Hi all!

I'm doing some research for the panel I'm running at Pax East next week ("What's Happening in Tabletop RPGs", for those who may be attending!) and I stumbled into this thread.

I'd like to make a couple of observations to maybe help provide a more solid foundation for some of your speculations.  It's been nearly 15 years since the decisions were made to do the OGL and d20, and a lot of the context seems to have been forgotten.

Let's rewind the clock to 1997.  That was the year Five Rings Publishing got the deal done to purchase TSR, brought Wizards into the deal, and that ended up with Wizards buying both TSR and FRPG.

That was a bad, bad year for RPGs.  TSR was essentially dead - it could not print any new products because it's printer had suspended its credit due to non-payment of past invoices.  TSR's financial picture was so bleak that no other printer would work with it except in a pre-pay situation and it had no cash, so it could not get any new product on shelves.  In the run up to the crisis in '95 and '96, it had stuffed its channels with backstock and no distributor and no book chain was going to take any more old product.  TSR had reached the end of its rope.

But TSR wasn't the only company in dire straits.  FASA Corp was also reeling - sales of Battletech/Mechwarrior had collapsed, and Shadowrun and Earthdawn were barely showing a pulse.  It had bet big on a new miniatures game, and that game wasn't selling.  White Wolf was also struggling.  It had created such a huge fragmented cloud of products and was trying to support a dozen games, all with slightly different variations on the Storyteller system, each creating a niche of a niche and making it hard for players of one niche to find critical mass - and sales of new products were a fraction of what their core books had generated.  Long time industry stalwarts like Chaosium, Iron Crown Enterprises, Steve Jackson Games, and GDW were all downsizing as sales across the board dried up.  Things were so bad that the GAMA trade show that year featured a number of industry insiders wearing black armbands to commemorate "the death of the industry".

I was asked to take over the reigns of the tabletop RPG business in late 1998 and the very first meeting I attended was a briefing by the head of RPG R&D, the MBA who was responsible for assembling a financial picture of that business, the head of marketing, and Peter.  I called that the "dirty diaper" meeting, because I was basically handed a bag of shit, and told by Vince Calouri, who was Peter's XO, "figure out what went wrong, and fix it".  TSR had come to Wizards with a non-functioning business.  Wizards' cash allowed it to clean up its financial house and get back into the business of producing RPG products, but even after a gap of several months (which you might think would increase expectation for new releases), the stuff it was making at that point was selling in the low thousands, and sometimes the hundreds of copies.

So in 1999 as we geared up to produce 3rd edition, we weren't just talking about how to increase sales by 10-20%.  We were talking about how, and maybe if, the whole business could be salvaged.

When we considered the competitive landscape we were going to ship 3rd Edition into, we decided that our biggest competitors were 1st and 2nd edition, not some non-D&D franchise.  Realistically due to the status of the market we knew that our only real chance for success was to introduce a huge wave of upgrades from older editions of D&D to the new edition of D&D.  There weren't enough people buying other RPGs to make it worthwhile to try and take marketshare from other games.  

We also knew that the market was structurally unsound.  For many reasons there were millions of people playing tabletop RPGs but we estimated the number of people buying tabletop RPGs in the low tens of thousands.  That much overhang was an indication that the market was fundamentally failing to deliver products that the consumers were willing to buy.  The industry had gone down various rabbit holes and was printing itself into oblivion.

So the OGL/d20 project was a part of a multi-pronged Hail Mary.  Absolutely horrific conditions are the only time a business will try insanely ridiculous strategies.  

I think it is inarguable that the strategy paid off.  If you had told retailers in 1999 that in 2001 they would be stocking their shelves with new RPG products from dozens of new publishers and that RPGs would triple or quadruple their sales, they'd have laughed you out of the room.  But that's exactly what happened.  And the transition from 2nd to 3rd edition was dramatically better than the transition from 1st to 2nd edition.  In 1989, when that 1e/2e transition took place, TSR sold 289,000 Player's Handbooks, in the full year.  In 2000, we sold 300,000 Player's Handbooks IN ONE MONTH.  By 2001, the tabletop RPG business at Wizards was significantly profitable.

People began publishing competitive Player's Handbooks almost immediately.  And predictably, none of them sold very well.  Why would a player buy a 3rd party book when they could get a "real" Dungeons & Dragons book which had the best production values in the industry?  The clones had no meaningful value to offer.  We even priced the core 3e books "insanely low" so that nobody could really undercut us on price.  The D&D brand held its value so well that when Wizards decided to do the 3.5 upgrade a full 2 years ahead of schedule, at a 33% price increase over the launch of the 3.0 books, the result was an even greater upsell.

But things went poorly after that high water mark.  The 3.5 transition happened too soon, and too suddenly, and was too significant.  A lot of 3rd party publishers didn't take it seriously and got caught short with inventory people didn't want because it was "incompatible" with 3.5, and the lead time to get their 3.5 products on shelves was long enough that cashflow starvation killed a number of publishers.  The MMO, which had been a curiosity gnawing at the edges of the market exploded after World of Warcraft, and sucked a huge percentage of the tabletop RPG player network out of their regular gaming groups, seriously degrading the network.  The knock-on effects to the economy from the dot-com meltdown, 9/11, and two wars, didn't help matters either.  People tend to overlook the fact that a lot of hobby gamers are military, and when they're on deployment, they're not shopping at local game stores, or providing a steady and predictable presence at game nights and conventions.

After 2005, the trend was really on an obvious downslope.  Despite numerous public statements that it wasn't working on 4e, it was obvious to many people that Wizards was prepping a new edition.  When they shipped it in 2008, Wizards told anyone who would listen that it was the most successful launch of a new edition of D&D in history.  So despite the fact that the OGL had been available for 8 years at that point, despite the fact that many people had made complete replacements for D&D, some of them very good, and despite the fact that Wizards had 8 years of experience in working with and around games that used the OGL, it was still able to tap a huge reservoir of good will towards D&D when 4e launched.

If 4e had been a game that players wanted, 4e would have been a massive success.  In my opinion, that's a very hard statement to argue with.

Everything that came after, especially the rise of Pathfinder, derives from the simple fact that 4e was not the game that players wanted.  I would further argue that it would not have mattered if the OGL had existed or not.  The near-death of TSR in 1997 showed that gamers don't just switch to another game system when D&D falters.  They just stop buying.  They just keep playing the game they already own.  The collapse of 4e wasn't because Pathfinder existed.  It would have happened regardless.

Pathfinder got lucky.  Paizo combined it's direct access to tens of thousands of customers it had from its time as the Dragon and Dungeon magazine publisher to address the gap.  Any number of companies - Fantasy Flight, Mongoose, Green Ronin, etc. could have addressed that gap.  Paizo just got there first, and had the advantage of that database of contacts to leverage, and when 4e stumbled, Pathfinder caught a break.

So Paizo didn't hurt Wizards of the Coast with Pathfinder.  Wizards self-inflicted its wounds, and would have sustained them in the absence of the OGL.

The OGL saved the D&D business.  It helped Wizards recoup a big chunk of the money it spent to buy TSR.  It made tabletop RPGs a meaningfully successful category again for retailers.  It launched the careers of dozens of designers who would never have gotten a toehold in the old industry.  Wizards hired some of those designers and directly benefited from their experience - including the guy running the 5e team, Mike Mearls.  Yes, Wizards certainly would like to live in a world where there was no Pathfinder RPG.  It would make 5e a much easier strategy to execute.  But there would not be a 5e if 3e hadn't worked, and 3e worked in large measure because of the OGL.

I basically agree with Ryan Dancey (thanks for that BTW, interesting read), except that while 4e's design was always going to alienate a chunk of players, I do think that if WoTC had stuck to the OGL or a generous GSL, the third party support from Paizo, Necromancer et al might well have been enough to push 4e 'over the top' and make it a success. 4e's design does have a substantial fan base (me included, mostly), but almost no one has much good to say about WoTC's published 4e adventures. Paizo and Necromancer could and would have produced vastly superior material; Necromancer '1e feel' is not a great fit with 4e, but Paizo in particular has a design philosophy that could have played brilliantly to 4e's underappreciated strengths - to me 4e seems a much better system for 'adventure path' play than 3e/PF, yet 4e has never had decent adventure paths published for it.

Edit: I guess there is the counter-example of Goodman Games - they put out  a large number of cheap & cheerful 4e adventures, generally superior to WoTC's stuff (not a high bar), but obviously they didn't sell well enough and GG soon abandoned 4e to do their own thing. Still, I think continued Paizo support could have taken 4e to another level.

Great post Ryan. Thanks for dropping by (i'd totally forgotten you were a member).

I'm always very careful to not say that 4e is a bad game.  Many people I really respect think it's an incredibly well designed game.  It just wasn't the game that the market wanted.

Awesome post by Ryan! Thank you for that insight into the factors which brought about the OGL!

Every time I hear the horror stories of no sales in the mid-late 90s, I wonder if I was the only one buying that shit, and buy it I did  I think I kept the AAFES bookstore in business all by myself.  But hey, I was overseas in the military with expendable income, so I bought just about every 2e product I could get my hands on.  Never actually played with most of it, but it was reading material when I was in the field.

Quote from: RSDancey;741115By 2001, the tabletop RPG business at Wizards was significantly profitable.

Which, I daresay, is the most important measure of success, as far as Wizards were concerned.

When OGL happened, I remember thinking that (a) it was an aggressive move to grow the roleplaying game pie, as a whole, rather than try to capture a larger slice of the existing pie, but (b) the OGL was overly generous/permissive and that, like the GPL (an open source software licence which, I'm guessing, inspired the OGL), once you let the genie out of the bottle, you couldn't put it back in.

Ryan - With hindsight, do you wish you'd made the OGL more restrictive?

Quote from: RSDancey;741126I'm always very careful to not say that 4e is a bad game.  Many people I really respect think it's an incredibly well designed game.  It just wasn't the game that the market wanted.

I know you've addressed this point in passing before, but how much of an impact do you think the collapse of the D&D Insider/virtual tabletop side of the 4E strategy had in the failure of 4E in the market? If DDI were solid and reliable and available right when the 4E products were coming out, along with a high-quality virtual tabletop product that provided everything that had been promised, do you think the market would have given it more of a chance?

My gut feeling is to say that it wouldn't have mattered - 4E, despite being good at what it does, was enough of a break from past precedent that it just didn't feel like D&D to enough people for the market to embrace it. Under another title it might have actually done better in the long run - it'd have lost the short term early boom of sales, but on the flipside it wouldn't have caught the heat it's caught for breaking so much from past precedent and it would be much easier for people to come to it without preconceptions. The clean break from backwards compatibility was so stark that it didn't feel like it made sense to call it the same game - the sheer amount of work you'd need to do to adapt a 1E/2E/3E module to 4E, compared to the work to convert an identical module from 1E/2E to 3E, is perhaps the most convincing demonstration of this.

Another question: one of the things which I found downright strange about the 4E launch was the weird debacle surrounding skill challenges. It felt like the team were came out with a patch almost as soon as the game came out - and then kept patching said patch, and never seemed (at least when I was still paying attention) to arrive at a version of the system they were happy with. That was frankly bizarre to watch, because surely if the system was so broken that the development team said "Oh god, there's absolutely no way we can ask people to live with that, we have to do a rewrite and put out errata ASAP", it should really have been caught in the playtesting process, if that process were at all robust or careful. I know you weren't responsible for anything going down in D&Dland at that point in time but do you have any insight into what was going on with the skill challenges and why they seemed so sloppily implemented as originally written?

Quote from: Sacrosanct;741133Every time I hear the horror stories of no sales in the mid-late 90s, I wonder if I was the only one buying that shit, and buy it I did  I think I kept the AAFES bookstore in business all by myself.  But hey, I was overseas in the military with expendable income, so I bought just about every 2e product I could get my hands on.  Never actually played with most of it, but it was reading material when I was in the field.

Heh!  Yeah, there were a few of us military folks still playing and buying the books/magazines at AAFES or other exchanges  

I had no idea what was going on in the background at the time, even when the TSR logo had changed to a Wizards logo on the stuff I bought.  I was really sad when I read the account of what happened to TSR.

Quote from: RSDancey;741126I'm always very careful to not say that 4e is a bad game.  Many people I really respect think it's an incredibly well designed game.  It just wasn't the game that the market wanted.

A lot of people I've talked to (many of them FLGS owners) said that if Essentials came out first, 4e would be a lot more popular and 5e may not even be a thing now.  Opinion?

Quote from: RSDancey;741126I'm always very careful to not say that 4e is a bad game.  Many people I really respect think it's an incredibly well designed game.  It just wasn't the game that the market wanted.

Thanks for jumping into the thread.

My contention that is D&D 4e is a well designed game that suffered from bad presentation. Not in the layout or the writing but what they choose to do with the system. It was a one note game (high powered fantasy) and that ultimately what ultimately made it a game the market didn't want.

And to add support to your statement about what knocks of the core books didn't gain any traction. Throughout the 2000's (and to this date) I travel around on company business periodically. I make it a point to stop in at the local game store and see what they got. When I started writing for Goodman Games during the waning days of 3.5e, I stopped to try to sell them on the books I was writing.

For most the answer was that selling third party products was tough, very tough. Retailer after retailer across the country told me that most of their customer were Wizards only. That most of were aware of third party material but they consider them crap. Combined with word of mouth, meant the only sure sellers was official wizards product.

Quote from: Warthur;741138Another question: one of the things which I found downright strange about the 4E launch was the weird debacle surrounding skill challenges. It felt like the team were came out with a patch almost as soon as the game came out - and then kept patching said patch, and never seemed (at least when I was still paying attention) to arrive at a version of the system they were happy with. That was frankly bizarre to watch, because surely if the system was so broken that the development team said "Oh god, there's absolutely no way we can ask people to live with that, we have to do a rewrite and put out errata ASAP", it should really have been caught in the playtesting process, if that process were at all robust or careful. I know you weren't responsible for anything going down in D&Dland at that point in time but do you have any insight into what was going on with the skill challenges and why they seemed so sloppily implemented as originally written?

A lot of 4e came out half-assed in June 2008; Skill Challenges are probably the most egregious example, but you also had the broken monster math where they could not do enough damage to threaten PCs at higher level; and 4e Monster Manual 1 critters often seemed to be from a different game - they didn't use the DMG math for damage and you had stuff like ogres and dragons doing 1e Monster Manual amounts of damage. A lot of the presentation in the 4e PHB was also poor, though the fundamental player-side structures were generally ok - that seems to have been were the focus of development was. The DM-side stuff like Skill Challenges was often just rough first drafts. The game wasn't really ready until 2010, when they settled on workable math (though monster hit points are still way too high - that seems to have been regarded as a core feature not a bug).

I think this is all explainable by the late (2007) cancellation of the original planned 4e 'Orcus' design, and a new design being rushed to publication at least a year too soon to meet a schedule that should have been abandoned. The contrast with 3.0 is striking - apart from Cleric 'buff' spells, 3.0 seemed to work fine out of the box, it had clearly been playtested (albeit within an AD&D mindset) and its major problems only emerged later as people got used to the system. Whereas 4e smacks you in the face with a wet kipper. It's a real bitch, maybe runs ok at 1st level if you can even manage to make PCs using the PHB (very hard until DDI) and don't use splats, but by 4th or 5th level the 4e that came out in 2008 is already breaking down horribly. It took me years and a lot of experience with the system to get it running smoothly. A lot of people just gave up.

Quote from: estar;741178Thanks for jumping into the thread.

My contention that is D&D 4e is a well designed game that suffered from bad presentation. Not in the layout or the writing but what they choose to do with the system. It was a one note game (high powered fantasy) and that ultimately what ultimately made it a game the market didn't want.

It's 'cinematic fantasy' - it's very closely modelled on Hollywood action movie tropes (almost like Feng Shui). It's designed to let you play Orlando Bloom as Legolas in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. So it's high powered in that sense.
But PCs even at high levels are actually very limited/low powered compared to high level 3e or pre-3e D&D; the casters most notably. The power gradient in terms of world impact is extremely shallow compared to all previous editions. There's no flying over enemy armies incinerating them with your wand of fireballs, if you want to fight an enemy army you had better set up something like PJ-LOTR's Battle of Helm's Deep.

Dancey:  (1) If your presentation is recorded, will you put it up online for others to watch after the fact?  (2) In your consideration, what was the impact of the MMO market upon TRPGs since WOW went online in 2004?

Great post Ryan. Its easy to forget how bad things were for RPGs on the eve of 3E. I remember feeling like D&D would be out of print and many of the local gaming groups were dying. Now witht he OGL, even if WoTC went of business tomorrow, the game will still be available.