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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8898558" data-attributes="member: 18">The trouble with this is, all that shows is that WotC are incompetent.Like literally bad at their jobs, bad at understanding their audience, bad at estimating risks.The OGL has been around for 23 years. In that time, basically nothing reputationally-damaging to WotC has happened because of it. WotC's own products have done some damage, though not a huge amount, because they're WotCs. If you had the Hadozee situation in an OGL game (and I'm sure there's stuff that's OGL that's worse), all that happens is people write off that developer, not WotC. There's no blowback to WotC.Further, destroying the OGL doesn't achieve their goal, because as has been much discussed, you don't actually need the OGL nor the SRD to make a book and say "5E Compatible", possibly even "Compatible with Dungeons & Dragons, 5th edition" (as long as you don't use any trade dress - Legal Eagle was very clear he believes that would fly). So all they've achieved is pissing people off and maybe setting 3PPs free of the OGL and free to make stuff that is exactly as much or as little of a "threat" to WotC and the D&D IP as it was before!If they wanted to protect the D&D IP better, the approach is blindingly obvious:1) Create a new logo for 3PP books that has an element of trade dress - the equivalent of the famed "Nintendo Seal of Approval" (ironically Nintendo long ago abandoned this and the Switch gladly will sell games full of bouncing tits and so on to kids - funny how that hasn't sunk the Switch, eh?),2) Create an SRD for 1D&D, and don't make it OGC.3) Create a GSL 2.0 which enforces whatever restrictions you like. If they were smart, this wouldn't include true poison-pill, though it would include "you can't publish the same product for both GSL and OGL".4) Offer people access to selling their books on Beyond. Leave it up to the companies involved to get the content creation right with Beyond's tools. Take 30% or whatever of their sales (more if you like!).Now have a clear separation between WotC-approved and "everything else". All your goals are met. You didn't have to attempt to destroy the OGL 1.0a.But they didn't do that. What they did was greedy and incompetent in the worst possible way. Even if they shut down the OGL 1.0a, unless they start a lot of lawsuits that are unlikely to go well for them, or get into incredibly murky waters by trying to ban non-OGL 1.1/2.0 stuff from Kickstarter (unlikely to go well for either them or Kickstarter - even if it's legal the PR damage to Kickstarter would be huge and would continue eating at it like acid for literally years). They asked for absolutely idiotic things they didn't even care about.So this idea that they were "being honest" is obviously wrong. They were not. At best, IP threat was one of a number of concerns. They're backpedalling desperate and trying to present it as the main concern, but it obviously wasn't, or they'd have offered a much better deal.</blockquote>

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