D&D General Looking for Articles about Third Party D&D creators Impacted by OGL not being available for 4th Edition D&D Released

[dave2008]

These are some great links. Thank you for sharing me. Wonder if history is going to repeat itself.

As has been noted many times, not likely. '24 D&D is, at this point, very similar to current 5e. A new SRD is not likely to be needed for 3PP to create products for '24 D&D. Just like one hasn't been needed since 2016, the last time the 5e SRD was updated. 3PP have being creating products just fine for the last 6 years without a new SRD and will like be able to do so past 2024.

However, I do hope they update the 5e SRD as things have been added since 2016 (like the artificer and mythic monsters, which are not in the SRD) that would be nice to have.

 

[gametaku]

The lack of an OGL tied to the 4th Edition pushed some interesting changes in the industry, and was the catalyst for the Pathfinder game and the entire OSR movement. Creators found a way around the "no OGL" problem, but it definitely had an impact on creators and their ability to reach the audience.

Except that the OSR predates 4th edition by a least a couple of years.

 

[billd91]

These are some great links. Thank you for sharing me. Wonder if history is going to repeat itself.

I doubt it. At least, I would hope that WotC had learned a valuable lesson to avoid poison pill provisions in any of their licenses. Plus, it's hard to imagine many big changes with OneD&D that will diverge enough from the 5e materials.

That doesn't mean that there aren't new factors that they may leverage. For example, D&D Beyond adds a new wrinkle that may involve special licensing for a 3rd party publisher to gain access, same with any other developments along the lines of virtual tabletops. My guess is that's the area where there will be a lot of new license considerations to work out.

 

[TerraDave]

The most extreme case would be no 5.50 SRD or its equivalent, second most extreme would be a new license linked to 5.50 (which is essentially what happened to 4e). Yet, from the promises around the 2024 edition it should not even matter: its all compatible!

You would also have to wonder what the problem is that is being solved. With 3.0 a lot of stuff came out, or very mixed quality. It was called a glut. 5e has some good 3rd party material, but nothing like that has happened. DMs guild also channels a lot of that energy into a forum over which WoTC presumably has some control, and maybe a cut.

 

[humble minion]

You would also have to wonder what the problem is that is being solved. With 3.0 a lot of stuff came out, or very mixed quality. It was called a glut. 5e has some good 3rd party material, but nothing like that has happened. DMs guild also channels a lot of that energy into a forum over which WoTC presumably has some control, and maybe a cut.

Without having crunched any numbers, I suspect there's a vastly greater amount of material available for 5th ed than there was in the d20 glut. Stable and routine markets for electronic products, the rise of the crowdfunding economy, accessible PoD, and DMsGuild's art licencing policy have vastly lowered the cost barriers to entry in the market. A brand new publisher can whip something up in their spare time as a labor of love, and not have to come up with funds ahead of time to pay for printing, art etc, and then try to work out a way to get in contact with distributors and publishers, and then convince jaded game shops to physically stock the thing.

There's no equivalent, these days, of the game shops stuck with shelves upon shelves of low-quality d20 shovelware and heartbreakers that are money losers. That was where the real problems with the d20 glut came home to roost. It costs almost nothing for DMSGuild or DTRPG to add new products to inventory, or keep them permanently available once they're there. And while I suspect a lot of it has very low sales, and I know as a fact it's of widely varying quality, an unsuccessful modern 3pp publication just sits in DTRPGs archive, rather than gathering dust and taking up space for years on a game store's shelf. The failure percentage is, I suspect, similar, but not as visible now.

 

[DNDElise]

I doubt it. At least, I would hope that WotC had learned a valuable lesson to avoid poison pill provisions in any of their licenses. Plus, it's hard to imagine many big changes with OneD&D that will diverge enough from the 5e materials.

That doesn't mean that there aren't new factors that they may leverage. For example, D&D Beyond adds a new wrinkle that may involve special licensing for a 3rd party publisher to gain access, same with any other developments along the lines of virtual tabletops. My guess is that's the area where there will be a lot of new license considerations to work out.

Thank you for sharing your insights! Hopefully there won't be too much change in regards to OGL with D&D5.5.