[miiiiiike]

> [...] game mechanics and rules are NOT copyrightable. We never needed OGL to publish material compatible with D&D (or any other system) in the first place.

This is something that I've been seen written over and over again.

While the mechanisms themselves are not subject to copyright, the rules, as authored by Wizards of the Coast, are. That is the specific implementation of those mechanisms (e.g. the definition of a feat, skill, or spell) is subject to copyright.

The OGL and D&D SRD allowed limited republishing of copyrighted material by third party publishers.

If you aren't using the words from the D&D rulebook you can publish a game that's 100% compatible with D&D. You would also have to spend a lot of time reimplementing the spell, skill, feat, and weapon boilerplate.. Which is why the D&D SRD and OGL were created.

It's like a hash table. While you can't implicitly[0] protect the concept of a hash table you can copyright and implicitly protect your hash table. Someone else can create a hash table but they can't copy and paste the code from your proprietary implementation. It's yours.. Unless you give them a license to use and/or distribute it.

The death of/community moving away from the OGL and D&D SRD is a good thing.

The RPG world is a victim of the OGL and D&D SRD's success. How many games are based on the six attribute format? I've been playing games like that for 30 years and I've had enough. When I pick up a book and see dex/str/con/wis/int/cha my eyes glass over. I want D&D to fade, I want publishers to create new, entirely novel, systems, and I don't care what it means the status quo. The ideas haven't been there for many years now.

What's great about the OGL and D&D SRD is that it brought an open source mentality to game publishing. It created a framework for companies can collaborate on a system and made that the default way of thinking about the creation of RPG material. That isn't going to go away. We're just going to be getting more and, possibly, better systems.

It's going to cause fragmentation, turmoil, consumer confusion, and it's going to be great. We'll get a burst of creativity, followed by a plateau, and finally everyone will congregate around a new system in a decade or so.

[0]: Copyright is implicit, patents and trademarks are not.

[rkangel]

> When I pick up a book and see dex/str/con/wis/int/cha my eyes glass over. I want D&D to fade, I want publishers to create new, entirely novel, systems, and I don't care what it means the status quo

The conclusion I've drawn from this is that the system doesn't really matter. The game rules are incredibly secondary to the concept of role-playing - the universe, the people, the motivations, the personalities etc.

We've got a system, it works and everyone knows how to use it. We've met the bar for a foundation we can build our universes on (until now, and this controversy).

That said, I don't think I've spent enough time playing other systems to really be sure of my feelings on this - the above is based on the situation we've got to. I've got Call of Cthulu on the shelves next to me and plan to run a game, partly because I want to answer that question: "does the different stat and mechanics system really bleed through and affect how you experience the world"?

[dleslie]

> I've got Call of Cthulu on the shelves next to me and plan to run a game, partly because I want to answer that question: "does the different stat and mechanics system really bleed through and affect how you experience the world"?

In my experience, they do because of the sort of players they attract and the engagement required of them.

Complicated games with many source books attract rules lawyers, who dominate the group experience by way of using their knowledge of obscure rules to control the play.

Whereas overly simple games, like FATE, lack enough structure to guide more timid players through the experience, and so play becomes dominated by the prominent story tellers in the party.

[miiiiiike]

> Does the different stat and mechanics system really bleed through and affect how you experience the world.

Play "Warhammer Fantasy Role Play" and get back to me. How many fingers did your players have by the end?

Or Dungeon Crawl Classics.. How many level-0s made it through the meat grinder?

The randomness in other system leads to some interesting developments that you don't see in D&D. There's also the culture of the games. In modern D&D there's almost a contract between the players and DM that the players aren't to interfere with the DM's world building and the DM will not interfere with the grand destinies of the characters.

It's completely uninteresting to me. I want to play and play with as many different characters as possible so I can see different parts of the system and worlds. Playing the same characters from level 1 to godhood is dull. Character death should be frequent and glorious.

I also like Blood Bowl so.. I have a pretty high tolerance for nonsensical, dice driven, narratives. There are so many good story hooks if you just go with it.

[CuriouslyC]

The D&D combat system is high variance (single d20 rolls), and fundamentally flawed. DMs routinely have to fudge rolls and engage in divine intervention to prevent the night from ending early because the pack of gnolls that were supposed to be a filler encounter turned deadly with a streak of high rolls.

Wargame systems where combat is the focus and fudging is cheating tend to use more small dice so you end up closer to a normal distribution of values, rather than a uniform distribution. That avoids stuff that doesn't make sense like a shepherd rolling repeated natural 20s while a dragon rolls 1s - if the dragon is rolling 5 dice for an attack the floor of that is still above the shepherd's ability to defend.

[rkangel]

I'm never sure whether this is a bug or a feature. When DMing, while I do very occasionally fudge things I try hard not to. The unpredictable aspect of the universe is a good thing and adds to the drama of an encounter. I do do some other things to make this work - I don't have a huge number of random encounters (also for game pace) and have some mechanism that softens player death a little. E.g. an NPC that can do a resurrection that they can earn, or an in-universe character re-roll.

[trynewideas]

Ironically, D&D's spin on Rule Zero, which is what you essentially describe in practice, isn't in any first-party SRD even though it's been arguably the foundational D&D rule as written in every published edition.[1]

It is, however, an OGL-covered rule in Pathfinder:[2]

> The rules presented are here to help you breathe life into your characters and the world they explore. While they are designed to make your game easy and exciting, you might find that some of them do not suit the style of play that your gaming group enjoys. Remember that these rules are yours. You can change them to fit your needs. Most Game Masters have a number of "house rules" that they use in their games. The Game Master and players should always discuss any rules changes to make sure that everyone understands how the game will be played. Although the Game Master is the final arbiter of the rules, the Pathfinder RPG is a shared experience, and all of the players should contribute their thoughts when the rules are in doubt.

1: https://theoutcastrogue.tumblr.com/post/685341001180741632/r...

2: https://pathfinder.d20srd.org/coreRulebook/gettingStarted.ht...

[trynewideas]

> The conclusion I've drawn from this is that the system doesn't really matter. The game rules are incredibly secondary to the concept of role-playing

Damn, have I got, like, 20 years of blogs, 40 years of forum and BBS posts, and 60 more years of magazine, zine, and rambling manifesto articles for you.