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?
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.
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.
Wasn't Kobold Press making 3pc for Pathfinder a while back? I'd swear I've heard of that company before
They did! Our GM at the time was super into the stuff they were putting out.
Well, one way or the other, more entities in the system development space is only a good thing. Praying that someone makes a system that feels as good to build detailed, unique character concepts in as Pathfinder with a slashdown on the amounts of bookkeeping required so people quit being intimidated by what used to be my favorite system.
Ever since my last Pathfinder group fell in on itself, the circle I run with now absolutely won't go near it-- say they'd rather stay on 5e because Pathfinder 'needs too much notetaking' and I'm just here like "oh you DEF haven't played Shadowrun before if you think PF's bad about the bookkeeping"
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 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.
Don't forget Kobold Press's Black Flag and FoundryVTT's Crucible.
Palladium also decided to re-release their TMNT modern adventure line, very recently.
I think its really shaken up the industry from top to bottom. So much of the last twenty-five years of TTRPGs has leveraged the OGL. WotC effectively killed GURPs, WoD, and Rolemaster when they put everyone on the d20 standard. And with every new iteration of their core franchise - from 3.0 to D&D One - they've been promising fully integrated software support that... never shows up (which has been a huge boon for Bioware and now Lauren Studios, as D&D-adjacent video games thrived in the absence of a real VTT system).
I don't think we're going to see how badly Matel screwed the pooch on this for another decade, at least. But they punched a huge hole in the community that was churning out half of their franchise's best content.
Lol so now I can play Crucible on Foundry hosted by the Forge. When do I get a blacksmithing certification?
Even FoundryVTT is making their own RPG? That's hilarious, I had no idea. I'll have to look it up. Is it also fantasy? I'm guessing they're aiming for a tactical focused system like MCDM's since it'll be for a VTT?
Its broadly fantasy, although the real focus is on building a system that naturally integrates with a VTT rather than one that's patched in under tabletop rules. Still in pre-alpha development, too. So don't hold your breath. But it looks promising.
Another huge boon is for the vtt community. A ton of shit had started moving from dnd to either Pathfinder or system agnostic.
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.