The Open Game License as I See It, Part I

Past, Present, and Future

The ongoing Internet debate as to whether the Open Game License can be considered a success -- even whether it should have happened at all -- has been on my mind a lot lately.

I've written here before that, when D&D Brand Manager Ryan Dancey first told me about the idea of making the d20 rules open and allowing outside developers the ability to work on it, I thought it was a terrible idea. It took some convincing, but eventually I saw that it was, in fact, a wonderful idea.

Why is it wonderful? Many reasons. The Open Game License was good for Wizards of the Coast, good for the game, and good for the roleplaying game industry as a whole.

The OGL Is Good for Wizards

First of all, it seems clear to me that Wizards of the Coast's sales are helped by the existence of the d20 and OGL products that are out there.

Would 3rd Edition D&D -- which most people have forgotten was actually a bit of a risk at the time -- have been so wildly successful if there weren't immediately a shelf full of support products to choose from? I'm going to say no. At the very least, I think the brand would have taken longer to succeed than it did.

The new edition of the game needed a lot of immediate support and the promise of further support. Those were exciting times in the game industry, both as a professional and as a fan. Interesting new products were coming fast and furious, and from unpredictable corners -- when White Wolf, of all companies, launched a hardcover d20 book just months after the Player's Handbook came out (Creature Collection), I think everyone knew that we were living in interesting times (the fact that it sold like gangbusters and beat the Monster Manual to market just made things more interesting).

So the new D&D game got support faster than Wizards could have ever provided by itself. And in retrospect, when looking at some of Wizards' early D&D releases, we should have waited even longer and made even better official support products. Whenever a new edition of the game comes around again, this is the #1 mistake I hope the company learns from 3rd Edition: The first few supplements are as important as the core books themselves. They should be among the best support products, not among the worst.

The benefits of the OGL are more complicated than just straightforward support, though. It's about spreading the D&D meme. D20 and OGL products don't help Wizards just because they require you to buy a Player's Handbook. For example, my own Arcana Evolved is an OGL product that does not require you to buy a Player's Handbook (arguably, it does require you to own the DMG and MM, but that's actually beside the point). Nevertheless, it propagates the D&D meme. See, the vast majority of Arcana Evolved players were already D&D players. They already had the D&D books. Even if Arcana Evolved did require the Player's Handbook, the number of people who would have bought Arcana Evolved and said, "My, I don't have one of these Player's Handbook things," would have been practically nil. But still, books like that are good for Wizards because they keep customers in the fold. You can use most d20 (and therefore D&D) books with Arcana Evolved, and that keeps players interested in the core. It keeps them going back to the game store to look at D&D books. It stops them from going to a completely different game system or, worse, from quitting gaming altogether, just because they longed for something beyond the core rules.

Take Ptolus, as another example. Someone recently contacted me who had read about Ptolus in InQuest magazine. He said that it looked so cool that he and his friends were going to preorder it, and when it arrived they would all get back into D&D. (I don't know if they'd given up on roleplaying games or were playing some other game.) This d20 product encouraged someone to go back to playing D&D. With him back in the fold, he is that much more likely to buy a D&D book, or -- just as importantly -- to teach someone new to play D&D. This is what I mean by spreading the D&D meme.

Similarly, someone else read about the book and decided to give D&D a chance because Ptolus sounded so cool. This fellow's gone out and bought the D&D core books to read up on them before Ptolus arrives. This latter example shows both a direct benefit to Wizards (sales of the core books) and the indirect benefits (a new gamer in the fold to spread the meme to others).

Who's more likely to pick up D&D's cool new release: Someone who's stopped buying Wizards books and only buys d20 or OGL (say, someone who gave up D&D to play Mutants and Masterminds or Iron Heroes), or someone who's stopped buying Wizards books and now plays GURPS? The OGL is a way for Wizards to keep a tether on customers even after they stray away from their product line. And keeping those customers in the fold becomes even more in the long term, when the time comes to convince them to try a new edition of the game.

The OGL Is Good for the Game

To be frank, I think the OGL was a wonderful idea because I realized that it enabled me to start my own game studio and still work on the products I wanted to write, using the rules I had helped create.

But there's more to it than that. As one of the designers of the system, I'm not interested only in the success of Wizards of the Coast. Nor am I interested solely in the success of my own Malhavoc Press. I'm interested in the success of the game, in the same way a parent is interested in the success of a child. And without a doubt, the OGL is good for the game.

Again, why? Variety. Choice. Multiple innovators. No matter how you frame it, having more people producing material for your game is good for your game. Not because you have to buy it all, but precisely because you don't. If you're going to buy five new roleplaying books in a given year, having thirty to choose from is better than having five. You can choose the products that really appeal to you rather than just taking what one company gives you. You can choose the products that really add something to your specific campaign. Or your specific character. And what's good for your game is good for the game as a whole. The happier you are with the game you're playing, the more you'll play, which is good for everyone involved.

Plus, that variety of producers allows for different styles: conservative, careful dollops of new material and wild, crazy extrapolations of the rules -- and everything in between. It's not just a matter of being able to have a whole book on dwarves and another on elves, but having books that apply to different styles and approaches. In other words, you want the field of products to be not just broad, but also deep.

This is good for the game not just because it offers greater of consumer choice, but because a great deal more innovation and true development emerges when you give the rules to a lot of different people, all of whom have their own approach. It's because of this that when the next edition of the game does come along, it had better be extraordinarily innovative, or the public will reject it. We've already seen too much innovation to the system to expect anything less.

Next Week: Part Two. Why the OGL is good for the industry, and yet why the bubble still burst. ...and what the future holds.

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