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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 5602323" data-attributes="member: 15538">To an extent, 4e is designed to be unclonable. To play, you need a lot of explicit text explaining exceptional abilities. Some of its best value is in its online system, which you can't clone except by writing a DB yourself. All those Hellacute Donkyhorse names are at least, in theory, trademarkable and copyrightable, or at least, some of them are, and you don't want to play the guessing game as to which will be. The popular new races are all relatively unique creations: dragonborn, tiefling, warforged. The amount of textual support to create 4e probably exceeds the capacity of a small press operation. Through the GSL, they have bound the hands of at least a number of publishers who have put ink in the game at this point; walking away from the restrictive licensure would be costly. The books are designed with art, color, and whitespace at a ratio many smaller presses would find uneconomical. I think it's more likely 4e will spawn three to five alter-games, games built around the 4e core innovations but outside the 4e commercial and popular spaces. The words "paragon" and "epic" both appear in OGC sources; there is is very little about 4e that is bound up in their IP apart from reams and reams of power descriptions, creatures, and general RPG instruction.</blockquote>