At 10:01 PM 4/11/2002, Ryan S. Dancey wrote: > > From: The LE [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > > > Now, riddle me this: What is the purpose of the Open GAming > > Foundation? > >To promote the acceptance of the Open Gaming Philosophy, which is that >game rules, and materials that use those rules, should be free to copy, >modify and distribute.
I am curious, and do not take this as a slam, but -- how well do you think this goal has been met over the nearly two years since D&D3e was released? I think a number of interesting things have been shown: a)It works. While there's clearly market saturation in many areas, I think it's also clear that there will be D20 products for a long time to come, and that a lot of them will be of very high quality -- in many cases superior to products in the same niche by WOTC. b)The worst fears of many -- that there would be mass copying and distribution of open content by fly-by-night publishers -- seems not to happen. There's plenty of PIRACY, but that happens, sadly, without regard to "open" or "closed" content. Indeed, I could argue there has been LESS reuse of open content between publishers than there SHOULD be. c)No one else has really jumped on the bandwagon. Both GURPS and BESM have adopted very limited and controlled licensing arrangements with third parties, and that's really about it. It's this last point which is interesting. Is D&D the only game system popular enough to benefit from an 'open' arrangement? I would really like to see other systems follow suit, but it doesn't seem to be happening. _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
