D&D 4E 4E: What we think we know
- Thread starter MerricB
- Start date
Who needs the OGL? Seriously. You can't copyright or trademark rules and there are ways to say on the cover "compatible with..." legally. The ability to say "usuable with..." "compatible with..." etc. is not limited to the world of games. The only thing left is product identity, and that is not some uber IP right, far from it. And product identity can be easily avoided, unless you think you can't posibly publish without saying Mind Flayer, etc., in every product. For example, changing hobbit to halfling seemed to work pretty well for TSR.
Third party publishers should band together and pony up the $30K-$40K for a reasoned opinion of counsel from a tier 1 firm and finally get some sense of certainty here. Heck, they may even be able to use the market power of WotC/Hasbro against it. That is if your goal is to make materials compatible with the rules. If you want to use logos, the "official" designator, etc. then well I guess you may want that license.
Third party publishers should band together and pony up the $30K-$40K for a reasoned opinion of counsel from a tier 1 firm and finally get some sense of certainty here. Heck, they may even be able to use the market power of WotC/Hasbro against it. That is if your goal is to make materials compatible with the rules. If you want to use logos, the "official" designator, etc. then well I guess you may want that license.
Garnfellow
Explorer
thormagni said:
Support for the OGL was my single biggest concern about 4e; I feel much better about this project now.
thormagni
Explorer
MerricB said:Cool, thanks muchly!
(You managed to delay my bedtime by a few minutes with that news!)
Cheers!
Sorry to keep you from your sleep.
It looks like the report from theminiaturespage.net is the verbatim press release minus a line and the closing paragraph:
For more information, visit our digital newsroom at www.wizards.com/gencon2007
Wizards of the Coast, Inc., a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. (NYSE HAS), is a worldwide leader in the trading card ... etc. etc.
Again, I think this is supposed to hit the wires at 930 eastern time
thormagni
Explorer
grodog said:
They mentioned that Dungeon and Dragon would both be represented on the new Web site and new articles would appear three times a week. Then once a month the best of those would be combined into a "magazine" but it was unclear to me whether that "magazine" would be digital or an actual print product.
grodog said:
For more background on this:
http://www.gleemax.com/articles/announcement010.html
http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=896542
http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=901372
In particular:
"I know that the D&D guys are planning to use Gleemax to help them find new writing talent. They still intend to pay writers for magazine-style content and the easiest way to find those writers is going to be to browse the user-generated content portions of Gleemax and see who the audience is rating highest. That's also a good way to find the content itself.
"There's no kind of automatic compensation guarantees built in because one thing that happens all the time is that multiple people will think up the same idea. I constantly see "new" Magic cards online that I know are already in our database. In the Great Designer Search there were several times when a designer submitted a card that was already in an upcoming set that we had signed off on but had not yet published.
"So we're not promising any sort of compensation because we don't want to wind up in a position where someone is demanding compensation that isn't called for. However, we do believe in identifying and rewarding talented contributors and we'll definitely be watching the community to see who we might want to work with as contractors or even, hypothetically, as employees." - Randy Buehler
Cheers!
