NEWS: OGL and SRD dates/info announced

[LeaderDesslok]

Honestly speaking, $5000 is not really a lot of money. i mean seriously, any company that has more than 1 employee on its payroll should be able to afford that!

Sitara, I'm guessing you are not in the small press/PDF business? I think that $5K is a LOT of money to a majority of the companies putting out OGL products. I was a partner at Silven Publishing, at we could have never paid up that kind of cash even in our best period.

If this is WotC's means of controlling the goldrush by limiting output to the larger publishers I for one have no problem with that. Technically, you're really just delaying the onslaught until after Christmas (which could be a secondary goal by WotC as well; more gift money goes to fewer companies).

I do have problems with what seem to be new restrictions on the type of content a 3rd party can produce and the actual content of the SRD. The SRD problem is more from a player's perspective though; I am a big-time user of d20srd.org, and I am not confident that the utility that the site provides me will be duplicated in the DDI.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

It also sounds like the days of us being able to just find a fully-fleshed SRD online might be a thing of the past. If their SRD is more 'guidelines' than the actual rules, that's pretty different than what we've gotten used to in the 3.X era.

I wonder what it actually can mean? If they are guidelines, does this mean they contain more the "art of D&D 4 design" then the actual implementation? Does it contain concepts why certain abilities work the way they are?

Well, access to the rules seems easy - just buy them. But access to the underlying assumptions and guidelines might be worth a lot to many publishers, since it means they can actually create rule subsystems and new spells, rituals or feats that will work on these assumptions.

Or it's a load of crap. I don't know.

 

[Reynard]

I wonder how man small and mid size publishers this will outright kill? If they can't afford to pay the $5K, the probably can't afford to go 4 to 6 months without selling anything while everyone plays 4E and therefore stops buying d20 supplements. And, on top of it, they'll be so far behind the competition that could pay it might not even be worth the effort.

Also: I wonder what the new restrictions are going to be like. Is WotC going to try and block 3rd parties from beating them to the punch on druids, gnomes, monks and all the rest of the stuff that won't be in the initial core?

 

[Sitara]

So...they could reference some barebones rules, but say, keep out the combat system. So therefore, when playing the game the players will needa copy of the PhB so they can refernce the combat system, since the 4E combat system will not be Oopen Game content?

 

[EricNoah]

My assumption, and I could well be wrong, is that the "small publishers" are chiefly people for whom publishing is a secondary calling, not a primary source of income. They have a "day job" and they also publish as a sideline.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Well, access to the rules seems easy - just buy them. But access to the underlying assumptions and guidelines might be worth a lot to many publishers, since it means they can actually create rule subsystems and new spells, rituals or feats that will work on these assumptions.

Any publisher that actually cared about the underlying design subsystems would already have taken the time to grok them before publishing.

Publishers that didn't care just shoveled crap out the door as fast as they could shovel.

I wouldn't expect that to change...

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

It means no complete games can be published. You have to have the PHB at every game.

Iron heroes, True 20, Mutants and masterminds and other stand alones could not have been pubished if 3e/d20 had those restrictions.

I don't know about True20 or M&M, but Iron Heroes was not a stand-alone game system. If you had never played D&D before you would still need the Players' Handbook to understand character creation and game basics that were not covered in the SRD.

 

[ZeroGlobal2003]

I'd say the 5k ante to get into the game is designed to curb the junk products that flew out of the starting gates when 3.0 hit. I've got some real stinkers sitting on my shelf that I bought in the first 6 months, some of which I've never even finished reading they were so bad.

What I'm most concerned about is that fact that new new OGL is going to be tied to the 4th means a that a lot of good ideas are going to be off the table again.

 

[frankthedm]

Also: I wonder what the new restrictions are going to be like. Is WotC going to try and block 3rd parties from beating them to the punch on druids, gnomes, monks and all the rest of the stuff that won't be in the initial core?

That's a damn good bet.

 

[Delta]

I hate to say it, but having thought about it some more, I see either lawsuits or legal clampdowns (cease & desist orders) on the horizon, over whether someone is making work that extends the 3E SRD fairly, or ripping off the 4E rules against the new restrictions. I could even see stuff like OSRIC coming under fire in the future now.