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  1. rknop

    WotC 5E Designer Mike Mearls Talks About The OGL Crisis

    Given that some of the biggest publishers have moved on to different open licenses (CC, ORC -- did Kobold do their own too?), I think this ship has sailed. I suppose it's possible that if WotC magically released a explicitly-irrevocable OGL, people might gravitate back to that, but even if they...
  2. rknop

    WotC 5E Designer Mike Mearls Talks About The OGL Crisis

    Network effects, if they manage to stay the market leader. The more people that publish compatible stuff for D&D that people like, the more demand there is for D&D overall, and the more people that seek out the core D&D books, or other things that the compatible stuff builds off of. Of course...
  3. rknop

    WotC 5E Designer Mike Mearls Talks About The OGL Crisis

    A "slew" is an understatement. Lots of people published lots of things under OGL. Somebody might want to combine some of that with something newer, but they can't. Over the history of the OGL, pulling from lots of different previous sources was a very common practice.
  4. rknop

    WotC 5E Designer Mike Mearls Talks About The OGL Crisis

    Are they releasing them under the OGL? WotC released the 5e SRD under Creative Commons, so you can use that. But, they did not release earlier editions under CC. So, if you want to use that stuff, or stuff that was derived from it, you have to use the OGL. Which is chancy, because it's not...
  5. rknop

    WotC 5E Designer Mike Mearls Talks About The OGL Crisis

    Yes, and this is one of the sad fallouts of the whole thing. They did effectively invalidate the OGL for future use. The only thing their backing down did was not (...for now...) prohibit the distribution of previously-published things that used the OGL. But publishers by and large will never...
  6. rknop

    WotC 5E Designer Mike Mearls Talks About The OGL Crisis

    What I remember being the single most egregious thing about the WOTC OGL fiasco was their attempting to de-validate the existing OGL. Having such a crappy deal for 5.5e was bad enough, but that was far worse. It would have retroactively removed permissions for publication from a large number of...
  7. rknop

    Freebies, Sales, and Charity Bundles for December 15, 2024

    Ok, thanks, that's all good.
  8. rknop

    Freebies, Sales, and Charity Bundles for December 15, 2024

    Because I got burned on the Discworld Humble Bundle, I want to check before considering buying: is the Free League mega bundle DRM-free PDFs? (A quick scan of the page didn't answer that for me )
  9. rknop

    Dragon Reflections #82

    I remember battlemats of that era; still have at least one somewhere in here. Does the [tm] version of battlemat even still exist? Nowadays we use it as a generic term, and there are a million varieties.
  10. rknop

    Dragon Reflections #80

    If you put 1,945,321 coins in a portable hole, does the entire thing collapse and eject all the coins to the Ethereal plane?
  11. rknop

    RPG Evolution: Inspiration from Venice

    Matt Riggsby wrote a "Renaissance Venice" supplement for GURPS (carrying on the longstanding tradition of "GURPS HIstoricals"): https://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/hotspots/renaissancevenice/
  12. rknop

    cyan starlight: Solo Roleplaying & Talking To Alan Bahr and Will Munn (Adept Icarus)

    I have to admit, I was very attracted to this, but it totally lost me when I saw that to get the endings, you used a QR code to go to a web server. This doesn't completely undermine it, of course, but it changes its category from a book that you can buy and keep in your library to cultural...
  13. rknop

    D&D General On This Day In 1983 The BBC Explains D&D

    Steve Jackson is talking, on the shelf behind him is Car Wars by Steve Jackson.. but not by him.
  14. rknop

    RPG Evolution: The Fair-Play Whodunnit

    The recognition of that sin in investigative scenarios is cited as one of the driving forces behind the creation of Pelgrane's "Gumshoe" system (used in Trail of Cthulhu, Swords of the Serpentine, Timewatch, Night's Black Agents, and others).
  15. rknop

    What's OLD is NEW Starter Box Is Here! Back This Fantasy/Modern/Sci-fi TTRPG With An Open License!

    Do the original three WOIN books have an open license, or is there a version (SRD or whatever) of them that does?
  16. rknop

    Worlds of Design: Goal-Oriented Play

    It's news to me that RPGs with group goals are not common today. It's certainly the norm in most organized play scenarios. I think the author is mistaking his experience in RPGs over time with being the standard experience.
  17. rknop

    Worlds of Design: Too Much Dice?

    3 is a bucketful? You need a bigger bucket.
  18. rknop

    The Plight of Owen KC Stephens and the Quest to Help Him

    Yeah, back in the mid 90's I was hit by a car while riding my unicycle (I'm not making this up), and broke my wrist. An ambulance showed up after somebody in a nearby house called 911 to drive me across Pasadena to the hospital. A month later when I got the bill, I was thinking I would have...
  19. rknop

    RPG Crowdfunding News – Shadowdark, Little Game Masters, Forge of Foes, and more

    A post-WWII fear that never manifested? It doesn't look exactly like what Orwell described, and, no it's not as extreme as all that. But it wasn't entirely unprophetic. Most of us are now monitored and tracked all the time. True, it's not directly by the government, it's mostly done for...
  20. rknop

    D&D (2024) RPG Evolution: Where Are the Board Gamers?

    I think the small, creator-owned space is also pretty huge in open source software. Yeah, what we hear about all the time are the big projects like Linux, Apache, the GNU C Library, etc. But, there are 10^7 small projects out there also licensed under the BSD or GPL licenses, either that stand...
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