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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7659758" data-attributes="member: 18">Given the failure of Morningstar, and the total lack of an OGL or any other kind of licensing mechanism for 5E, this bodes pretty ill for the long-term future of 5E, I suspect. This is 2015. People want online tools for character generation and advancement.By cracking down on stuff like this, they successfully depend their IP, but no matter how politely they do it, they also illustrate their own failings, and tell fans of the game &quot;don't try to create any kind of programs for this, because we may just ask you to take them down&quot; (you can't even stick to the material in the basic stuff and be sure, in the absence of any OGL or legal language stating you can). It's nice that they're not being rude/abusive/legally nasty, but a polite takedown notice is still basically &quot;burn all the work you've done&quot;.There's absolutely no reason to believe that they're developing any digital tools like this themselves. They already contracted it out once and then rapidly called time on it, and historically, WotC has a very poor record of creating tools, and a very good record of announcing anything digital as soon as it's even planned.Realistically, though, unless WotC does make some sort of official API, or officially licensed offering, we're pretty much not going to get any tools for 5E, and that's just not going to work long-term, not if they want to maintain or grow D&amp;D, rather than to appeal to an ever-shrinking core of traditionalists.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 7659758, member: 18"] Given the failure of Morningstar, and the total lack of an OGL or any other kind of licensing mechanism for 5E, this bodes pretty ill for the long-term future of 5E, I suspect. This is 2015. People want online tools for character generation and advancement. By cracking down on stuff like this, they successfully depend their IP, but no matter how politely they do it, they also illustrate their own failings, and tell fans of the game "don't try to create any kind of programs for this, because we may just ask you to take them down" (you can't even stick to the material in the basic stuff and be sure, in the absence of any OGL or legal language stating you can). It's nice that they're not being rude/abusive/legally nasty, but a polite takedown notice is still basically "burn all the work you've done". There's absolutely no reason to believe that they're developing any digital tools like this themselves. They already contracted it out once and then rapidly called time on it, and historically, WotC has a very poor record of creating tools, and a very good record of announcing anything digital as soon as it's even planned. Realistically, though, unless WotC does make some sort of official API, or officially licensed offering, we're pretty much not going to get any tools for 5E, and that's just not going to work long-term, not if they want to maintain or grow D&D, rather than to appeal to an ever-shrinking core of traditionalists. [/QUOTE]

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