Thema: Mike Mearls über die OGL

[Wormys_Queue]

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.

Link

[Xiam]

Er vergleicht die OGL mit mit Open Source Software und beklagt dann, dass die OGL nicht ebenso erfolgreich war, wie Open Source Softwareprojekte? Das ist ein Paradebeispiel für den Vergleich von Äpfeln mit Birnen.

[TheRaven]

Naja, sagt er ja selbst aber erkennt dabei nicht, dass dies der Kern seines Textes ist und ihn damit überflüssig macht, sofern man bei Meinungen von "überflüssig" sprechen kann. Ich halte OGL auch für keinen grossen Erfolg aber immerhin für einen Erfolg und das ist doch schon mal mehr als die meisten solchen Vorhaben von sich behaupten können.

[Tobias]

Der will die GSL verkaufen. Wird er da wohl sagen, daß die OGL ein uneingeschränkter Riesenerfolg war? Oder eher typischen Doppeldenk-Quaksprech auspacken, der besagt, daß WotC natürlich niemals was falsch gemacht hat, daß sie aber jetzt trotzdem alles besser machen?

[Wormys_Queue]

Ich hab den Thread hier noch mal ausgegraben, weil ich zufällig über einen Thread auf den Paizoboards gestolpert bin, in dem es um das Thema geht, wie sehr Third-Party-Publisher (und wie sehr WotC) von der OGL profitierten.

Im ersten Post wird  Nicole Lindroos von Green Ronin zitiert, die auf die Behauptung antwortet, ohne die OGL hätte Green Ronin niemals existiert (Original-Post auf ENWorld:

I know Pramas usually posts here as the voice of Green Ronin but I find myself with a few things to offer today, if just for a little clarification.

Green Ronin was formed in early 2000 and our first product Ork! the Roleplaying Game was released in June of that year. We shortly thereafter decided to dabble in this "d20 thing" by planning out a couple adventures, adventures that went on to become the Freeport Trilogy, but when we made that decision the OGL and the d20 STL were completely untested. Make no mistake, we certainly benefited from the license and will never deny the impact that d20 had on the direction of our company but I think it's quite overstating the case to claim that we "wouldn't exist if not for the OGL."

Green Ronin's founders had more than 35 years of combined experience in the game industry when we formed the company, experience not only in roleplaying games but also cards, miniatures, magazines, board games, and more. Due to the enthusiastically favorable response to our d20 dabbling, you could say we were "distracted" from some of our other possible projects for a while but we did continue to work on other things, even during the height of the demand for d20 material. The Spaceship Zero Roleplaying Game and Faery's Tale Deluxe, the Torches & Pitchforks card game and the Walk the Plank card game, map books like Dungeons of Doom and Cartographica, or our recent non-fiction hit Hobby Games: the 100 Best. We've always had our fingers in things other than d20 products.

I've often seen people talk about how third party publishers failed to support WotC or D&D, something I think Charles Ryan first floated here on EN World back when he was still the D&D Brand Manager. Green Ronin published almost 100 straight-up d20/D&D support products without counting support for d20 Modern or D20 Future. My feeling is that WotC's expectation that unrestricted numbers of third party support companies could continue to endlessly support straight-up D&D in the face of the product glut and unending direct competition was unrealistic. The market was demanding more and WotC themselves were not filling those holes; it's utterly predictable that companies would expand out to fill those niches and strive to create products to meet fan demand (as well as differentiate themselves from their competition). That was no more a "betrayal" than WotC designing a new edition of D&D... it's the natural course of business.

While we are mindful of the role the OGL played in the development of Green Ronin, I personally don't feel we "owe our success" to it. We helped manufacture support for WotC's business according to the plan they offered and by doing so we received exposure for our company; it was a mutually beneficial relationship. Our success, on the other hand, was not granted to us from on high by Wizards of the Coast or any other Powers That Be. We competed, we worked hard, we made mistakes on some things and chose wisely on others and earned our success through our efforts. In the far less mutually beneficial climate of 4th Edition and the GSL, I am confident that we will continue to produce excellent work and find an audience for it, starting with A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying and any number of things beyond.

Im weiteren Verlauf (auf Seite 2 des Threads) spricht Mike Selinker über einige der Gründe, die mit für die Einführung der OGL verantwortlich waren:

Zitat von Chris Mortika:

Ryan Dancey didn't push for an Open Gaming License because he wanted be nice to small game publishers. He pushed for an OGL so that everybody would be using the same core mechanics for their games, and those core mechanics would just happen to be D&D. This was intended to be good for everyone, including Wizards.

Antwort von Mike Selinker:
A more accurate sentence is "Ryan Dancey pushed for an Open Gaming License because it would be good for Wizards."

The OGL was good for WotC vis-a-vis its extant competition in 1999 and 2000. D&D was on something of an even plane with a bunch of other RPG systems. We wanted to turn that plane to be much more slanted toward us. So by opening the door to many other publishers, many of whom didn't exist yet, WotC lowered the applicability of single-publisher systems. The goal was something which we occasionally called the Skaff Effect (after designer Skaff Elias, who quoted this old market principle first), which was summarized as, "All activity in a marketplace benefits the market leader most of all." So assuming we were the market leader, we could benefit from hundreds of publishers taking our market share, as long as the global market share expanded and the market share of competitive systems went down.

The situation today is that many of the publishers who helped increase that market share for Wizards are now serving as its competitors, including Green Ronin, Paizo, and others. The competitive system against 4E is now Wizards' previous system, one which cannot be removed from the marketplace easily. The only way to do that is through making vastly superior products and customer experience. Which is why I think it's a great time to be a gamer.

Mike

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