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Originally Posted by MerricB Except, of course, you really need to be able to include full statblocks to make good adventures, and you can only do that for 100% original material. You want your kobolds to be Shifty like the Wizards kobolds? Sorry, you need to put a "See the 4e Monster Manual" reference in there. 
Not happy. |
Sounds like the intent there is to keep someone from doing something like World's Largest Dungeon, which includes every monster in the
SRD, and thus doing an end-run around the "Can't reprint the monster manual", by arguing that you're just including the stat blocks for the monsters in the advanture....
And, of course, as you note, this means that 3rd party adventures are automatically more annoying than
WOTC adventures, since you won't need constant page flipping with a
WOTC adventure.
"Do I want to play the one where I need to look up all the monster abilities and how they work, or do I want to play the one where everything I need to run the encounter is printed right in front of me? Hm ,hm, hm..."
Honestly, looking at this, I think the only reason it exists at all is that
WOTC announced back in '07 that
4e would "have an open license", and since they announced this to potential competitors, failing to produce one might have exposed them to some corporate liability for possibly defrauding competition. (For example, suppose Microsoft promised that the next version of Windows would include feature X, and other companies made plans around that, and then the next version didn't Feature X.) So they kept working until they came out with a license which makes it very hard to produce products of the same quality and utility as the ones
WOTC can make.
Of course, we may all be misinterpreting this license. But you'd think that after waiting an extra six month, the license would be crystal clear. This is one reason why keeping the license secret during development was a Really Bad Idea. The
OGL was widely adopted in part because the development process was public and these kinds of questions and concerns were asked, answered, and dealt with before the license was released.