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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6194871" data-attributes="member: 42582">My sense is that the benefit of releasing under the OGL is that it lets you preserve a very high degree of fidelity in your description of game elements - classes and class features, races, monster abilities etc - which therefore makes the transition of players from the original to the clone as seamless as it can be. You can do this without concerns about being hit for copyright infringment. And the widespread use of the SRD as a reference tool just reinforces the prospects that your text will be experienced by your players as seamlessly merging with the text of the original game.The challenge for a non-OGL 4e clone is to be textually close enough to the existing game for players to smoothly transition without being so close as to be an infringement of WotC's copyright. Probably not impossible, but I think not trivial either.If you are correct about cloning D&Dnext out of existing OGC (the SRD + other stuff out there) then (i) I think WotC are in a pretty difficult situation, and (ii) your advice to them is plausible.There one thing that makes me wonder whether you're correct, though, and I wonder what you think of it: D&Dnext is presented in a very narrative-mixed-in-with-mechanics style, both in class features and spells. And those narratives are new ones, they're not just taken from the existing SRD. A clone based on current OGC couldn't just replicate all that descriptive text without breaching WotC's copyrights - so it would either have to present the D&Dnext mechanics in a more stripped back, mechanics-first way (a bit like 4e); or it would have to rewrite with its own descriptive texts. This might be an obstacle, then, to the "seamless transition" for players that a clone is aiming for.If WotC think that they have achieved this sort of obstacle, then maybe they have a reason not to follow your advice. But I'm curious what you (and others) think about this.</blockquote>

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