Open Gaming and the GSL

Once again, I'm stealing my topics from Psion's blog.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/blogs/psion/339-gsl-not-gsl-question.html

Does anyone care about open gaming? Does anyone care about third party support? With the GSL, WotC has removed the former from D&D 4. The terms of the GSL are so mindblowingly one sided that it wouldn't surprise me if they'd also eliminated the latter.

However, it appears they haven't. Necromancer Games, 4th edition's biggest fans pretty much from day 1, will be continuing with their alternative Player's Handbook and Adventure Path, and presumably there will be a monster book at some point - it just won't be called Tome of Horrors (and D&D 4's loss is possibly Pathfinder's gain - I'm not sure whether we would have had a Pathfinder ToH anyway, or whether it is a result of the GSL).

Goodman Games are expected to produce a line of adventures for 4th edition under the GSL. Whether or not they'll be called Dungeon Crawl Classics remains to be seen, and there's a chance they'll ignore the GSL and produce it without a licence, relying on copyright law.

Its this copyright approach which most interests me about the whole thing. At the time I had no idea there were so many "D&D compatible" products for earlier editions, or the fun TSR's lawyers were having trying to defend their trademarks.

Necromancer Games warned WotC that if the GSL was too restrictive they risked a return to unlicensed products. Apparently that was taken by WotC to be a threat; if so that is a mindboggling response from a company which has done a pertty good job of boggling my mind this year.

Well, Adamant's Venture 4th, Kenzer's new version of their Kalamar setting and (I assume) Goodman's Gen-Con offerings will be compatible with the world's most popular role-playing game, but they won't be D&D.

Interesting times .... unless you don't care about open gaming and / or 3rd party support.