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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5607889" data-attributes="member: 54877">Heh, I was pretty turned off by a subset of the 3E guys that took the attitude that the OGL was so that "professionals" could deliver content to us plebians, and save us from our own stinky house rules. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> Actually, one of the many good reasons for having a very simple, basic version of the game as a base is that you could then make that base OGL, while preserving the vast volume of the more complicated options as proprietary. You wouldn't do it merely for that reason, but it is certainly a good secondary reason. Take monsters as just one example. Let's say this theoretical basic version has the proverbial 2-line monster stat block that we all know and love from our early days. There is no flavor there, short of whatever image "ogre" conjures up in your mind. Then in the monster manual, you have a page or three on ogres, complete with options for the varying complexity of the game. A third party wants to use this ogre. He can put those two lines in his product, no problem. He can put a section at the beginning of the product saying that it was built with the expectation that you would use optional monster rules A, H, and L. You still put the two lines in your adventure, and the DM knows to go look in the monster manual. You say that you also use your own optional rule MyHouseRule X. That is detailed in the product. You can list it after the two lines if you want. Then WotC sells customization options in the DDI, both to the third party and the users. The third party either pays a fee, or goes for a percentage. If they pay the fee, then WotC just allows their customization options in, and any user that subs for that in their subscription contributes directly to the third party. WotC gets the fee and the heightened interest in their monster manual. Maybe the third party is small. They go for percentage. They enter the data. WotC is out nothing. If it sells, they get a cut and that heightened interest. If it doesn't, well--customization is easy to ignore, if you code it right. OTOH, say that the third party decides to go with only the base version, no options from WotC or their product? WotC doesn't get anything, right, same as the problem when people reprinted the SRD? Nope, at that point, by definition, the third party is making content and selling it, which helps move the game. It might be adventures. It might be source material. But it is content. And in this model, the DDI is a content movement product, not a particular game. When the base system is the complicated version, none of this works. It isn't even an option to try to make it work. You've got weird intersections of their version of your complicated options, and it is difficult to track what counts or what doesn't.</blockquote>

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