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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6190406" data-attributes="member: 37579">"Don't" is not the same as "can't" or "won't". They might never crack down on non-commercial use. Or their next CEO might have different views on the maintenance of the brand. And just because a site currently is non-comercial does not mean it will always be non-commercial. If a site becomes popular enough eventually someone might start thinking T-shirts or prints or PDFs. Maybe even a kickstarter. There's a couple webcomic exmples. <a href="http://rustyandco.com/" target="_blank">Rusty and Co.</a> and <a href="http://www.goblinscomic.org/" target="_blank">Goblins</a>. The former features a rust monster, which is part of the SRD. But during a Kickstarter to raise money for a book one of the rewards was a stuffy of said rust monster. And the OGL doesn't cover toys, so cue the lawsuit. And another character, a yuan-ti, had to be renamed. The webcomic spent several weeks down and his on-the-ball attorneys managed to settle with WotC before the creator spent years in a painful lawsuit.With one webcomic drawing attention, the writer of Goblins realized one of his main characters was also yuan-ti, identified as such by name. A monster not part of the SRD. So any books sold of his comics violated the OGL as well. Suddenly he had to go through hundreds of strips looking for examples of the offensive term and editing it out in favour of a game neutral term. All that could have been avoided with a dash of forethought and a glance at what WotC Product Identity and the OGL.If you can help someone, isn't it?WotC is somewhere in the middle, with TSR, Games Workshop, and Palladium on one end and someone like Paizo (or maybe Posthuman Studios) on the other. WotC isn't too bad but they're not particularly transparent, they tend to talk via legalese, and have a firm policy to send Cease & Desists first and ask questions later. There have been a dozen or so annoying incidents in the past decade from WotC. I know a couple free fan projects in the Dragonlance community got shut down hard by lawyers. And there are other fun incidents like the aforementioned Rusty & Co., Ema's Character Sheets, the Masterplan incident, and more. It's not worth being afraid of WotC, but it's worth being cautious. Not leaving yourself open in the event of a policy shift or change in management. It's simply a case of being better safe than sorry.</blockquote>

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