On Apr 26, 2004, at 9:54 AM, jdomsalla wrote:
So, your snide comment aside, the only reason "busy"
publishers wouldn't be able to involve themselves would be from a lack of
desire; their "busy-ness" seems to allow them to qualify already, so how
much time-investment could there really be other than to ensure that there
is a place on one of the covers for the logo?
I have to ask: what have you brought to market?
I don't mean this as any sort of insult. It's just that even though I had friends working in gaming for years before I did, I found the actual work load of writing and then developing staggering - and at that I have advantages in not having to deal with a lot of the physical side of production or distribution. I do not exaggerate when I say that when you're putting out multiple products per year for multiple lines, it's never a question of getting everything done the way you'd like. It's only a matter of figuring out what you can leave as less than you'd like, because you _must_.
I also don't know how much experience you have of the gaming business before and around d20. Again, this is not an insult. One of the things that's not immediately obvious is precisely how contentious and bickering it is. I know that folks like Chris Pramas and Nicole Lindroos of Green Ronin, Mike Tinney and Andrew Bates at White Wolf, Matthew Sprange at Mongoose, John Nephew of Atlas, Patrick Kapera of Alderac, and others you'd need to make this kind of thing work have seen the cycle go by a bunch of times, and have attitudes that would seem cynical to people newer to the fray but are regrettably well anchored in a pragmatic assessment of the realities.
Note that none of these folks has found it worthwhile to standardize an open-content declaration for all of their products within a single company. They're all experimenting, evolving variations in response to the reactions past efforts got, and tweaking for all kinds of reasons. If the folks who have most interest in such things haven't converged on anything like a single usage or even two or three most common usages, that strongly suggests that there is no obvious commercial advantage to any one particular interpretation, and therefore little reason to surrender one's own judgment to someone else just because they find another approach more aesthetically pleasing or whatever.
Note too that, to put it mildly, these folks aren't all best buddies, nor do they have general philosophies of the relationship between their work and that of other OGL creators anywhere very close to each other.
It is possible to get antagonists together and get them to agree to a single standard even though it's not in anyone's obvious interest to do so. But it's hard. And precisely because all these folks have seen time and effort gone down the hole of doomed effort, I strongly suspect that many or even most of them would simply decline to try. They've all got better and more rewarding things to do with their effort - and also, at least in theory, lives to lead away from business some of the time. 60-80 work weeks are pretty routine for folks in their position, and that's dealing with essentials. Some of them are already committed to side ventures because they think it worthwhile and have no more energy lying around unattached, while others would just prefer to have a bit of life apart from gaming business.
An effective pitch would have to do all of the following:
1. Offer an informed explanation of why it wouldn't turn into a time sink like so many other basically good but impractical ideas, with reference to past failures (and even successes, if you can find some to point at).
2. Offer a clear and simple explanation of the commercial advantage to potential participants in going along with it rather than continuing to refine their respective individual standards.
3. Offer an equally clear and simple explanation of who would be dealing with existing antagonisms and new ones bound to develop, keeping themselves out of each fray, with standing to command mutual respect despite the disagreements, and demonstrably with the time and energy to do the work of mediation and administration.
It's not impossible, just hard. But it's what it would take to get the attention of these folks.
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