Mark CMG
Creative Mountain Games
Here is why I am unclear on the notice thing.
He says that he decided to leave his position at WotC last week.
He is now no longer working for them.
While he might be "no longer working on Dungeons & Dragons" we don't know if he might be finishing out his two week notice sharpening pencils. Still, I am guessing this decision has actually been coming for some time, since the change over in the L&L articles. He came on board last September, IIRC, about six months ago, so a six month contract seems likely. It might also explain why after the L&L articles were shifted away from him he stayed around this long.
There are obviously different ideas of the way the fifth edition should be built. Anyone reading the WotC articles and blogs can see they haven't (up to this point) settled on one direction. But now they are at a point where they need to build the new edition in a more serious way, with much more direction, for the subsequent playtesting to have any real use for the designers going forward.
If, as I speculate, he wanted to go with the OGL and make full use of all the great design ideas that has generated over the last decade+, and management was opposed to doing so, then that would be a very good reason to walk. It might even be that they brought Monte on board because they wanted his OGC without having to use the OGL, because that is one way around it as would be buying it outright, and maybe Monte didn't want to give up the IP but would have been fine using it under the OGL and even expanding on it, because it would remain either his or OGC. We may never know but these are certainly plausible scenarios.
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