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VikingCoder

I'm so tired of everything remotely like this.

Why do we not crowdfund some excellent game designers to make a truly open set of RPGs?

Some that would be amenable to making into Computer RPGs.

Some that maybe that would be nearly impossible to automate. (That's fine, too.)

Under some licenses like CC BY / CC BY-SA / CC BY-NC?

I _like_ buying RPG books. I would continue to do so, even if the license was CC BY. I also like getting searchable PDFs, and turning dungeons into a Wiki for the DM to make it easy to find content.

I mean... Come on...

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Truly open RPGs already exist. Fudge, for example. And Fate (based on Fudge, because it's open and they can). And if Pathfinder 2 is indeed free from any old d20 content (I don't know), then that one counts too.

The big problem is that there's not a single one that everybody agrees to use as the new standard. D&D is the standard. Like Windows. Everybody knows it sucks, but nobody can agree on a single alternative, and the market stays with what people know.

Fudge uses OGL, which is the topic under discussion.

https://www.fudgerpg.com/about/about-fudge/fudge-ogl-require...

PF 2.0 also uses OGL:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/104wjuo/why_d...

> The big problem is that there's not a single one that everybody agrees to use as the new standard. D&D is the standard. Like Windows. Everybody knows it sucks, but nobody can agree on a single alternative, and the market stays with what people know.

I don't understand why there needs to be "a standard". in the 80's, 90's people played Runequest, Warhammer, GURPS, AD&D, Dark Eye... there was no need for a "standard". No, people are lazy and just want to play what is popular, this isn't a standard. Games rules are half the table top RPG, the stories are as important if not more...

Furthermore, back in the days, people were interested in innovative rules or universes, D&D is none of that, it's the most bland and boring game system...

D&D drowns out the rest of the market, practically speaking. We don’t have a great way to measure overall play but Roll20, the dominant virtual tabletop, publishes their stats regularly and D&D is more than 50%. Call of Cthulhu is around 15%. It drops quickly from there.

There’s a huge network effect at work here. It’s easier to find D&D players than players of any other game — not that you can’t find them, but D&D is easier. WotC runs organized play programs such that I can walk into almost any brick and mortar tabletop gaming store in the country and immediately find a regular game.

Look at https://startplaying.games/search and count the number of D&D games compared to anything else.

And this has happened before. D&D 4e got rid of the OGL, which made people have these same conversations. This did create Pathfinder, but even cloning the earlier version of D&D didn’t prevent WotC from dominating except during the year or two between 4e and the current edition. Plus 4e played really differently, which won’t be the case for this new edition.

> back in the days, people were interested in innovative rules or universes

People still are. There's been tons of innovation over the past 20 years, and some of it even seeped into D&D and Warhammer.

But despite everything, D&D is still the big name everybody recognises. Maybe there doesn't need to be a standard, but there is, and it's D&D. Just like with Windows.

The differences between the rules are not important, that's exactly why there needs to be a standard.

TTRPG rules are not tabletop game rules: they don't say what happens, GM does. TTRPG rules are a language that abstracts away trivia in a somewhat objective manner.

This is similar to having many programming languages: ideally you would want to have a single language for everything, but they all suck in different small ways.

> Why do we not crowdfund some excellent game designers to make a truly open set of RPGs?

Why are you waiting for someone else to do this? Do it yourself!

Something that bothers me more than most things is when people demand others act to solve a growing problem. Sure, you're not the most qualified person to do it, but actual execution trumps qualifications every time.

Get out there! Get in touch with some excellent game designers, ask them what it would take to get their help. Come up with a plan based on their feedback and execute it!

Or at least if you're not going to do it, recognize that your reasons for not doing it are probably exceedingly similar to everyone else's reasons for not doing it, and stop asking the question.

> Something that bothers me more than most things is when people demand others act to solve a growing problem. Sure, you're not the most qualified person to do it, but actual execution trumps qualifications every time.

I would agree with this, however most people can't organise and maintain the most mundane aspects of their lives, let alone gather a large group of people together to combat some big goal like this.

What makes you think that GP isn't already doing so, and trying to rally others to do the same?

> and stop asking the question.

I agreed up until this part. Even if you aren't going to do it, stoking the fire with otherwise idle conversation might get more motivated individuals interested.

There are game designers possibly reading this thread.

I've approached two of my favorites, back possibly too long ago before Kickstarter was more of a known quantity, and they both said "hard pass" at the time.

Also, have you ever been approached by an "idea guy"? It's obnoxious as hell. "Hi, I'm creating a video game. All I need is a game designer, 2 programmers, 2 artists, and a sound guy. Pay is on commission." It's like, What? What do you bring to the table?

I bring very little to this table, other than the assertion that I would spend money on this product, if it existed.

But it's entirely possible a game designer will see this, and decide to run their own Kickstarter, based off of the comment I made and the comments I got back.

Or, someone more knowledgeable than me could have explained to me why my idea was unworkable. Or someone could have shared ten links to existing products or ongoing Kickstarters.

I'm not afraid to speak up in a public place about my hopes. Why should I be?

I mean, maybe you meant to be encouraging, but please accept my feedback that your comment seems to me to be an attempt to discourage discussion.

Yeah, I want to discourage people from asking the naive question: "Why don't people solve <problem> for me?!"

Do it yourself, or at least examine why you won't, and then recognize that the people involved are also humans, and many of those reasons you and others here have listed apply to these "special" people too.

Discussion is nearly worthless; so many people can generate so much of it for so little cost, it must be worth basically nothing. There's far too much of it, and far too little action.

This site is literally the social media arm of a startup accelerator, go start something up!

Is it better if I explicitly ask,

"Can anyone shoot holes through this idea of mine? Has anyone else already done this? Is anyone else interested in helping me do this?"

Or would that still warrant discouragement from you? Because, honestly, that's the tone I intended. And if you can't read that tone, maybe that's on you?

Yeah as long as you’re not asking for other people to solve your problems, all good from me!

Just to close the loop, in case you didn't know, the next biggest players in the Table-Top Role Playing Game World got together and did exactly what I was hoping for:

> In addition to Paizo, Kobold Press, Chaosium, Legendary Games, and a growing list of publishers have already agreed to participate in the Open RPG Creative License, and in the coming days we hope and expect to add substantially to this group.

This would be roughly akin to Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Rackspace announcing they would work together to fight some awful cloud computing initiative from Amazon. But thanks for angrily telling one dude on HN that he should be the one to lead the charge. Really great advice, thanks.

https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v?Paizo-Announc...

Richard Garfield made Magic the Gathering and was given carte blanche by Valve to make Artifact, and it bombed spectacularly.

Just because you bottled lightning once, doesn’t mean you can do it ever again.

Other game developers have made hit after hit.

And I think the nature of open content is still relatively new, so that's the best explanation I have for why it hasn't been done yet.

AFAIK Garfield was involved in the game design, which is actually appreciated by the players. What made the game reviews tank is the game monetization schemes.

Eclipse Phase was released under CC BY-NC-SA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_Phase

I don't know if there are others or not.

There are tons, the parent commenter just doesn't know.

I found several NC. That didn't suit my purposes at the time. It's great to hear there are more. Would you care to list your favorites? Or the ones you believe are already popular?

On nice! I read some about it a long time ago, it looks like a very cool system.

Similarly, I was coming in to post Sufficiently Advances, which is (I think) Creative Commons.

As always, the issue isn't so much content, is selling people on it so they use it, get excited, get involved. Like everything open, when you don't have a budget to make that happen, it gets a lot harder.

EP was very common at conventions when I used to attend them more regularly, and they had good hardbound editions for sale (which I purchased). They did their part to promote the game and achieved good success with it. It was all over r/rpg for scifi gaming in the early 10s (after that I dropped off of Reddit generally so I'm not sure how much it gets posted and discussed anymore there or similar forums).

FWIW, Basic Fantasy RPG [0] is in the process of converting to CC BY-SA right now [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Fantasy_RPG

[1]: https://www.basicfantasy.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4596...

Off the top of my head:

GUMSHOE, FATE, Forged in the Dark, Dungeon World, Quest, and Trophy are all available under CC BY licenses. Many of those are fairly popular (if you don’t compare them to D&D) — six figure Kickstarter revenue, for example. Creative Commons has been a reasonably common choice for game designers who want open content for a decade or so.

Thank you much!

> GUMSHOE - Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution Unported License

> FATE - Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) / OGL

> Forged in the Dark (Blades in the Dark) - Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license.

> Dungeon World - Creative Commons Attribution

> Quest - Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License

> Trophy - custom, permissive-looking license

Yours was by far the most helpful response I got.

There's also this list:

https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/Open_Game_Systems

Which I found from another thread you were in:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34304853

In case someone wanders into this conversation later, Paizo just announced that they are doing something exactly like what I hoped for.

https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v?Paizo-Announc...

> Why do we not crowdfund some excellent game designers to make a truly open set of RPGs?

No need to even do that, there is plenty of alternative RPG and game systems out there already. It's not about money. It's about principles. But people wants to play "D&D", Hasbro's IP, Hasbro rules and business practices...

But also let's not forget how some conferences managed to shut down and shun the competition by forbidding them to attend the conferences to promote their alternative creations, insuring Hasbro/WotC prominent market shares... There is a lot to say about that "community", a lot of corrupt individuals...

The problem isn't money, it's getting a large group of people to agree on...anything.

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