D&D 4E What to do with 4th Edition

[Jer]

What hornet's nest? You got three responses, one of which was a request for clarification, and the other two of which were not directly disagreeing with you. (I don't parse Jer's reply as being a direct disagreement, at any rate.)

To clarify - I was worried that there was something in there that was a problem when it came to the OGL or something - I didn't even think about the length being an issue.

 

[eyeheartawk]

To clarify - I was worried that there was something in there that was a problem when it came to the OGL or something - I didn't even think about the length being an issue.

I didn't get it at first either. I was like, who cares if it's 1, 3 or 10 pages it's at the back of the book and nobody reads it anyway. But I guess, the more works and companies that are referenced the more likely it is that somebody at sometime might have an issue down the line, despite how clear the OGL is on stuff like this.

I don't really know that I'd call that a eminent concern. I don't even know that is bears mentioning as a risk.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

Can you though?

Under what license would you publish it?

I don't think you can just make a new adventure under the OGL and say "It's for the 4th edition of the world's most popular roleplaying game". I think the GSL makes that real precarious.

I wasn't talking about "publishing" per se. Agreed, you would need the OGL comptabile retro clone.

I was just talking about an active user community on Foundry with tools to easily inport officially purchsed PDFs, particularly all the monster tokens like PF2e can do and characters from the offline character builder. And free user generated content (new monster tokens and maps basically). Still a risk I guess but seems like WotC might leave us alone...

 

[Jacob Lewis]

What hornet's nest? You got three responses, one of which was a request for clarification, and the other two of which were not directly disagreeing with you. (I don't parse Jer's reply as being a direct disagreement, at any rate.)

You know what? I started writing my response a few hours ago (yes, it can take that long for me to write a post sometimes) after those three responses came in pretty quick. I thought more would be flooding in while I was writing. I'll be happy if the topic ends there.

(For what it's worth I agree that a three-page-long Section 15 in an OGL is overlong for a ruleset that might be intended (in part) as a kernel or baseline for third-party extension.)

That was essentially my point. Some days I'm a little more verbose about what I want to say, and others I can cut right to the point. Today, I think my point was too quick and I just went fully in the other direction. Split the difference?

 

[Jacob Lewis]

I didn't get it at first either. I was like, who cares if it's 1, 3 or 10 pages it's at the back of the book and nobody reads it anyway. But I guess, the more works and companies that are referenced the more likely it is that somebody at sometime might have an issue down the line, despite how clear the OGL is on stuff like this.

I don't really know that I'd call that a eminent concern. I don't even know that is bears mentioning as a risk.

I have a concern, so I mentioned the risk.

More important to me, however, is what it says about the author and the OGL. This is not an efficient product if its borrowing from every possible source it can find. That's all well and go for the specific game they want to create, but not for an all-purpose OGL, which I believe is what we're discussing here. (Aren't we? Everyone seems to keep glossing over that little distinction.)

 

[Garthanos]

I have a concern, so I mentioned the risk.

More important to me, however, is what it says about the author and the OGL. This is not an efficient product if its borrowing from every possible source it can find. That's all well and go for the specific game they want to create, but not for an all-purpose OGL,

I would say they want to have a heritage for a 4e element within OGL to make sure it all could be covered.
All Purpose I thought the purpose was to find ALL 4e elements existing in the OGL in some form.

which I believe is what we're discussing here. (Aren't we? Everyone seems to keep glossing over that little distinction.)

Not sure I under stand the distinction

 

[Jacob Lewis]

I would say they want to have a heritage for a 4e element within OGL to make sure it all could be covered.
All Purpose I thought the purpose was to find ALL 4e elements existing in the OGL in some form.

Not sure I under stand the distinction

I'll try to explain how I see it. And to be fair, I could be wrong about this. Here goes.

I think we're all in agreement that 4e needs an OGL that everyone can use to make whatever 4e-like game they want. An OGL for the community, if you will.

I look at the OGL for Orcus and see an OGL specifically for Orcus. Cool, but I'm not interested in Orcus for reasons that aren't important.

The OGL for Orcus and the OGL for the community are different things. Orcus is not the community. It may be a specific subset of it, in which case it only serves that section of the community.

Now. As I have mentioned at some point, I'm not the expert on OGLs and copyright stuff. I certainly don't pretend to be. So what am I missing about the Orcus OGL that makes it a candidate for the whole community to start adapting?

More specifically, why do we need to create OGLs within OGLs within OGLs to make a system usable?? It seems like a lot of redundancy. Can we not just go to the source (some suggested using 3e or 5e) and create a base for what is needed, then branch out from there? I guess I see Orcus as a branch of an OGL and not close enough to the root.

 

[glass]

More specifically, why do we need to create OGLs within OGLs within OGLs to make a system usable?

We don't, there is literally exacly one OGL (1.0A) that everything has to use. EDIT: Which is why your posts on the matter to date have been rather difficult to follow. EDIT2: Sorry, that was a tad dismissive. I will try to come up with better response.

_
glass.

 

[bert1001 fka bert1000]

ORCUS is probably the closest for a 4E baseline to start from... then folks can publish 'OGL alternates' incorporating their 'fixes'... but at least it creates a central hub similar to OSRIC

I've taken a look but can't easily wrap my head around it. It doesn't look like a "reproduce 4e exactly 1-1 but change the names when needed" retroclone but I could be wrong? But maybe the work has been done in terms of creating entirely new games based on 4e but not as good for tweaking original 4e or creating new content for original 4e that is OGL compatible?

Can anyone verify or correct me if I'm wrong with this take?

 

[Garthanos]

More specifically, why do we need to create OGLs within OGLs within OGLs to make a system usable?? It seems like a lot of redundancy.

The references of various other OGLs are to justify "recreation" of 4e ---> as opposed to just claiming this is content that happens to look like 4e which has a nasty license

It is an act of self defense