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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6273308" data-attributes="member: 2067">I'm not sure I see an indication that this is driven by the legal team.The re-branding initiative may have been driven in part by OGL . One of the things re-branding is sometimes good for is in distinguishing you from a lot of competition, and if the managers of the brand saw the existence of this vast field of published off-brand D&D as a "muddying of the identity" of some sort, actually confusing people and reducing the value of D&D because of a lot of knock-offs, then re-branding is one logical approach to solving that issue.That's not a legal consideration, though. It's still a branding/marketing consideration. It's also deeply misguided for a library of reasons. Among those reasons is (a) a lack of appreciation for the market forces of the "<a href="http://www.theknockoffeconomy.com/" target="_blank">knockoff economy</a>", and (b) an ignorance of <a href="https://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.asp?x=dnd/md/md20020228e" target="_blank">Ryan Dancey's brilliant concept of milking the externalities</a>, but <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/why-companies-fail/308887/" target="_blank">there's a lot of reactionary fearmongers in a typical business environment</a>, and if some of those terrified minds are in charge of your brand, their insecurity might very well see a bunch of other people riding D&D's coattails as trouble instead of the boon I truly think it is.You can see the existence of Pathfinder as, in part, a point in favor of the success of the D&D brand (it's still considered D&D, after all -- the brand has transcended the corporate ownership of it!), and some of the struggles of 4e might be seen to be a failure of WotC to compete with its own brand. That's part of why it'll be interesting to see what happens with 5e and licensing/OGL. WotC's success in changing that climate (or lack thereof) will be most evident in how 5e embraces or fails to embrace this breathing world of D&D that lies outside of Redmond's art-splashed walls. But it's not a legal consideration as much as it is a branding/marketing consideration, and one that is evidence of a stagnant, fearful brand team that is more interested in policing the brand than in growing it.</blockquote>

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