Quote from: John Morrow;420804Yes, but the question that the board of a company like Hasbro that owns WotC and the D&D trademark are going to ask is how much does Linus Torvalds make off of Linux and how much does WotC/Hasbro make off of d20?  From a charitable perspective, it's nice if other people make money off of d20 but Hasbro isn't a charity.  Had it panned out that the OGL grew the D&D audience to the benefit of Hasbro, I'm sure they would have stuck with the OGL.

I am sure people like Linus Torvalds has a day job to pay the bills and projects like Linux are done on the side.

Quote from: Daedalus;420810I am sure people like Linus Torvalds has a day job to pay the bills and projects like Linux are done on the side.

The problem is that Hasbro isn't doing D&D "on the side".  It is their day job.

Quote from: Daedalus;420810I am sure people like Linus Torvalds has a day job to pay the bills and projects like Linux are done on the side.

Which is the response that Hasbro will not want to hear.

Quote from: Aos;420721and only BRP purists think that CoC d20 was a disaster.  I don't even like d20, and I can see the excellence of it.

I agree completely. BRP CoC is one of my absolute favorite systems/games, and I'm still very fond of the D20 version. Very nice looking book, well written and with a lot of new and good ideas.

Quote from: ggroy;420715Call of Cthulhu, Traveller,

Wow. You're the first person I've seen lump these in as being bad adaptations/system not fitting the subject. CoCd20 is pretty fantastic (and I'm a fan of the original from way back), and the campaign I played in was damned fun. Traveller d20 (or T20), while not as highly praised, was not a bad iteration of the game.

Quote from: DKChannelBoredom;420832I agree completely. BRP CoC is one of my absolute favorite systems/games, and I'm still very fond of the D20 version. Very nice looking book, well written and with a lot of new and good ideas.

And it ran really well. Matter of fact, the d20 level system actually helped enhance the horror - I think we were 7th/8th level by the time we got to the climax of the "Beyond the Mountains of Madness" campaign our GM ran. Our biggest scare before then had been from a pack of sled dogs; when we actually confronted Mythos critters, we suddenly saw that our levels that we'd so laboriously accumulated since the dog confrontation were worse than useless, as they'd given us a false sense of security.

Quote from: Daedalus;420707That guys is a wackjob.  No wonder he is still single.  Using all of that free software to hobble together what you need sounds like it wastes more of your time because it takes longer to do things.

Me, I am happy to pay for software and keep people employed

People like him don't surprise me, since the rise of the internet the "freeloader culture" has become a problem.  Everyone thinking that everything should be free, the problem is in the real world that doesn't work so well.

Wow.  You have no real idea how the internet works, do you?

Quote from: ColonelHardisson;420776And another part of the problem was that many shop owners, for various reasons, didn't do much research into which companies were producing shit, and ended up not stocking much of anything d20 after trying to stock everything for the first year or two. I commonly saw shitloads of those FFE hardbacks and the endless Mongoose class and monster books crowding shelves of the shops I frequented, while the higher-quality stuff like that of Green Ronin and Necromancer was lost in the shuffle. I recall discussing the relative quality of this stuff, but the shop owners I spoke to either didn't care or didn't put much weight in my opinion, or both.

Yeah, this. A lot of stores don't put enough effort into market research that would actually be cheap and effective; instead, they base their decisions on general trends and personal biases. It is not even specific to game stores - just on the street I live, I could mention maybe half a dozen bakeries in the last five years that tried to compete with chain stores by offering mass produced goods instead of going for high quality at slightly higher prices; as well as two deli stores that failed because they didn't restock stuff that sold well while they wasted funds and shelf space on stuff that didn't. These are typical small business mistakes.

Besides, a number of producers were rather successful in the 3.5 period: Goodman and Paizo built their businesses on the adventure module niche which was neglected by publishers going after the sourcebook market. They might not have had sales like in 2000, but they seemed to be doing well enough to sustain themselves.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;420713Had D&D (TM) been killed off in 1997, the retro-clone movement might have started a decade earlier.

You are soo right...

QuoteGamers like to create game material. d20's OGL channeled the creative urges of gamers, it did not make them creative.

Also true. But it not only channeled the creativity, it showed that it was legally possible to make the results of their creative urges public, with a hint of a chance to make buck from it.

Quote from: John Morrow;420804Yes, but the question that the board of a company like Hasbro that owns WotC and the D&D trademark are going to ask is how much does Linus Torvalds make off of Linux and how much does WotC/Hasbro make off of d20?  From a charitable perspective, it's nice if other people make money off of d20 but Hasbro isn't a charity.  Had it panned out that the OGL grew the D&D audience to the benefit of Hasbro, I'm sure they would have stuck with the OGL.

WoTC is the original copyright holder and has only released one OGL product. A better example is Paizo.

As for Linus Torvalds his works at the Linux Foundation on Linux full time. He is a millionaire as two Linux companies (Red Hat and VA Linux) presented him with stock options that were worth a considerable amount of money.

There are a handful of companies that make a lot of money directly of Linux. But there are countless others that use it as a foundation for their software or hardware. For example many routers have Linux as their core. I know of several motion controllers that have their central processor running on Linux inside the card.

Like with the same for d20 more companies and authors use it as a foundation for their own work than make money off it directly. The value of open source isn't just the product directly but also in the other products it's spawns off.

Without Open Source it stifles creativity and innovation as original copyright holders put various limitations on their works. More important even if the original copyright is receptive there is the work involved trying to secure permission for anything new while with open source you can just get on with it.

I don't think d20 was good for the industry; I think d20 plus the revocation of the license was good for the industry. d20 functioned as training wheels, and the revocation forced the qualified publishers to set out on their own. While GMS was doing tons of d20 material, eh, that was nothing special. Now that he's had to set out on his own, he's done Icons, which isn't perfect but it's more interesting than Yet Another Pulp D20 Class.

But that's not the really interesting thing about that post. The really interesting thing is the strong implication that Ryan cares more about the industry than the company he's working for. The OGL was bad for WotC, and it would have been bad even if they'd used it for 4e -- the market for a 3e clone would still have been there and Paizo would still have picked up the banner. Ryan's post talks a lot about how good the OGL was for gaming as a whole, and not at all about the benefits for the company that was paying his salary.

You gotta be careful when you hire someone who styles himself a visionary. He'll wind up trying to set up a structure that prevents you from going in a direction he dislikes. Or give you Rolling Thunder. One or the other.

Quote from: Daedalus;420735Disagree with this. With electronic publishing becoming more and more popular they would eventually have come out. Maybe instead of D20 using a system that was a better fit for it.

Not necessarily.  It's a lot less work to create just the piece that you care about, such as a new magic system, and say everything else is just like the default than it is to create everything from scratch.  Many of the D20 products were made by D&D players for D&D players to enhance D&D; without the OGL, there would have been no point.
 
Regarding the D20 glut, it's easy to forget that 3rd ed. and D20 probably tripled rpg sales for several years prior to creating a month or two of unsold product when things dropped.  It's like hating the goose that lays golden eggs just because it crapped on your carpet.   Much of the downfall was also due to the arrival of 3.5.  Few people wanted to buy 3.0 products despite the fact that the changes were miinor.  On the other side, companies that published stuff a few months prior weren't up to retool books that would then sell 10% as much as a brand new book.
 
There were several misthought products though, especially when made by people trying to cash in even though they didn't like D20 and never learned it very well.  It showed in their products.

Quote from: Thanlis;420882The OGL was bad for WotC

I don't think anyone has the data to say categorically that the OGL was bad for WotC. Many of the benefits the OGL provided were ancillary and would be difficult to quantify, which is not to say that they did not exist.

My group was basically the poster child for OGL benefits: from 2000-2008 we played a wider range and variety of games than we ever had before, and the one common denominator was that they were all powered by the d20 engine. And while we bought a lot of non-WotC products, all of these games reinforced our commitment to the d20 system, and because of this we ended up playing a ton of D&D and buying much more WotC product than we would have otherwise.

But since WotC abandoned the OGL? We've played a little 4e, a little Pathfinder, and a lot of 3.5e and Mongoose Traveller -- the last, ironically, a non-d20 game produced under the OGL.

Quote from: Thanlis;420882The OGL was bad for WotC, and it would have been bad even if they'd used it for 4e -- the market for a 3e clone would still have been there and Paizo would still have picked up the banner.

I think you're flat-out wrong here. WotC created a significant competitor in Paizo not because of the OGL, but because they did not understand and did not value the benefits of partnering with other companies. Remember, Paizo formerly produced most of its 3e game products under an exclusive license and not under the OGL.

The Paizo/WotC partnership should have been a model for 4e since it worked so well for 3.5e. Paizo revivified Dragon and Dungeon , two magazines WotC was unable to run itself, and by producing excellent material directly increased the value of WotC's intellectual property.

Even if WotC was committed to abandoning the OGL for 4e, they could have still brought Paizo along for the ride as an exclusive licensee for adventures or something similar. Such an arrangement probably would have been better for everyone: WotC, Paizo, and the fans.

In this scenario, would someone else have picked up the gauntlet and tried to make their own Pathfinder/3e clone? Almost certainly. But they also wouldn't have had anything close to the market position and support that Paizo did.

Instead, WotC decided to go it alone.

Quote from: John Morrow;420822The problem is that Hasbro isn't doing D&D "on the side".  It is their day job.

I don't disagree and I know it is their day job.  Which is why I found giving away the OGL a weird thing.  The fact that they want away from the OGL for 4.0 means they were losing money from it and wanted to patch the hole regarding the OGL.

Quote from: StormBringer;420840Wow.  You have no real idea how the internet works, do you?

I know exactly how the internet works.  I also know Free doesnt work and not having a revenue stream doesnt work.

Which is why the dot com bubble burst and why so many sites (such as Hulu, etc) are moving towards pay walls.

And yes, I know that many servers are running on a free version of Linux.  So don't tell me that I don't know how the internet works.