> I personally believe that saying that people made other game systems
simply
> because TSR might sue them doesn't hold much weight.
To be clear, this is not what I believe.
I believe that if TSR proactively created a system where people could use
the core D&D game rules (not just a tacit nod and a gentleperson's agreement
not to sue), that those rules would have evolved faster, and been more broad
based than they were, and there would have been very few games that gained
any kind of distribution or sales volume that didn't use those core rules.
People would still design them, but they wouldn't (by and large) make it
onto retailer's shelves.
So you'd have one big, thick tree of games that shared a common reference
point, and then a bunch of smaller saplings that were different in very
fundamental ways, stunted due to lack of general distribution and interest.
Occasionally, one of those saplings would merge into the big tree as it's
unique creativity got absorbed, and occasionally a seed would fall from the
big tree to start a new sapling as someone "tried to do it better". If the
reference platform of the big tree was generally Open and the major
publishers regularly incorporated obvious improvements and advances to the
reference platform into their core rule offerings, I believe that the big
tree would pretty much be able to limit competitive games to a very, very
minor niche.
I also believe that the tree would not look like D&D third edition. 3E is
what D&D should have been morphed into in 1989, but management at TSR was
unwilling to make even minor system changes that were considered "new game
rules". There's very little in 3E that didn't exist in '89; although the
extensive use of templates in both text presentation and in combining
rulesets owes its lineage directly to the rules design technology evolved at
WotC for use in Magic, so it is possible that the '89 version of 3E might
have been a bit more muddled in presentation than the modern incarnation.
We'll never know what that market might have been like, because there's no
way to undo the damage done by TSR's early policies. Now, we have a
substantial number of consumers who have been educated or self-taught to
loathe the core D&D rules on spec, and those consumers will fuel any number
of non-d20 games for years to come. Also, sometimes the lack of an example
can be a big factor in not taking a risk, and the modern generation of game
publishers have all the examples they need that non-d20 RPGs have been
popular and profitable in the past. So we won't see a monolithic d20
market.
What I hope for instead is an increasingly monolithic "Open Gaming" market,
where at least those people who choose to go their own way do so in a
structure that encourages others to recycle the efforts of others rather
than new publishers going back to scratch for every single new game engine.
Instead of one big tree, I believe that we'll end up with three or four big
trees each serving a specialized niche; and I'm sure that there will be a
spiderweb of connections between those trees in the form of standard
conversion guides. If Open Gaming as a theory is successful, consumers will
start to make purchasing decisions based on whether the game materials they
are buying use an Open Game license, which insures the consumer somewhat
against complete abandonment in the event that the publisher switches focus
or goes bankrupt. If consumer demand mounts and that demand is understood
for what it is by the publishers, we could see the end of proprietary,
widely distributed RPG systems in years, not decades.
Ryan
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For more information, please link to www.opengamingfoundation.org
