Surely if the Wizards of the Coast bring out a 4E D&D that is not
compatible with the SRD it will just make it economically viable for people
to add character creation rules to the SRD and sell their own 3e PHB/DMG/MM
clones.
Game companies would also have an incentive to do their own SRD bug-fixes
and while certain companies might not want to be as co-operative as others,
enlightend self interest would push most publishers together.
*snorts with laughter*
Forgive me, David, but I just HAD to respond to this. Enlightened
self-interest would push most publishers together to adopt the same
bug-fixes?
It will NEVER happen. One of the "talking points" that had everyone excited
about the OGL was that we were likely to see a whole bunch of rules and
ideas, and the best ones would quickly be adopted and become "the standard"
among third-party publishers, and possibly among WotC/D&D play as well.
That never even came close to happening.
Why not? Three factors.
First, the OGL's "viral Section 15 - but nowhere else - credit requirement"
made it impractical to do so without creating ever-bloating Section 15's.
Second, publishers were very ambiguous with their OGC designations, making
picking out and reusing the OGC something of a legal liability minefield
that nobody wanted to brave. Why was this done? Occasionally out of
laziness, but I have to believe #3 below played a part as well...
Third (and in my view most importantly), too much OGC came along as
"crippled" - publishers, by and large, closed more than they opened
(especially closing down names of spells, monsters, etc.), making re-use
near-impossible... there are a multitude of reasons why this happened, but
in my mind, it boils down to most publishers simply not wanting to
contribute any more than they had to with the attitude, "if there's any
money to be made on my writing, I'd darn well be the one making it."
In other words, self-interest among many publishers killed the truly
sterling potential of the OGL to create a dynamic, legitimate alternative to
D&D. There was nothing "enlightened" about it. Forgive me if I don't share
your optimism that 4E will somehow cause a shift in attitude among
publishers of third-party material.
Everyone was so busy obsessing over protecting the little kingdom of
"Intellectual Property" that they had created that they failed to realize
it's usually not much more than a pile of mud and sticks that they were
protecting (and not worth much more, either... realistically, I would guess
that there are probably between half a dozen and a dozen third-party OGC/d20
publishers remaining whose Intellectual Property has a value that is above
four digits).
That little rant is not likely to endear me to anyone in the RPG industry,
but there it is. The uglier the truth, the truer the friend that tells it.
*shrugs* Oh well. I hope at the end of the day it turns out that you are
right and I'm not just a cynic. But honestly, I saw little "enlightened
self-interest" the first go-round, why should the second go-round - with
mostly the same players - be any different?
--Spencer "The Sigil" Cooley
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