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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 1501709" data-attributes="member: 18017">People are allowed to develop any kind of SRD they want using the open gaming content in Unearthed Arcana. Let's assume that Hasbro's team of lawyers have spent a lot of time deciding what is legal and are aware of all implications of releasing this book as OGC. TSR might not have always known what they were doing with the Web and with their legal budget--compared to the Hasbro megasaurus, TSR was a very small, silly, and inefficient mammal that briefly flourished in a strange climate but became extinct last millenium.UA has already made a profit for WOTC/Hasbro, unless book retailing has already gone the way of the record industry. It's also WOTC's big dip into the d20/OGL swimming pool, their first book since the takeover that both uses other people's OGC and gives a sizable chunk back in return. As others have pointed out, it's also a way to put more toys in the d20 sandbox, a sanctioned set of optional rules that help set the way D&D is going to play with the other kids. In fact, a measure of how successful the OGL has been for WOTC is that the PHB, DMG, MM, and UA are (AFAIK) the only books that people have bothered to text-hack. There are lots of RPG products that people care enough about to scan and trade in a huge, unwieldy, often-crappy way. The D&D books that contain OGC are the only ones popular enough that users have converted them into an electronic format you can really work with; WOTC are also the only publishers that have opened the "source code" to their books, by posting their open content as a freely accessible SRD on the web.It's probably safe to assume that neither WOTC nor Hasbro has missed anything that's freaking obvious to us. The interesting question is, are the Game Mechanics selling more copies of Swords of our Fathers now that some of its OGC has become part of official D&D? Since the Mechanics used to work for WOTC, they knew what they were getting into, and I bet they're watching their sales figures to see the results of this experiment too. Hasbro is stuck with the fact that Ryan Dancey gave all of D&D's toys to the sandbox. The OGL is a binding document that he designed to make it very difficult for anyone to claim that they own the basics of the world's most popular roleplaying game, or to revoke the OGL and take their toys home in a huff.I think Hasbro knows what it wants, and they might also be the company that's best equipped to determine what the mass market of gamers really wants as opposed to what our tribal folklore says we want. The OGL was an experiment by WOTC, and Hasbro is probably watching the weird mutant it brought into the nest with some curiosity, but overall I think the experiment worked out the way Ryan expected. D&D didn't need to hoard its toys to be the most popular kid in the sandbox. Of course, lots of the other children still hate it because it used to be an unthinking and selfish bully, it's so much bigger than they are, and there's always people who don't like things that are popular.The spirit and the legal intent of the OGL are the same. Open content is free for everyone to play with as long as they don't take it out of the sandbox and follow the rules while they're there. All OGC has always been free for the taking if anyone tries hard enough. We've just been in a brief evolutionary period where publishers could try to use print as a copy-protection scheme. As I'm sure all the hard-working scanners in our community can attest, extracting source code from the printed page is still a clumsy, annoying process.If a d20/OGL publisher releases their entire work as open content except for the names they want it to be called, and then cries because other kids are playing with their toy, or don't want to be forced to pay money in order to play with it, or are sharing their own toys for free, it just means they're still too little to have figured out Ryan's rules for the sandbox.</blockquote>

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