopped seeing value in the d20STL because WotC used it for D&D/d20modern/d20future and companies relied on their own name recognition rather then the compatability license. I certainly would call the d20 license a failure.
No, I know there's a difference. But that difference has been come moot over time for exactly the reasons you point out. People have published games which were fully D20 compliant under the OGL simply because they didn't want the stigma D20 obtained, and many games were printed under D20 that wern't designed to be used with the core game.
Spycraft had that pretty D20 logo on it, yet didn't conform at all to what the basic game was like. You couldn't use any of the core classes in the setting, or transport most of the new rules back to the main game. Compatability was close to nill, outside of a few feats.
Mutants and Masterminds is OGL now, I'm sure of that, but I don't remember if it always was and since I'm not at home I can't check my first edition book. (I suspect it always was OGL.)
The d20STL has definitly been a failure, because it did not in anyway keep the communty from fragmenting.
The OGL was designed for folks to share and combind their ideas, yes, but it was still designed with using the three core books in mind. I don't think it was ever meant to produce systems like M&M. I'm quite glad that it did, but it wasn't meant to.
Because you cannot create anything 4E derived games under the GSL you will have to create your own game system, and thus improve the pool of Indy games.
I don't see how these two things are related in any way. And I'm not saying that Goodman Games are Indy Games. I'm saying that Goodman Games-type adventures are the ONLY products you'll see under the GSL. Dreamscarred Press said they will not make their all psionics setting under the GSL. They want to be able to publish material for it after the GSL is pulled. You won't see the Tome of Horrors converted over to 4E since Clark wants to be able to sell those books forever on (mind you, clark did say that they will make a monster book, but I'm betting all those monsters will be completely new). You're not going to see 3rd party alternate take on the cleric since that is forbidden. Alot of things that the d20/OGL encouraged are discouraged under the GSL.
4E sickness is worse then Elven Cancer.
Because you cannot create anything 4E derived games under the GSL you will have to create your own game system, and thus improve the pool of Indy games.I don't see how these two things are related in any way. And I'm not saying that Goodman Games are Indy Games.
Here's why it will improve the pool of Indy games.
If somebody wants to create a new game, they won't be basing it on 4E. They'll make their own system. A new game like Spycraft won't be a mutation of D20, with numerous problems because the base system doesn't quite fit the setting and goals of the game. Instead, it will have it's own system designed for it, and will be able to really shine.
If somebody wants to create a new game, they won't be basing it on 4E. They'll make their own system. A new game like Spycraft won't be a mutation of D20, with numerous problems because the base system doesn't quite fit the setting and goals of the game. Instead, it will have it's own system designed for it, and will be able to really shine.
[silliness]It sounds to me like you're saying that 4E sucks and any game that is based on it is going to be a "mutation" and will have lots of problems.