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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 5486382" data-attributes="member: 15538">Non-negligible, perhaps. I personally wouldn't offer a lot in return for it. Consider Green Ronin and Mutants & Masterminds. At one point, it was supposed to be a d20 System game. When the sticking points became too sticky, they ditched the logo and went purely OGL. Obviously, that worked out pretty well for them.How much value does that logo have over a phrase along the lines of "compatible with the world's most popular fantasy role-playing game?" Good question.But it is equally of value to WotC, if not moreso. By offering the license, they spare themselves the expense of taking legal action in legally gray areas.Again, if I give it away, I don't have to worry about what to sue people for.What market share did Mongoose capture? I consider that case to be negligible, as WotC boldly predicted it to be, as it turned out, in fact, to be. Regardless of what's in the book, WotC owns the D&D trademark and has a large-scale publishing business with access to distribution. Mongoose was stuck with "Pocket Player's Guide" which is an uninspiring, to say the least, title.There's a big wall of wax. To summarize, though, in the absence of Pathfinder, my response would not have been to play 4e, but probably a more earnest boycott of WotC. Further, the enticement would have been all but irresistible for someone to reverse engineer the OGL material... and then you have no leash on the beast at all. Would WotC rather see a CC-SA version of the 3.5 player's handbook floating around, neatly skirting their copyrighted text but providing you with all the material you need to use existing 3e product?I cannot discern how there is a winning side in such a situation, unless you count the lawyers. That's because Dancey thought the OGL would be a going concern for some time. The GSL and WotC's adversarial stance toward an existing 3pp community is what brought about Pathfinder. All Wotc has to do was... nothing. Let 3e languish as a PDF. Move on with whatever they wanted to do with 4e. But somebody, at some point, felt they had to exert control. Control over something they did not understand as well as they thought they did.Naturally. And hence they still have something of value to sell. Those are interesting arguments, but it's important to separate the issues surrounding OSRIC versus any given hypothetical reverse-engineered system.Somehow, I was never confused about system those third party books were marketed for in the 80s and 90s. It's also what makes it possible without a potentially even more serious weakening of WotC's rights.Who said anything about "large chunks?" In recent years, I think people have gotten bolder about mentioning other IPs in roleplaying books, provided the book itself is not obviously intended to replace a licensed product or infringe on existing core rules. If you don't need to actually reproduce a rules system, the door is pretty wide to comment on other people's works.WotC didn't invent the terms longsword, battle ax, or spear. How much control can they exert over those terms being listed on a table, along with public domain expressions like 1d10?I don't know how the license came about. I do know that I purchased a copy of Kingdoms of Kalamar, well before the OGL era, and was slightly disappointed to find out it was not for "any system" so much as for AD&D of some flavor. The legal viability of a campaign sourcebook as been pretty well established.As for OGL Conan, if you changed a few terms here and there, renamed the feats, and avoiding lifting any blocks of text, I suspect you could present essentially the same game. The fact that it was OGL-friendly was a benefit... definitely to WotC, who had their flavor of RPG reinforced as the dominant system. You don't need a wacky legal notice in the back of a book to sell a game that says "Conan" on the front. Potentially. But you can play it simple.I think we have a different view of the relative value of the things being exchanged. I view the OGL as, nevertheless, slightly favorable to WotC.From a business standpoint, it hardly matters to me whether I am shut down by a cease-and-desist or by a "revocation." Since revocation is pain-free, it sets up WotC in a vastly superior position. OTOH, in the case of a court hearing, they have to use about a pint of blood for evey pint I shed, and it is possible anywhere along the way to find a settlement agreeable to the aims of both parties.To establish a covenant. WotC is not a high dollar Wall Street venture. Ultimately, they are in arts and entertainment, and you can't have people suing each other all the time if you want anything worthwhile to happen. Nor can you have people brazenly ripping each other off. Well, exactly. The license is not a worthwhile exchange of one thing for the other. So do you think it was worthwhile for Hanna Barbara to send Image Comics a C&D over the character Bedrock, for "infringing" their Flintstones trademark? And what about enforcing rights that may not exist?If you step outside the tabletop RPG market, it's not hard to find examples of this. "Unofficial" strategy games. "Wii-compatible" controllers. Vacuum bags for "Hoover" vacuum cleaners. Cliff Notes for in-print books. I can certainly create game software to run on a Windows PC. And yet somehow WotC is going to stop me from writing "software" for their D&D game system. So I don't have a good example to furnish of such a "generous" trademark holder. Similarly, it's hard to find oil companies arguing for greater regulation of carbon dioxide emissions.</blockquote>

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