D&D 5E Any word on the gaming license for Next?

[Dausuul]

I think I have. But here goes again.

Without it 5e will be at a disadvantage. Many folks will look at the lack of 5e being able to 'live' past it's support from WotC as a mark against it. Their competitor will have an advantage over 5e from day one.

Okay, that makes sense. I don't think it's a very big advantage--after all, people are still playing AD&D today--but I concede that that is an advantage.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Someone explain to me what the advantage to Wizards is of opening up the 5E core in such a way that a third party could produce a Pathfinder-equivalent for 5E.

I gave six back on Page 2, but lets get a little more specific: what is the advantage to Wizards of someone making a 5e-knockoff?

For one, the same advantage there is to Prada to have someone in China making a "Prada."

Being followed reinforces market supremacy. Authenticity has a substantial market value, and any 5e knock-off won't have that.

There's a lot of other advantages, too, but that's one big one.

It seems like the unstated assumption lying within the question is that the 5e ruleset is going to be what makes 5e a big seller, so anything that copies the rules is going to be able to copy/eat into the success. That isn't the case, though. If rulesets were what sold games, Pathfinder probably wouldn't be #1 (3e is a mess, man). What D&D NEXT will give its audience won't just be rules. So copying the rules shouldn't be any great threat to 5e.

 

[Nellisir]

Oh, frack. Just lost a post.

Insert this: 5.6 Reprinting. Licensee will not publish or reprint (a) the contents of the SRD in their entirety; or (b) definitions of any 4E References, whether or not similar to those listed in any product published by Wizards. into the OGL, and you've got a compromise between the OGL and the GSL without a poison pill. Make "entirety" something like "more than 30%", and you've locked out the wholesale rule copying while still leaving all the accessory 3PP lots of room. Super Genius Games could keep going without missing a beat. Make it applicable only to pdfs, and you've choked out almost all the name publishers without touching the little guys. WotC doesn't care about the remoras. The remoras are good. They don't want other big sharks around.

It's not OGL or GSL with no middle ground.

WotC doesn't want competitive rulesets. They do want weird niche rules, adventures, and little campaign stuff.

 

[dd.stevenson]

Well, it's not much more specific, but here Mearls introduces himself as "Senior Manager for the R&D team. I basically oversee everything about D&D: the role-playing games, digital games, the board games, basically the whole kit and kaboodle." That does seem to track pretty well with what Slaviscek wrote, though their titles are different.

Other than perhaps the novels, I'm convinced that Mearls does the same work as Slaviscek but as a Sr. Manager rather than a Director. However--the novels seem to be a pretty big deal, as they were part of Slaviscek's title.

Does anyone know whether Mearls is in charge of the novel lines? Any records of him making promises about what will happen in the future of these products?

That post does illuminate the question, IMO. Mearls does have a good deal of authority, but the higher-ups have to sign-off on any intellectual property issues. And there's some cross-department interaction, involved as well. I mean, on the face of it, I have no idea why the V.P. of Human Resources would veto exemptions OK'd by the V.P. of R&D. The legal department, I could see, but H.R.? At any rate, while Mearls is lord of all that he sees in the Land of D&D, decisions such as whether DLIMedia gets C&D'd, or whether Stan! gets his exemptions, or whether Next is OGL are certainly beyond his pay grade.

Stan!'s story coincides perfectly with my own institutional HR experiences. One of the reasons there is a VP of HR is to ensure that someone within HR has the stature to push policy level questions up to the CEO. And, now that the policy has been established, the CEO will not need to deal with questions of that particular nature again, because the VP of HR also has sufficient stature to enforce the policy.

The VP of Counsel would have similar authority to push important policy questions up to the CEO. However, Mearls would still have stakeholder-level input into these decisions and all other legal matters pertaining to D&D. For example, consider the way that the DDN playtest agreement changed to allow online play: this was a significant revision to the agreement and Mearls was able to secure this within a matter of days.

 

[darjr]

Okay, that makes sense. I don't think it's a very big advantage--after all, people are still playing AD&D today--but I concede that that is an advantage.

It's a big deal to me, but you're right, I can't know how big it'll be when 5e rolls out. It might not make much of a difference. I think it will, but I just don't know.