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I'd love to believe that, but the law is never truly settled. That's both the benefit and the problem with common law: lawyers can always find some new angle to argue, and a new precedent can suddenly change what is and isn't allowed. Look at Disney. There's a perpetual battle by their legal...

Hopefully there was more to the term sheets than those crumbs. If that was it, they were basically saying "we won't screw you over quite as much as other people - now we'll pause for you to heap thanks and praise upon us". The only thing that might have made that palatable is if they opened up...

The one where the stegosaurus promises not to roll over in its sleep, then one night it does and the skinny guy is barely saved in time by screaming. I'm sure I'm not the only person who took that story as a cautionary tale to be well heeded.

It might be too late. It's like the old story about the skinny guy and the stegosaurus. Now that it's proven it can roll over, you're going to find a new place to sleep.

I disagree with your interpretation here. OGL 1.0a does the opposite - it explicitly prevents others from using their IP, to a greater extent than even common law allows. They had no need to change the OGL in any way, shape, or form to prevent the sort of use you allude to. The license that...

Insightful and illuminating. The question, though, is whether it's worth the fight. I'd be curious to hear your take on Paizo's ORC and the movement to have the entire industry step out from the shadow of the OGL. It seems apparent that a single, biased, for-profit entity is a poor steward of...

Wonderful! My only comment is that this shouldn't be done in a vacuum. Kobold is rallying the troops, so (IMO) the best path forward is an industry partnership dedicated to releasing a truly open source game system.

I agree. There's a dearth of fey opponents in D&D while there's an overabundance of undead. Plus, having an evil fey hanging out with the undead makes for a nice encounter mix as they aren't susceptible to being turned.

In Eberron, there's an entire continent under a curse intended to all but guarantee travelers will become lost. Although, in general, one challenge with "you get lost" as an adventure design trope is that it falls under the category of "forced fails". All you need is a ranger who can roll a 30...

I've noticed the fog of war coming back in VTTs. It's been handled low-tech by DMs forever by slowly revealing the map as the party progresses, but with VTTs allowing for enforced lines of sight I see fog of war becoming more of an expected element of the game.

Don't forget about the cost of acting lessons. You need to learn how to really sell those dives if you want to win soccer games.

Fair. But keep in mind that Hasbro has been public since 1968 and has owned D&D since 1999. That's respectively 54 and 23 years of history. If serving the wants and needs of shareholders was such a death knell to the products, I'm sure we would all have abandoned D&D long ago.

Funnily enough, I was thinking of Monopoly too. But do we get to write it off as a terrible game? Lots of people love it. I love it, even though objectively I can't defend it mechanically, thematically, or in any other way. Soccer is the same. An awful game that seems to generate enormous...

My favourite game is still the original Pool of Radiance, 1988 IIRC. All the goldbox games are on gog now, so the temptation is always there to sink a few hundred hours more playtime into them. On the subject of value per hour, while it's hard for a TTRPG to compete with a video game, one thing...

I'm not seeing why. Financial success = success. Is there a game out there you're thinking of that's financially unsuccessful but is successful in some other way? Or the reverse, financially successful games that fail in other ways? I'd be very curious to see this game that's wildly financially...

With DMsGuild, you have to hope the exposure more than doubles your sales. If it does, it's still a net win after you cough up 50% of the revenues. If not, you'd be better off under the OGL either on DriveThru or doing your own thing.

I thought this was interesting. It's not news - I think they announced this a few months back. But I was reading this and thinking of the assorted suppositions that DDBVTT will be a closed system. The fact that WOTC, through DMs Guild, which is sort of OGL+ with increased access to product...

Please tell us your players appreciate your work ethic.

Sorry, but they aren't. Executives of successful companies think long term.