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Hasbro’s next earnings call will be soon. Expect this and MTG to be raised as questions. I’ve got to think they want it resolved before any uncertainty has an impact on the stock price. If they don’t have clear answers, they could be in trouble with the market. Any time a company makes it to...

WotC/Hasbro leadership have painted themselves into a corner. They could save the D&D brand by abandoning this strategy, but they would lose their jobs and their options. So they’ll keep fighting until the end. They’ve been incentivized to make bad decisions.

They have to do this. If they don’t, their whole D&D Beyond strategy falls apart. They would have to admit that they vastly overpaid for D&D Beyond. Taking a $146M write down less than a year after purchasing that asset would not be viewed favorably by the market. It might be a good time to...

Not the valuable portion of WotC’s IP. Not the Forgotten Realms, etc. that you can access through DMs Guild for 50% royalties. Only the 5.1 SRD content you currently can use for 0% royalties. And you still can’t claim compatibility with D&D or their latest release. And you still might need to...

The point is, there are a ton of 5e players out there with tons of 5e Player’s Handbooks. Level Up is likely the game that is closest to 5e, to the point that content from one game can be used in the other. Make it easy for those players to pick up a Level Up adventure and play it. Most of an...

Not necessarily. Assuming that you can keep selling existing Level Up rule books, which WotC does not seem to be contesting and rests on very solid legal foundation, you can make an abbreviated reference document under a new license that allows 3PP to support Level Up. That reference document...

You don’t need to de-OGL-ify Level Up. It looks like existing OGL 1.0a products are safe from any threats from WotC. All that is needed is a method of making supporting materials for Level Up. That’s pretty simple—adventures, campaign worlds, spells, monsters, sub-classes, etc. can easily be...

Pathfinder 2e 🤣

To not be supportable by previous SRDs it would need to be completely unrecognizable as D&D. No classes, no attributes, no spells, no monsters, etc.

They can all be supported by the open game content in the 3.5 SRD released under OGL 1.0a.

To save you a little more time: The difference between OGL 1.0 and OGL 1.0a is that "Trademark" has been changed to "Trademark or Registered Trademark" in 7. Use of Product Identity. When Wizards is saying that 1.0(a) "is no longer an authorized license agreement", they are using 1.0(a) to...

Look at the FAQ directly below the first appearance of the license. Open Game License v0.1 Simplified They definitely did intend for the license to be used for non-WotC content. It was meant to be used by anyone "You can use this license to provide a strong copyleft to any material, including...

If you look at the archive of the OGL on the Open Gaming Foundation website, you see that there is a version .02 that was for comment and critique and could not be used at that time. It was not approved. https://web.archive.org/web/20000817030933/http://www.opengamingfoundation.org:80/ogl.html...

But they did. Through the OGL. How do you protect game content when everybody says game content isn’t copyrightable? You get everybody to agree that certain content (open game content) is copyrightable by having them agree to a license to that content. You also get them to agree that other...

It’s not quite right. WotC has copyright on the content of the portion of their SRDs that is copyrightable. They also have copyright on derivative works that other creators of open game content have made. Those creators also have copyright on the original portions of the derivative works and any...

Have you heard of this game called Level Up, produced by a game publisher of some note? It would likely be compatible with whatever license Paizo produces, as it references Pathfinder in its OGL section 15. It plays very much like 5e—so much so that you can have 5e and Level Up characters in...

I don’t think that is likely. I think the companies are very aware of the network effects and will be careful to build on them. They understand that they can strengthen the RPG community by cooperating and have it benefit them all.

The problem for Wizards is that D&D Beyond isn’t worth $146M without the revocation of the OGL and the creation of an walled garden. They are kind of screwed either way. Create a walled garden that no one is willing to join with their current strategy or go try to go back to the previous status...

Double post

Which does bring up an interesting point. There are definitely some elements of later 3.5, 4e, 5e that are derived from the alternate rules in Unearthed Arcana, including the original, non-derivative open game content from Mutants and Masterminds and Swords of Our Fathers that is included in...