At 01:30 PM 7/8/2002 -0600, Brad Thompson wrote:
> > Joe Mucchiello
> >
> > At the risk of sounding obnoxious, I've been using the internet since
> > 1986 and as an old-timer, TSR's online policy did not have any impact
> > on people I knew who played D&D.
>
>YMMV.
I'm curious. How many people do you know who childishly said, "I'll never
buy anything from that company again?" How much had those people bought
from TSR in the past? How many people stopped playing D&D because of the
online policy? How many came back?
There are a lot of people who play RPGs who never buy supplements. In fact,
if a perfect game ever came along, customers wouldn't need to buy
supplements for it. (HERO comes close to this. You can do anything with
HERO out of the box. Any additional supplements are just someone else doing
the thinking for you.) So the guy who wants to put a website up runs afoul
of TSR's lawyers and has to take it down. Does he convince his players (you
know he's the DM) to go out and buy GURPS now because he hates D&D suddenly
because of something called the Internet they've never heard of? If he
lived in a remote area, he went back to D&D or he stopped playing entirely.
> > But, by holding the d20 license they can make the hoops you have to
> > jump through smaller and smaller until you just cannot do it any more.
>
>That's a different situation. I apologise for using the term 'd20 project'
>to refer to WotC-released OGC. It was confusing. The question was specificly
>regarding OGC, not the logo, and I was answering that question specificly.
>The fact that publishers used the OGC under the logo program doesn't change
>the risk they took to use the OGC in the first place.
If Wizard's hadn't dangled the d20 carrot, there would be fewer people
using the OGL. With the OGL you can release a product "Compatible with the
most popular fantasy RPG". With d20, you can release a product that makes
direct reference to D&D. With the d20 license, non-savvy gaming stores at
least know enough to put the d20 stuff near the D&D stuff. I cannot discuss
Wizards' stopping their OGC output without the d20 license coming up.
> > Oh, I know. I just couldn't let the PR Nightmare go. No, people on
> > lists like this would be outraged. There'd be "told ya so's" in the
> > rpg.net/pyramid/d20weekly discussion groups. But normal gamers wouldn't
> > really notice.
>
>Lets hope we don't find out.
How will it all end?
In fire.
Joe
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