D&D 4E Is there any 4e Retro Clones out there?

Tony Vargas · Nov 24, 2015

AbdulAlhazred said:
GSL really is a very LENIENT license, OGL just spoiled people. Very few systems allow even supplements or adventures to be written by 3PPs. You CAN write 4e material of any sort, it just can't reuse terms and material from WotC publications.

Which does rule out anything remotely like a PF-style 'clone.'

Rechan said:
I was hoping someone might have "fixed" it. Streamlined it, addressed various problems, etc, while still able to use those old books/not make the old stuff rubbish. Too much to hope for, I suppose.

Yep, no hope there. Not in the realm of possibilities for legal reasons, alone.

AbdulAlhazred said:
It would be HARD to make a 'retro clone' of 4e, but maybe not impossible. Its just not a subject of nostalgia, we still HAVE 4e.

Nostalgia kicks in 20-30 years down the line, so you're talking a window most likely somewhere in the 2030s. Maybe we can play a 4e clone in the common room of our assisted-living communities.

Rechan said:
Has WotC removed all the 4e stuff from the online tools/discontinued it?

Not yet, though obsolescence is inevitable.

delericho · Nov 24, 2015

Tony Vargas said:
All those are d20 clones based on the OGL. The OGL doesn't work for 4e and the GSL doesn't allow re-printing of core material the way the OGL does.

People can and do use the OGL for 4e material. Though doing an out-and-out clone would be very difficult, and potentially risky - WotC's willingness to let a clone of a long out-of-print edition slide may well be different from an edition they've just moved on from. So it might be possible, but you should be very careful.

AbdulAlhazred · Nov 25, 2015

delericho said:
People can and do use the OGL for 4e material. Though doing an out-and-out clone would be very difficult, and potentially risky - WotC's willingness to let a clone of a long out-of-print edition slide may well be different from an edition they've just moved on from. So it might be possible, but you should be very careful.

Right, 4e is still D&D, and MANY of the terms and concepts entered a permanently licensed state when the OGL came into existence. That makes it hard to say exactly what they might be able to try to ding you for. This is added to limits on what different forms of IP can cover to start with. Its grey enough that businesses stay out of it. So we have games like Strike! that clearly mirror a lot of the aesthetics and design choices of 4e, but in terms of detailed mechanics and content bear little relation to it, and we have games that are clearly d20-derived that perhaps overlap with 4e in some of the same ways, like 13a, but owe most of their actual mechanics to 3e/d20 or just 'general practice' that has been recycled in various forms for 30 years.

Tony Vargas · Nov 25, 2015

AbdulAlhazred said:
Right, 4e is still D&D, and MANY of the terms and concepts entered a permanently licensed state when the OGL came into existence. That makes it hard to say exactly what they might be able to try to ding you for. This is added to limits on what different forms of IP can cover to start with. Its grey enough that businesses stay out of it. So we have games like Strike! that clearly mirror a lot of the aesthetics and design choices of 4e, but in terms of detailed mechanics and content bear little relation to it, and we have games that are clearly d20-derived that perhaps overlap with 4e in some of the same ways, like 13a, but owe most of their actual mechanics to 3e/d20 or just 'general practice' that has been recycled in various forms for 30 years.

But, we do not have and can't ever legally get a 4e 'clone' the way 3.5 was cloned by Pathfinder.

Morrus · Nov 25, 2015

Tony Vargas said:
But, we do not have and can't ever legally get a 4e 'clone' the way 3.5 was cloned by Pathfinder.

Sure you can. You just have to be really, really careful. You may need to change a couple of terms.

The barrier is simply that it's an incredible amount of work for an audience unknown in size. If market research indicated it would sell, somebody would do it.

Tony Vargas · Nov 25, 2015

Morrus said:
Sure you can. You just have to be really, really careful.

Which Paizo didn't have to be with Pathfinder. You could clone 3.5 because the core of 3.5 was sitting out there in the SRD. You could take that and mold it into a facsimile of earlier editions, too, because 3.5 didn't throw away a whole lot of what came before. You can't legally do either of those things to clone 4e, which added a whole lot that was never in the SRD.

The barrier is simply that it's an incredible amount of work for an audience unknown in size.

The size of the RPG market is known, and it's small.

Banging out an OGL game is easy, you just pull up the SRD and work with it, and it's perfectly legal.
You can't clone 4e that way.

You could try to skate the letter of the law and come up with something close that didn't technically violate a Hasbro copyright, but if you'd be looking at a legal battle, even if you got it exactly right. No one's bothered to do that in the RPG market since Arduin Grimoire, at the height of the fad. The market just isn't worth fighting such a legal battle over anymore.

Morrus · Nov 25, 2015

Tony Vargas said:
Which Paizo didn't have to be with Pathfinder. You could clone 3.5 because the core of 3.5 was sitting out there in the SRD. You could take that and mold it into a facsimile of earlier editions, too, because 3.5 didn't throw away a whole lot of what came before. You can't legally do either of those things to clone 4e, which added a whole lot that was never in the SRD.

The size of the RPG market is known, and it's small.

Banging out an OGL game is easy, you just pull up the SRD and work with it, and it's perfectly legal.
You can't clone 4e that way.

You could try to skate the letter of the law and come up with something close that didn't technically violate a Hasbro copyright, but if you'd be looking at a legal battle, even if you got it exactly right. No one's bothered to do that in the RPG market since Arduin Grimoire, at the height of the fad. The market just isn't worth fighting such a legal battle over anymore.

You just repeated what I said, but in a much more long-winded, less elegant way.

Although no, nobody has properly surveyed the size of the RPG market since 1999's Game Industry Survey commissioned by WotC. Certainly nobody has surveyed the size of the 4E market any time recently. I was involved in a project to do exactly that (the former, not the latter) but it fell through as the costs to do so are surprisingly high.

AbdulAlhazred · Nov 25, 2015

Morrus said:
Sure you can. You just have to be really, really careful. You may need to change a couple of terms.

The barrier is simply that it's an incredible amount of work for an audience unknown in size. If market research indicated it would sell, somebody would do it.

I think its more than 'a couple' of terms. You couldn't use any class name, power name, feat name, item name, etc that wasn't part of the OGL licensed material. You probably cannot use any of the stat blocks, power blocks, etc as formatted (probably covered by design patents, certainly NOT covered by OGL). Then there's the question of the 'overall similarity', which CAN be an issue, is the work 'derivative', and that could be a question of just how precisely the mechanics of your clone recapitulate those of the actual game, particularly if they use many of the same (OGL covered) terms in the same ways, such that the audience would understand it to be the same game.

IANAL for sure, but I've been around a lot of similar issues. I can almost assure you no investor with any common sense would come within 2 miles of that project, not unless the potential return was really startlingly high. Its just NEVER going to happen, realistically. 4e is dead and any cloning remains at least decades into the future.

ccs · Nov 25, 2015

Tony Vargas said:
But, we do not have and can't ever legally get a 4e 'clone' the way 3.5 was cloned by Pathfinder.

Good.

Tony Vargas · Nov 25, 2015

Morrus said:
If market research indicated it would sell, somebody would do it.

Morrus said:
Although no, nobody has properly surveyed the size of the RPG market since 1999's Game Industry Survey commissioned by WotC. Certainly nobody has surveyed the size of the 4E market any time recently. I was involved in a project to do exactly that (the former, not the latter) but it fell through as the costs to do so are surprisingly high.

So, the RPG industry isn't even worth the effort needed to nail down the size of its market, let alone the market research to determine if a hypothetical clone of an RPG without benefit of a ready-made SRD & permissive OGL, "would sell" enough to justify the design challenges and legal minefield involved.