Another Cease and Desist Letter: 4E Powercards

[DaveMage]

I like the suggestion earlier that rather than shut things like this down - find a way to partner with it. It may not be possible in all (or even most) cases, but wouldn't it be nice if that was the first course of action rather than a C&D? (And perhaps they did try, but we don't have such information.)

Maybe I'm a sentimental fool*, but I love stories like the Suzanne Vega / D.N.A. relationship where rather than suing D.N.A. for using her a capella version of "Tom's Diner" with their music, A&M records and she made a deal with them and released it.

I think the danger in simply sending C&Ds to sites that aren't making money, is tht you may be alienating some of your most-passionate fanbase. That's not a good idea, IMO. (But then, that's a whole other thread, isn't it? )


*No "maybe" about it.

 

[JohnRTroy]

People keep quoting Ryan Dancy's reasons for the OGL. However, they forget one prediction he made that failed.

He predicted that if there was a choice with either OGL products or a closed and different version of D&D, people would choose the OGL version and reject any radical changes D&D's future owners might make to D&D.

D&D was massively changed from 3e to 4e.
The OGL was not used for D&D rules.

It looks like he was wrong.

If you guys want to prove him RIGHT, do a mass exodus from D&D and support an OGL fork of the 3e D&D ruleset. If you want to prove Ryan's philosophy right, I'd like to see over 50% of the market reject D&D and move to the other games.

But trying to make D&D 4e "more open" is not going to work, neither will trying to reverse engineer it, etc. WoTC made their choice.

Personally, in this day and age, I wonder why people spend so much time working on stuff they know they don't have 100% control over. A lot of creators for comics learned this lesson and focused on independent publishing. Gary Gygax never really went back to D&D--while he ended up doing Castle Zagyg, he ended up creating 2 widely-different games, even though he had offers to do D&D stuff with TSR and WoTC--and he walked away from stuff he had no control over.

That's the real model for being creative--make stuff you 100% control. That's why I take a dimmer view on "fan fiction" or "derivative works". All the effort going into working on stuff that goes beyond "fair use" tends to make me think these guys are wasting a lot of creative energy that could go to something else.

As far as people "lockstep-defending" WoTC...I think it's a reaction to all the radical statements made in this decade by the moves towards "openness", giving away stuff for free, and turning a blind eye towards privacy.

There's a lot of people who care about raving against "the man", and I think there are some frightening entitlement issues from the masses. People forget "the man" sometimes is a little guy like you and me who has rights. If I was a novelist of childrens books and discovered "slash fiction", I could see myself engaging in a lawsuit and attempting to shut things down, because I don't want my work corrupted by fan-fiction.

While I am critical of WoTC's rather lax attitude towards the fan community with this release (the GSL situation should have been handled a lot better), I am also critical of reactionary people who take the OGL too far and focus more on how the game is licensed and should be released. There are no "thought police", we are free to create our own campaign settings, rules, and adventures in our own homes. Publishing derivative works--even for free--is a right reserved for the creators to control, and even in this day and age of people having blogs, message boards, etc, I defend the right of authors to have this control--from Disney to my friend who has written his own novella.

 

[Mercutio01]

In case my point above is not clear enough. I do not exclude the possibility that Wotc could have been behind the operating and closing down of these sites for marketing reasons. Yes, this is a conspiracy theory but if you think about it, it could also be some very efficient marketing -why? because the promotion comes from a fan, rather than the seller.

That's ridiculous. And it shows that you simply don't have a clue when it comes to the Power Card creation scene here on ENWorld. I'm quite positive that none of us who made designs of power cards are WotC plants.

 

[DaveMage]

People keep quoting Ryan Dancy's reasons for the OGL. However, they forget one prediction he made that failed.

He predicted that if there was a choice with either OGL products or a closed and different version of D&D, people would choose the OGL version and reject any radical changes D&D's future owners might make to D&D.

If this was his prediction verbatim, then his prediction is correct. I have chosen the OGL version and rejected the changes of 4E. There are many, many others like me.

If his prediction was that MOST people or ALL people would do so, then I agree, his prediction seems to be incorrect. (But without the lack of real data, who knows?)

 

[dm4hire]

This could be debated either way Piratecat. Since there were no offical power cards or anyway of doing it via WotC (until recently with the advent of the character generator and soon the actual cards) as long as they were not making profit WotC had to prove that by producing them the website was infracting on their copyright in away to deny them money. Which would have been hard pressed since players still need the PH to play the game; granted they only need one.

If you follow the threads about piracy on Techdirt you'll see arguements on both sides proving how sites like the aforementioned actually do drive the market. Most people prefer to be legitamit and having gotten a taste of what could be obtained most people actually go out and buy the real deal. One way of looking at it from a marketing aspect that WotC should have done was not send an immediate C&D but request information as to how successful it was then compare and then offer to purchase the method of creation if it was proving to be more popular. Or working with them so that perhaps they were the only sactioned site outside of WotC where you could acquire them via the web but require free advertising for WotC products.

A good case in point was the recent dispute Hasbro had with Scrabulous. The backlash that happened from their C&D to the main site and Facebook was horrible for the company and it was proven that Scrabulous had actually increased sales of Scrabble. Their C&D resulted in a legalized variant game being made which doesn't have quite the same following, nor does Hasbro's official Scrabble, so both sides lost out.

I just hope that WotC doesn't put a clamp on the template, which could be viewed as a character sheet. I also hope that WotC is really weighing their options before issuing the C&D or they will start taking on the persona of the RIAA in a lot of peoples minds and we all know how that has worked out for the recording industry, ticking off the fans is not a good thing.

I agree that a fan site guideline would help a lot if they are going to try and limit fans and it would need to be posted were it can be easily found and referred to.

 

[xechnao]

I know certain parties have argued that the Bad-OGL outweitghed the Good-OGL but my own experience doesn't bear that out. And with the number of reviews available on the web, I never felt I was an uninformed consumer when purchasing a 3rd-party product.

For every Book of Erotic Fantasy (which I think was d20 license, not OGL), I can site multiples that were top notch products, such as Mutants & Masterminds, Conan OGL, True 20, Game of Thrones, etc. Also none of those products diminished my WotC purchases - it increased them due to the fact that I could plug-n-play so much of it.

I wanted to see a different system developed for Conan's S&S than D20 3e for example. Mongoose did not choose to go with D20 because it is the most suitable system for playing in Hyboria IMO. It went for other reasons. Same feelings for a Game of Thrones.

 

[Mournblade94]

I am not very happy with the 4E product line and the direction that the D&D brand has taken. Having said that I don't think its fair to say that the WOTC designers have no integrity.

I see where this post implied that, but I meant the entity that is WOTC, not the designers. Please refer to a previous post, I made where I address the integrity of designers. I DO BELIEVE the designers have integrity.

WOTC has produced a game they thought a lot of gamers would enjoy. I don't believe these designers would work on something if they didn't believe that.

I believe the designers did their best with the parameters.

I prefer Coke over Pepsi. Does this mean that Pepsico has no integrity and produced cola they knew to be inferior to the competition for the sole purpose of pissing me off?

If coke had a perfectly good drink, and then coca cola changed thier drink to that of homogenized milk, I would be annoyed. WOTC made homogenized D&D.

There are other considerations that might have an impact on the current products. Hasbro beancounters wanting more revenue from thier IP than the normal rpg medium typically producers is certainly a possibility but thats far and away a different bag of rats from a lack of integrity by the designers.

Agreed

Again, I do not think the designers lack integrity.

I think the Heads of WOTC with which the designers must work lack the will to ensure their product stands up to the D&D name.

I find 4th edition to be a botched attempt, but I will still buy STAR WARS because it is a good system.

I don't think 4th edition is doing as well as people think in real space. My game store needs ME to run D&D 4th edition on games day because they cannot find enough DM's willing to run it.

Most of the criticism I hear from people in the store is... its not D&D.

That is what I mean by lack of integrity.

 

[JohnRTroy]

If this was his prediction verbatim, then his prediction is correct. I have chosen the OGL version and rejected the changes of 4E. There are many, many others like me.

If his prediction was that MOST people or ALL people would do so, then I agree, his prediction seems to be incorrect. (But without the lack of real data, who knows?)

IIRC he predicted "the majority of players" would reject it. Which apparently didn't happen.

 

[jaerdaph]

Any site that posts actual content from the game that WotC charges for should expect this to happen. If I sold a book, and people were extracting it's content and giving it away for free, I'd want them to stop.

x3

I agree 100%. WotC did nothing wrong.

 

[DaveMage]

IIRC he predicted "the majority of players" would reject it. Which apparently didn't happen.

True. (Although the unquestionably-valid EN World poll of a few weeks ago indicated that 58% had NOT switched to 4E.)