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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 6305316" data-attributes="member: 8461">That's moving the goalposts pretty significantly in terms of what we're discussing. WotC's stake changes significantly if it's licensing actual Intellectual Properties, rather than licensing game mechanics. (Incidentally, they have done exactly the sort of scenario you're discussing here before, during the 3.X era with Dragonlance and Ravenloft - including, I believe, reviewing products before they were released.)Remove that aspect of the equation, however - which brings it back into line with what's been discussed so far - and this still fails to answer the question of why WotC would bother with individually-negotiated licenses for any and every third-party company that wanted to make compatible products. Simply put, no one has offered a good answer for this. There's no plausible explanation for why WotC would want to expend that much time and effort to make sure that someone else's products are quality material. If they wanted to adopt something like that, it's more likely that they'd simply not make any kind of community license at all, instead pursuing individual licenses with specific companies as they wanted. It'd basically be a return to the pre-3.X era of compatibility."its own game that folks buy, without customers ever having any need or desire to go back to WotC again" ignores the idea that publishers might want to make compatible products that aren't their own games. There were a lot of stand-alone d20-based games, certainly, but there were plenty that required the Core Rulebooks to play.Saying "well, maybe nobody wants to make compatible products that requires the Core Rulebooks" is a scenario that fails the plausibility test. We don't have to look back very far to see that there were plenty of companies putting out loads of materials that did require the actual D&D rules.The world has changed, but it has also stayed the same. Also, Ryan Dancey made it very clear that he was serving ends that were, in fact, WotC's, alongside everyone else's. He flat-out says in one of his interviews (which I can't seem to find at the moment) that there were multiple reasons for making the OGL. One of them (for the hobbyists and fans) was that D&D would have an "insurance policy" in case WotC tried to kill it. Another (for WotC) was the market of compatible products that served as satellite products that would lead folks back to the Core Rules.WotC did see a problem with that since, hence the GSL. Maybe since then, WotC has seen a bigger problem with their response, and is now ready to go back to the OGL?</blockquote>

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