I've got an unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach that history is going to repeat itself. Remember the great holy wars between the Mac and PC camps about a decade ago? Tech-savvy users all preferred the PC largely because it was open to tinkering, while Macintosh was a closed package, both in its hardware and its software. The Mac's plastic shell was designed to defeat intrusion, and, when software crashed, you got an umbrella message to the effect of: "Computer crashed. Restart? (Yes)" The rest of humanity, meanwhile, adored the Mac's sophisticated interface, and had neither desire nor reason to get into the machine. A DOS message to the effect of "Error: invalid rvcomp bat file refdex type 12. Entry 04 E1 16 A0 00 00 00 00" was no more helpful to the general public than "Computer crashed. Restart? (Yes)"
Ultimately, PCs, and specifically Microsoft, won out. Not because it was a better product - even today, with the benefit of a decade of refinement, Windows is a mediocre product, and works as smoothly as it does by virtue of copying the Mac interface. Rather, PCs dominate the market today because of smart business practice. While Mac reserved all rights and privileges to itself, PCs allowed other companies to market PC programs and gizmos without paying royalties. Small software companies naturally preferred to write for the PC. Buyers, seeing the imbalance of available software for both platforms, began to buy more PCs. Software developers, noting the larger market for PC-compatible software, wrote even more preferentially for the PC, and so on, until the Mac spiraled away into the obscurity of graphic developers' cubicles. VHS enjoyed a similar vicious cycle in its competition with Beta: more VHS users means more VHS titles, which encourages more VHS users.
For decades, a similar ideological war has raged between fans of the Dungeons and Dragons game and fans of every other role-playing game. When D&D first appeared, it was a brilliant and original idea for a game. Unfortunately, it also had many problems, naturally enough for a prototype. The gaming community gradually refined and improved the basic ideas of D&D in many ways - the substitution of discrete skills for "class-and-level," uniform rules for action resolution, the simplification of dice rolls, and a de-emphasis of combat are prominent improvements. TSR, the company which owned D&D, responded badly to these challenges. Rather than improving D&D, TSR relied on a bigger art budget to make its products slicker and glossier. It published cruddy supplements relying on brand recognition for sales. It encouraged gaming at the lowest common artistic denominator ("munchkinism") and spread this attitude since D&D sold so well to young players without the experience to know better. It hounded small-press competitors with lawyers. Ultimately, it paid the price for bad business practices, and was bought out by Wizards of the Coast, but for a long time, TSR had a reputation with everyone but the many D&D players (and even some of them) as the evil monolithic company with nothing but greed and malice in its heart. The similarities to IBM during the explosion of the home computer market are remarkable.
In the meantime, small press writers convinced, usually correctly, that they could do better, kept churning out new games and supplements. Most stank. Many were innovative, interesting, and useful. A precious few staked out and held territory of their own, despite a market glut.
Wizards of the Coast, new owners of the Dungeons & Dragons license, have recently streamlined the D&D mechanics and turned the core rules loose in what is called an "open gaming license" under the name D20, after the 20-sided die used to resolve actions. Anyone can now write game materials using the underlying mechanics of D&D - but not the logo, setting, or setting-specific rules - and sell them without paying a royalty or seeking permission from WotC. WotC hopes to broaden its market share to the point where people use D20, not because it's better than other systems, but because everyone plays it.
Ryan Dancey of WotC explained the strategy in an interview1 with Eric Noah:
Here's the logic in a nutshell. We've got a theory that says that D&D is the most popular role playing game because it is the game more people know how to play than any other game. (For those of you interested researching the theory, this concept is called "The Theory of Network Externalities").Note: This is a very painful concept for a lot of people to embrace, including a lot of our own staff, and including myself for many years. The idea that D&D is somehow "better" than the competition is a powerful and entrenched concept2. The idea that D&D can be "beaten" by a game that is "better" than D&D is at the heart of every business plan from every company that goes into marketplace battle with the D&D game. If you accept the Theory of Network Externalities, you have to admit that the battle is lost before it begins, because the value doesn't reside in the game itself, but in the network of people who know how to play it.
In short, the quality of D20 doesn't matter if it's the only game in town.
Had D&D tried that strategy a few years ago, it would have accomplished nothing. D&D was so clunky compared to its rivals that players who tried something else never looked back. White Wolf Studios won a big slice of the market with its World of Darkness series, and games with a truly innovative setting could hope for a similar success, since almost any rules were better than D&D. But D20 is a different matter. Where D&D had situation-specific rules, which meant no rules at all for anything the rulebook didn't specifically address, D20 has a generic mechanic which can make do in any situation. It isn't good, but it is adequate, and I'm afraid that being adequate will be enough. Atlas Games, a personal favorite, has bowed to the weight of history and begun turning out products for the D20 line rather than its own Over the Edge and Unknown Armies. WotC bought the Star Wars line when West End Games went belly-up, and wrenched its widely praised system into a D20 format. More casualties will no doubt follow. The only compensation we have for this obstacle to innovation is the improvement of the worst of gaming, a pathetic trade, if you ask me.
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1. This interview is available at http://www.rpgplanet.com/dnd3e/interview-rsd-0300.htm. Dancey likens the open license, not to proprietary Microsoft, but to the free-thinking Linux community, and expresses a hope for grass-roots innovation. I do not share his optimism. Real innovations appear more often in underlying systems, not in specific rules, and are unlikely to remain compatible with D20. OtE's trait definition and Rolemaster's determination of degree of success, for example, have no place in D20.
2. But not so powerful and entrenched as the idea that the competition is somehow "better" than D&D, as the next sentence explains.