> 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.
Not at all. I think you are mostly right. You're probably aware of my take on "crippled" OGC--I dont buy in to all the claims, and I think that most people are just trying to do stuff the best way they knew how, but I know for sure that there were some publishers who were trying to hoard content. But you forgot another reason: 4. A lot of the third party stuff wasnt that good. And another reason: 5. There was too much of it. There was no good way to track who was making what to even rationally discuss what should be adopted as the standard. It was hard to sort through the noise of d20. Plus, there was no interest in actually selecting a standard. Heck, you had GR compiling everyone elses spells. You had Monte doing his "best of d20." That is as close as anyone came. And neither of those are good solutions. Simply compiling stuff isnt selecting what is good, it is just putting it all in a pile. And Monte deciding what is good, while I respect Monte, is hardly the voice of the whole community selecting the best content which is what you need for a "standard." You are right. I cant imagine anything about 4E that would make the above problem any better. "Enlightened self interest" is a nice dream. "Greedy begrudgingly minimal compliance" is the reality in many cases. Now, there are lots of exceptions. I like to think Tome of Horrors is an example of great sharing of open content. But even that product, as great as I (rather biased, I admit) think it is, wasnt exactly reused that widely. And I even put instructions in the thing on how to reuse the content. The bottom line truth is that there was very little significant reuse of OGC. Clark __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
