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See it’s getting all confused again. The “contracts” that WotC sent to be signed were specifically designated “term sheets.” That is explicitly a draft, in that even both parties are immediately happy and sign it, it only functions as a letter of intent while the legal teams hammer out the real...

Kyle Brink said he shielded the creative team from the discussions, which tracks with other reports that WotC rank and file were unaware of what was in OGL 1.1 and were caught by surprise. I also don’t know why he would lie about that. If the idea came from creative, I find it hard to believe...

This is a very good point, and IMO somewhat lends credence to the idea that they were worried more about implementations in future technology than specifically trying to cripple the current major VTTs. (With the caveat that there were almost certainly people within WotC that would have been...

I really don’t know what she expected him to say about how Wizards will regain trust. Trust is built on a pattern of behavior. Once lost in the manner in which Wizards did, it’s going to take time to regain, and that can only be done by communicating intent and then following through. So...

Which contract? The term sheets, which by definition are open to negotiation, or the OGL 1.1, which could not have been entered into unless someone published work under it? I mean, no one sends out a contract draft with the terms they don't want to be final. That doesn't mean they expect to get...

I'm not sure we can make that presumption. A term sheet being pre-signed doesn't mean the second party is expected to sign it. It just means that the pre-signing party is perfectly happy with the draft as is, and if the other party is happy as well, then the pre-signing is simply an expedient so...

Let me see if I can bridge the disconnect. OGL 1.1 was indisputably a draft. It was never published, never put into effect, never executed. Linda Codega even called it a draft. I also agree with you 1000% that contract offers are sent with both drafts of the contract (in this case, the term...

The applicant selection process considers diversity. The actual hiring is blind, with no identification information, so it can be made (as much as possible) on skill alone. Incidentally, this is not just to remove bias in hiring or not hiring minorities, but to also remove bias in judging...

He mentioned that he’d been talking with Ginny Di before this interview, so expect that to drop fairly soon.

Time stamps are included in the video’s dooblidoo. I really appreciated how Teos gave the interview room to breathe, asking good, even pointed questions, without expecting Kyle to dish on all the internal goings-on at WotC, or to throw anyone under the bus.

Best of both worlds! Duran Duran was what I listened to when my mom drove me to school, and Big Head Todd and the Monsters are what I listened to when I drove myself to school!

In the Alphastream interview, he said that D&D VP Dan Rawson was his immediate superior, with whom he meets everyday, and above Rawson is WotC CEO Cynthia Williams, with whom he meets a couple times a week. Per that same interview, he says he was aware of the plans, but shielded them from his...

The advantage of putting 3.5 in CC is that it utterly removes any incentive for future WotC execs to try and deauthorize OGL 1.0. That shores up the banks of the OGL’s safe harbor, allowing creators to make use of it if they want access to the older material, or of its inherent share alike...

I would even argue that the incompatibility of 3E and 3.5 is somewhat overstated. To be sure, 3.5 left a lot of 3PP works in a lurch, and from a "system mastery" standpoint, many builds and mechanical synergies were invalidated. But the core engine was still the same, and I daresay for most...

The Complete [Character Class] Handbooks were just about all crunch, with loads of class kits, new rules, new spells, and items. What you're saying doesn't track at all.

Power creep is a separate issue from compatibility, at least in the margins we’re talking about. 1D&D baseline characters may indeed be on average more powerful than their 5e counterparts, but if Wizards is designing them so that they fit in with 5e adventures, we can expect them to be within...

That doesn’t exactly follow. As I said, we can generally expect that to be the case, but there are going to be edge cases, rough edges, and moments of friction. All I’m noting is that Wizards has never promised that they would design such things away. That’s just par for the course when you’re...

Wizards has never made this claim. They've only defined backward compatibility as "fifth edition adventures and supplements will work in One D&D." Cross-pollination of characters, per se, never enters into it. Inasmuch as 5e adventures working with the 1D&D core rules, we can assume that...

I’m fairly sure that the speed through which the announcement and the CC release happened was due to the desire to push it through before corporate changed their minds. In particular, WotC has a history of seemingly unrelated VPs butting in to scuttle plans by the rank and file.

Yeah, actually, I know that. But I don't know anything about him beyond that. Except that he has tremendous balls of steel, apparently.