The Chatty DM has a guest column this morning over at dungeonmastering.com on the concept of the OGL and its effect on Dungeons and Dragons, both in terms of the effect it had on 3E as well as the possible effect on 4E.
I don’t substantially disagree with anything Phil is saying there. However, I’d like to hone in on a part of the argument he sort of glosses over:
- The OGL, at its base, is a business document. It has little or nothing do to with role-playing itself, at least not categorically.
- The negative effect of the OGL on retailers, in terms of third party products, demonstrates a weakness in the current publication and distribution channels - business factors – rather than a problem with the OGL itself. After all, comic book retailers are able to bring in titles that don’t sell on a regular basis with little danger. An aggregative distribution company for third party OGL materials could, I think, both lessen the impact to retailers, and see more consistent distribution of third-party product. Any entrepreneurial gamers out there want to start a company?
- A glut of bad products should make consumers focus on a known quantity. If there were 100 different brands of HDTVs and 84 of them completely sucked, you’d turn to the remaining 16; many people would turn to the top company, fearing the demise of the other viable 15. Who does this hurt? The 15? No; they will see increased business from people who were buying the 84, or at least level sales. And it sure doesn’t hurt the consumer.
- I don’t think we need time to know which system was best for us as consumers, if not as gamers. Competition forces the cream to rise to the top, and that is what happened with the 3E OGL. Great third parties who made great products (Goodman, Monte, etc) stayed in business. Companies that made less-than-stellar products didn’t. And WotC got a huge recruiting ground and sandbox out of the third parties, providing them with additional resources, but also forcing them to put out quality product so as to stay in the market.
What’s the point here? It’s the same point I’ve been making to my friend who believes that 4E is going to be “New Coke.” I’m not a marketing expert, and don’t want to be when I grow up. I don’t have access to industry data to tell me how things are trending, I don’t have demographic data, I only have what I read on the Internet and hear from my friends. And that is the definition of anecdotal. Most of us really have no clue what will happen when 4E comes out. We might have hunches or hopes, but it is business acumen, not gaming insight, that determines how accurate those hunches or hopes will prove to be.
The point, then, is like I said above: the OGL is a business document. Its impact on the game has to be understood in terms of how it affects the market; any other impact is, likely, minimal.
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Great discussion on the business side of the OGL.
I don’t know if you’d consider buisness, but the actual setup of the OGL and SRD allow me to post things like variant classes and variant rules on the net in all legality.
Yes I know chances are low that Hasbro lawyers would knock at my door if the OGL didn’t exist and I still posted but it’s nice to know that I got Monte’s permission to borrow his sorcerer and create something with it…
Knocking down the (virtual) doors is exactly what TSR did pre-OGL (and pre-WotC). Of course, all this did was lead to more net books on the newsgroups and the company earning the moniker of T$R.
Being able to use the core material is, for non-publishing designers like us, a boon to conscience, if not a boon to practice.