How Many RPG's Are Being Made Because of the WotC OGL Debacle?
How Many RPG's Are Being Made Because of the WotC OGL Debacle?
I just discovered Kobold Press's Black Flag Role Playing system and Tales of the Valorant game being made. I had no idea that was a thing.
Added with the ones I did know about:
- Critical Role's Daggerheart
- MCDM's new RPG (Matt Colville's company)
- And we can count the Pathfinder 2's updates if we want
I wonder how many other RPG's are being made as a result of that debacle.
It does seem like a lot. WotC really shot themselves in the foot spawning all this new competition, didn't they?
I hope many.
I tire of D&D's stranglehold on players minds. It's slowly getting easier and easier to suggest people read a second book, and while that's great to see, we still have plenty of work to do.
And, no, for the 11th time, I will not run my Star Trek game in 5e that's insane.
Are you using the official Star Trek TTRPG? I definitely want to run something with the Lower Decks book for my party at some point. Maybe next First Contact Day
Star Trek Adventures? Yeah! It's a great book. It takes a little bit to wrap your head around, as it's a little abstract in some places, but once you get it, it's simple to play and works very well for emulating an episode of Star Trek.
I had used Mongoose's Traveller in the past, but ST:A is a far better system for the purpose.
What's truly funny is that this isn't the first time this happened. 4th edition had WotC bamboozle third party creators by fiddling with the OGL, and third party creators responded by making a rival to D&D. They called it Pathfinder.
Then you look a little further afield and you see a massive indie TTRPG community that I have to assume had an influx of new designers who only found out about it due to the OGL incident.
TSR had the exact same issues back with 2.5 edition. That's how WotC even managed to acquire the property.
@AngryCommieKender @Susaga Eh, I wouldn't really call TSR's issues in "2.5"/late 2e similar to the issues surrounding the cancellation of the d20 System Trademark License, the 4e GSL, or this past January's OGL debacle. For one thing, the game never officially had an open license before 3e came along. For another, late TSR's woes had more to do with their reach exceeding their grasp.
WotC really shot themselves in the foot spawning all this new competition, didn’t they?
They can do that as often as they like. This is great!
I am not sure the OGL debacle is really a reason. There is I don't know how many thousands RPG published each years. If I do a search on kicksrarter for RPG in boardgame category I get above 6000 matches.
So tons of new RPG are being published each day, most of them are forgotten, some are good enough to drag a small but existing community, and may-be a dozen of games are big enough to provide a living revenue to their authors, while one game per decade really change the way we play (Basically D&D, Chtulhu, Vampire, Fate, Apocalypse world) so not sure there is something new under the sun.
The D&D player will keep playing D&D, the non D&D player will keep not playing it, and with the marketing power of Hasbro will keep having a long time telling beginner that there is more than just D&D or that tweaking D&D into a horror games where weak humans face cosmic error takes more work than buying COC
I don't think that's true about dnd staying in dnd. Just that it takes time to transition away.
In both of the tables I play in, none of us are buying any new WOTC stuff. We're finishing up existing campaigns, and we have a (fairly last minute) 3rd party 5e Xmas one shot coming because we don't want to force anyone to have to learn a new system for it.
But we're already branching out into PBTA and the more DM and leadership focused of us already have pathfinder 2e books and everyone is on board with trying pf2e.
Plenty of D&D players both staying and leaving. But there is definitely an impact because there are some whales leaving.
I don't think any of these were created per se from the debacle but certainly it helped grow them and maybe push timelines up.
I can't speak to the creation of new systems, but it certainly gave me the push to try existing alternatives.
Paizo's modifications to Pathfinder 2E are a direct response to the OGL debacle. They're tearing out all the stuff that was only in there because they were still chained to the SRD.
Like stats only counting when you had two of them so you have to take them two at a time or else it's a waste.