[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I can't believe you think that most RPG systems exist because people
> couldn't
> get licensed access to D&D.
you don't? You *have* read Ryan's interview, especially where he talks
about the "Theory of Network Externalities" (or however that's spelled.)
> There are plenty of systems which exist not only
> to cover different genres, but also because many people were dissatisfied
> with the mechanics of D&D. The fact that they had any market success
> at all
> is because consumers were willing to purchase them; because they
> wanted them.
> You can say that people would have rather had each genre in the D&D
> system
> but that ignores the fact that TSR released many genres (Top Secret, Star
> Frontiers, Gamma World, etc.) using the same basic system but other games
> continued to be made and bought.
I'd say that's more due to TSR's poor buisness practices, and the
creative *settings* of the other games, than anything else.
And according to the theory, different game systems *which don't have a
good reason to be different* are bad for RPGs as a whole. It's great
that, for example, GURPS is different than D&D. It's not so great that,
for example, that any Tolkien-based RPG can't use the D&D rules.
> The OGL may solve a lot of the problems we all face (publishers and
> players
> alike) but ignoring the idea that there are people who want some
> diversity in
> systems doesn't help. The OGL shouldn't just be about d20, and the
> idea that
> the OGL will eliminate all other systems by opening access to the d20
> system
> is just wrong. While d20 will help the OGL become established,
> ultimately
> the success of the OGL must be independent of d20 because ultimately
> d20 is
> not the perfect system.
The OGL won't eliminate other systems. It will eliminate *unncecessary*
systems.
And the OGL *isn't* just about d20--it's only that d20 is the only
significant system relased under it at the moment.
DM
P.S. Ryan has said that he agrees with you--d20 *isn't* the perfect
system. Of course, there *is* not perfect system. But it doesn't
matter... all that matters is that everyone can use the *same* system,
thus eliminating the trait of learning new rules unecessarily.
P.P.S. All this has strong paralells to the PC industry; for exmaple,
there are good reasons why TCP/IP is an open standard, or ASCII... and
there is fairly clear evidence as to *why* open source systems like UNIX
have far fewer bugs than closed-source systems like Windows. With RPGs,
the OGL might just be the key to a "perfect" system...
>
> -Alex Silva
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