On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Faustus von Goethe wrote:
> Another concern with the "produce on request" model is when and how you plan
> to say "no".
We don't plan to say no.
> BTW expect that the day you announce a ref document that me (AND many folks
> less scrupulous) to be requesting it. Are you going to say "no"?
Actually I expect *you* to ask for it, but I don't expect very many other
people to do so.
Let's set the scene here. My background and the background of The Guild
Companion is not D&D, it's Rolemaster/Spacemaster/MERP/etc. The
backgrounds of our core writers are similar. Our core audience will not be
the D&D community. All these things bias the nature of our expected
product lines towards settings and scenarios and away from compendia of
monsters, feats, skills, spells, etc.
(Once you've written a Rolemaster Companion, writing new rules tends to
lose its appeal. Been there, done that.)
So I'm expecting the OGC content usable outside our settings to be
limited in quantity. (At least in the beginning - later products may be
very different.)
This doubtless raises a question about the "openness" of our settings
themselves. I can discern only two reasons why anyone would want to write
stuff in someone else's setting:
i) the setting is really cool - so it inspires folk to write in it
ii) the setting is really popular - so folk are swayed by the profit
motive or the glory motive (i.e. lots of fans will read my work).
Of course the more popular a setting is the more people will find it cool.
(Digressing slightly, I believe that most (D20/OGL) authors would rather
write about their own settings and worlds than use someone else's. End of
digression.)
Now either The Guild Companion will have a niche audience in which case I
don't expect many requests from OGL authors for our open content, or it
will become extremely popular whereupon the time spent answering queries
from OGL authors will be more than compensated for by the revenue
generated by our products.
Regards,
Nicholas HM Caldwell
General Editor for The Guild Companion
http://www.guildcompanion.com/
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