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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lizard" data-source="post: 4133447" data-attributes="member: 1054">Well, somewhere inside me is a cheerful optimist who likes to think that WOTC looked at the market, looked at initiatives like Pathfinder, looked at how ambivalent many companies are about 4e, and decided, "Y'know what? Let's just keep the OGL, make a new 4e STL, and try to make sure complying with the STL has such great benefits for companies that they'll really want to do it and drive our core book sales."This is the same part of me that feeds nickles into slot machines.The realist in me says that there will be nothing like an "Open" license. Licenses will be issued to specific companies who meet specific terms, and there will be limits on product type, product costs (no 2.00 PDFs flooding the market), number of products per year (no drowning the market in a dozen different sourcebooks inside of three months), general content limits (already discussed), and so on. The only thing which will be different from normal IP licensing is that the license will be either free (to companies which meet the requirements) or *relatively* low cost, and there will likely be no requirement for inspection/approval of products (that costs WOTC money for little gain). They will be able to 'kill' the license for any product or any company at will. There will probably be a clause allowing very limited reuse of the 3x SRD solely for purposes of 'migrating' existing products, though I suspect that will be closely watched. A key reason, publically stated, for holding back things like Druids and Frost Giants is to make the PHB II, MMII, etc, seem more 'core', so I doubt they're going to want to see this undermined by third-party replacements out a year early.It will be interesting to see how close the final policy is to my prediction. I suspect WOTC marketing will 'spin' this as 'open' because "There's no fee" (maybe) or "There's no approval process". If my prediction is right, I think it will be bad for WOTCs bottom line, hurt adoption of 4e, and put WOTC in the unenviable position of competing with their own former game system, which will remain actively supported by professional publishers, something which never happened with any prior upgrade.EDIT: Another thing to consider is that part of the reason for the OGL was to end the problem of fan sites producing 'compatible with' material. After the late 90s idiocy of "We have trademarked 'armor class'", WOTC needed to win back the Internet. Ironically, free fan made material was relatively sparse for 3e, mostly because anyone who could produce anything even halfway worth using went into publishing. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> (I used to be a big fan of Blue Troll, back in the day) Anyway, nowadays, WOTC doesn't want fans posting their homebrew stuff on their own sites -- they want everyone on Gleemax. This is another reason I think the GSL is going to be narrowly tailored for commercial use only -- they want to draw people to their own, pay, site, and I think any website which began to be known as a source of high quality fan-made 4e 'crunch' will find a C&D coming down the pike.</blockquote>

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