NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sunshadow21" data-source="post: 6307093" data-attributes="member: 6667193">The OGL is the only reason we're still seriously talking about the brand after WotC's last flagship product flopped. Without the OGL, WotC would be looking an awful lot like White Wolf after the nWoD debacle. With it, they still have a reasonably large group of people who still follow the overall brand and a lot of former partners that still have reason to consider working with WotC again under the right circumstances, making their challenges far less than they would be if everyone had moved on to completely different games made by completely different companies that had no reason to care about working with WotC. It probably didn't help 4E, but there was a lot of decisions made by WotC that didn't help 4E, and pinning all the blame on just one is a bit unfair. It has definitely changed how WotC must approach the brand, but since their stated goal the entire time of their ownership has been to move beyond just the role playing game anyway, that shift in approach was going to have to happen regardless of the OGL or not in order for them to meet that goal. In the end, if they play their cards right, it will actually have very little, in any, long term impact on the brand while strengthening the gaming community in the process. A simple shift from focusing entirely on the rules is all that WotC needs to successfully pull off in order to make the OGL's weaknesses not matter anymore. WotC still has full control of all the worlds, all the characters, all  but one of the official rulesets, and are still the only ones that can  use the actual brand name.  Pathfinder is no danger of destroying the D&D brand, as Paizo made their own brand, and have no desire for it to be seen as "the other D&D brand", and no one else is even close to having the overall impact that Pathfinder has. In the end, if WotC does it right, the troubles with 4E and the OGL will be just a small bump in the far bigger success story of the brand.</blockquote>

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