Dungeons and Dragons Is a Case Study in How Capitalism Kills Art

>This sounds more like a problem with taking a company public than it does with capitalism in general

I don't disagree, but it's sort of difficult to disentangle the incentives to take a company public from "capitalism in general", at least as it's practiced in the world today.

I'd point to Valve as the paradigmatic example of "not-evil corporation", precisely because it's GabeN's private hat empire and he can do things like fund the big unwieldy rocket of Steam Machines, which can then jettison the much more capable craft of Proton -- neither of which The Shareholders would have been comfortable with.

Would there have been pressure to go public and become normal if Valve didn't have access to Steam's money-printer? How about if Valve's charismatic hat-emperor was no longer at the helm? Maybe so, but I think that suggesting that "the sirens call of "infinite wealth"" can corrupt anyone is capitalist apologism when there are strong counterexamples in similar forms of expression. Moreover, suggesting the mere act of going public generates "monopoly money" and "infinite wealth", suitable to corrupt even the most principled, strikes me as parroting a just-so story about vulture capitalism's obvious unstoppable dominion.

I know you're not arguing this, but for the sake of expanding into the following point:

There have been plenty of games and other creative projects that became successful ignoring or even despite the economic system.

In fact I would argue that many of the most artistic games that had the most positive impact on me personally were made because they simply had to be made.

I'm not a fan of table top games (haven't tried them seriously enough) but I could give you a long list of computer games that are just oozing of passion, artistry, profound insights and deep respect for both their craft and their players. A good portion were successful financially, but certainly not all of them.

Tetris came a decade later so computers were more common and floppy disks were a thing making it easy to copy and share information.

Not to mention all the reasons why a book of roleplaying rules has less memetic potential than a small quick to play single player game. Today with good screens and internet it is plausible, pretty sure there already are such systems out there, but it couldn't have happened in the 70's and I'm pretty sure it would never happen in the 80's either.

5.54b was the last version before Icefrog, and then Icefrog took over development and the game slowly became the clean and interesting e-sport it is today. Was still just hobbyists doing it for fun though. People still don't know who Icefrog is, even after being hired by Valve he remains anonymous.

When Warhammer and open-source collide, I'm always fascinated to see which aspect the discussion assumes deserving of attention: the miniatures, or the rules. The minis were historically protected by the rarity of injection moulding hobbyists, but in the era of 3d printing all bets are off. It's made easier by the casual Warhammer scene having long ago grown accustomed to "counts-as" models. Assuming it's around the same size and profile, you can use that WWII tabletop tank and call it a Leman Russ, so a Leman Russ with sliiiiiightly off dimensions or print quality is a shoe-in.

The rules, though, are a different matter. Warhammer 40k (the sci-fi variant) is a confusing blur of simultaneous, competing standards, controlled by an edition rulebook (which handles general gameplay rules and discussing physical aspects of the hobby like collecting and painting) and Codex books for each army, which aren't necessarily updated when a new edition comes out. The interactions of the army rules in each Codex and each edition's ruleset is chaotic at best, and often results in insane-looking letter-of-the-law strategies that exploit that interaction (early Tau firefish, anyone?), until it's fixed by a new Codex or edition.

The problem is, IMO, theorycrafting. The nerds that wind up playing your game have a lot more time, in aggregate, to break it than you do, and once one 'sploit has been found, disseminating it through the internet is trivial. Now everybody's doing it, and it's called "the current meta". If you don't want that, you've got to change something. You can add ever more and more complex pieces to the system, like they did with D&D3.5, or you can keep it moving forward and correct newly discovered imbalances live, as they do with WH40k (or, if you're a conspiracy theorist, correct some and intentionally introduce others).

I stopped trying to climb the endless mountain of 40k a long, long time ago. While I idly dream of a drop-in replacement ruleset that does away with the push-and-pull of edition-and-Codex rules-leapfrogging, I don't think something as complex as 40k can really be distilled into a timeless, unproblematic ruleset like chess or Icehouse or Homeworlds, especially if the intent is to continue releasing new models with new rules... especially if they're Space Marines, the Mary Sues of the 40k universe and the best-selling model line by far.

Anyway, I find it interesting that the parent comment took the approach it did. Note how Warhammer-as-open-source is about the free market providing new models, rather than the reverse-engineers "pirating" the entirety of Magic for XMage or creating new rules for the Star Wars variant. Warhammer has an "alternative client" too, in the form of the Vassal engine [0] (an LGPL 2d tabletop simulation system). Unlike XMage, it doesn't automagically enforce all rules, but then, neither does IRL live-action Warhammer. One could do something similar in Tabletop Simulator, of course.

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