The OGL and SRD Hold Us Back

When you look at it, we don't need the OGL and SRD at all.

An argument can be made they hold us back. We are putting our ideas of fantasy gaming inside the box D&D and Wizards made. Yes, sure, the "network effect" argument can be made, but on the flip side, you can argue that "it only benefits the market leader."

Plenty of other games use rules that are nothing like D&D; people learn and play them just fine, and they do everything D&D does.

• Runequest
• GURPS
• Forbidden Lands
• Pathfinder 2e
• Conan
• Cypher System
• Warhammer
• Dungeon Crawl Classics
• Sword of Cepheus
• Castles & Crusades
• Mork Borg
• Blades in the Dark
• Dungeon World
• Savage Worlds & Savage Pathfinder

And that is just a small list. Those games are very different than D&D, yet they do the same things just fine. Within the D&D-like games, there are too many to list (OSE, Labyrinth Lord). A few of the above are arguably close (DCC, PF2, C&C), but they are so far removed from the core experience they can be called entirely new games.

And some of these 5E has borrowed from (C&C), so 5E and the 5.1 SRD should be asking the question, "Who made who?" It looks pretty petty for Wizards to have tried anything like what they did, and many people still need better tastes in their mouths - especially since no changes at the top were made.

Same Wall Street corporation, different day.

The same "delayed implementation" rollout.

Wall Street's plans do not change THAT quickly.

And honestly, moving away from the OGL and SRD will free many games to follow their creator's dreams rather than being judged strictly on how closely they follow ideas created 20 to 50 years ago.

Why do we chain ourselves to the past?

Why is what Wizards says about fantasy gaming gospel?

Nostalgia?

Is nostalgia enough to say today's creators' dreams are worth less or somehow invalid?

There is such a thing as SRD fatigue, that if all you play and see fantasy as comes from between the covers of books and documents created by Wizards, then your world is tiny, limited, and restricted to the ideas of a few people in the past plus a small subset of inputs.

Yes, D&D opens the door to your imagination and gives you that framework to express yourself, but on the other hand, the longer you stick to those ideas, the more you limit your dreams and fantasy vocabulary. Why are everything magic missiles, sleep, and fireball? Is that all fantasy magic can be?

Or can it be something more?

Something uniquely you and me?