NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8220815" data-attributes="member: 18">Yeah that was particularly sad. I don't think I'll ever understand what they thought they were pulling with effectively getting rid of the SRD/OGL. What did they think was going to happen by bringing in a vastly more restrictive approach? The SRD was insane, basically just a list of words and some formatting, with no actual rules material (completely unlike 3E and 5E).It was surely obvious that this change, plus the GSL nonsense would create big problems for 3PPs, and not just discourage them from engaging with 4E, but actively make it difficult for them to do so (given you couldn't even include MM statblocks in a game that was pretty serious about statblocks), even if they wanted to. That that, combined with the total incompatibility with all of their previous products, which was perhaps unavoidable, but a further issue, would cause a big backlash from consumers and 3PPs alike?I don't think we've ever heard any current or ex-WotC staffers talk about the "why" of these decisions in general (correct me if I'm wrong!). Reading between the lines you can perhaps see they wanted people to use a digital product that didn't initially exist (and wasn't super-viable technologically at the time), by forcing companies to just use names of monsters, abilities, etc. - but that's so devaluing to their products - and you can imagine that they were jealous that some 3PPs were making a fair bit of money by, quite frankly, far better serving the adventure/campaign market than WotC themselves were. But that doesn't seem like enough. I guess we may never know, beyond that it was yet another bizarre mistake.I remember at the time I was kind of mad about Pathfinder and thought it was a slightly cheap move by Paizo, but frankly, in retrospect, they did the right thing, and WotC had it coming (to be clear though I was always critical of the GSL/SRD stuff). Pity it had to happen to 4E. I suspect the same game, with the same mechanics and writing, but different marketing (including WotC people avoiding ill-advised comparisons!), and a proper OGL/SRD could have been extremely successful. Maybe not 3E successful, but better than it did. Had they also been realistic about technology and software, and slightly changed the game because of that, it could have been more successful still.</blockquote>

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