So, what will be in the SRD?

[Grymar]

I won't begrudge WotC for this decision, but it makes me a sad panda. It will be harder to convince my group to move to 4e rather than to 3.5e.

Same with my group. Their opinion so far is that we'll try out the SRD and decide if we want to buy the core books. This may have killed 4e for my group.

 

[Nylanfs]

What the New RD looks like it is going to be is an extensive OGC declaration for the core three books. With hopefully later "core" books getting in, but that might be wishful thinking on my part

 

[Sir Brennen]

Instead, they'll go the AE/IH route of "wink-wink-nudge-nudge" near-compatibility. Because if I can't take, say, a Pegasus from the SRD and reprint it in my book without paying WotC, my incentive to use a Pegasus is greatly diminished. Now I'll call it a "winged horse," make up similar stats (maybe divergent in one or two ways), and say "enjoy!"

I can't imagine the new SRD would say "Hey! You can write 4E compatible adventures with the SRD! But you can't use any of the actual monsters from the MM! Or create any characters with feats from the PHB!" That... simply doesn't make sense. At all.

I think they truly do want to make it a bit more difficult for some of the more shoddy publishers who were simply reprinting chunks of the SRD without contributing back much creatively. I have at least one 3E supplement (unfortunately, most likely more) that bumped up it's page count by just replicating all of the SRD domains, or feats... or equipment tables :\

These are some of the things I think they mean by getting rid of the "cut-n-paste" mentality, or even worse, the wink-wink scenarios that are nothing more that replicated rules with a different name slapped on them. This is what I think they meant by making publishers get more creative. They don't want a repeat of some of the lazy-arse material from the early 3E days.

 

[BASHMAN]

I can't imagine the new SRD would say "Hey! You can write 4E compatible adventures with the SRD! But you can't use any of the actual monsters from the MM! Or create any characters with feats from the PHB!" That... simply doesn't make sense. At all.

I think they truly do want to make it a bit more difficult for some of the more shoddy publishers who were simply reprinting chunks of the SRD without contributing back much creatively. I have at least one 3E supplement (unfortunately, most likely more) that bumped up it's page count by just replicating all of the SRD domains, or feats... or equipment tables :\

These are some of the things I think they mean by getting rid of the "cut-n-paste" mentality, or even worse, the wink-wink scenarios that are nothing more that replicated rules with a different name slapped on them. This is what I think they meant by making publishers get more creative. They don't want a repeat of some of the lazy-arse material from the early 3E days.

Well one thing that they BETTER dang well put in the SRD is monster statblocks-- because expecting a publisher--or heck even an amateur DM-- to retype the stat block of every monster in an entire adventure they are writing is beyond ridiculous. If they do do this, you can bet that someone will make a "Monster Book- 4th Edition" without even saying what it is a 4th edition of-- but the readers will know-- just so people can copy/paste monsters into their adventures. In this book you will find a great many knomes, cobalds, draggons and orks who bear striking similarity in stats to gnomes, kobolds, dragons, and orcs...

 

[Kevin Brennan]

My personal suspicion is that the SRD will allow referencing of classes and class abilities, powers, magic items, monsters and so forth, but will leave out combat, detailed skills and descriptions, and so forth. In other words, it will give you just enough information to write up statblocks for adventures and campaign settings, or create new powers and abilities for existing or alternate classes, but will make it difficult to create new rules.

 

[Yair]

Well one thing that they BETTER dang well put in the SRD is monster statblocks-- because expecting a publisher--or heck even an amateur DM-- to retype the stat block of every monster in an entire adventure they are writing is beyond ridiculous.

Perhaps. I think it will contain only a relatively small cadre of monsters, though, with more monsters being reserved for Wizards' exclusive use (as per the Mind Flayer in 3e).

If they do do this, you can bet that someone will make a "Monster Book- 4th Edition" without even saying what it is a 4th edition of-- but the readers will know-- just so people can copy/paste monsters into their adventures. In this book you will find a great many knomes, cobalds, draggons and orks who bear striking similarity in stats to gnomes, kobolds, dragons, and orcs...

An otpion that nags at me is that WotC apparently requires everyone that wants to use the license to register with them, and has "community standards"... I suspect the license could be suspended arbitrarily, with no reason, on an individual basis. So WotC can have a policy of "We're not gonna allow copy-paste jobs", and anyone that does it gets booted off the "community" and must cease and desist using the 4e STL [what WotC calls "OGL"].

 

[BASHMAN]

An otpion that nags at me is that WotC apparently requires everyone that wants to use the license to register with them, and has "community standards"... I suspect the license could be suspended arbitrarily, with no reason, on an individual basis. So WotC can have a policy of "We're not gonna allow copy-paste jobs", and anyone that does it gets booted off the "community" and must cease and desist using the 4e STL [what WotC calls "OGL"].

They very well might do that... and yet the book will be published anyway under the 3.X OGL. It "just happens to be" compatable with 4th ed D&D-- who would have guessed. Calling the book "Fourth Edition Montsters" doesn't say what it is the fourth edition of, afterall...

Essentially companies (especially smalll ones) will start making an OSRIC-like situation for 4th ed using the 3.x OGL-- at least that is what I am guessing will happen if the OGL for 4th ed is too restricting.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

Essentially companies (especially smalll ones) will start making an OSRIC-like situation for 4th ed using the 3.x OGL-- at least that is what I am guessing will happen if the OGL for 4th ed is too restricting.

Well. Experience tells us there will be a significant number of people who refuse to make the switch--or who make the switch, find they're unhappy, and revert to the previous ruleset. It might well be less painful for some small companies to support this new breed of 3.x grognard, rather than convert to 4.x.

 

[Morrus]

I agree it makes complete sense. I also agree that there will be a lot of angry gamers who were counting on using the SRD to play 4E.

I assume WotC isn't worried about losing the zero income they get from these people!

 

[Voadam]

My personal suspicion is that the SRD will allow referencing of classes and class abilities, powers, magic items, monsters and so forth, but will leave out combat, detailed skills and descriptions, and so forth. In other words, it will give you just enough information to write up statblocks for adventures and campaign settings, or create new powers and abilities for existing or alternate classes, but will make it difficult to create new rules.

I think this is likely. Enough to put in stat blocks for adventures and setting books, some templates for formatting new 3rd party monsters, classes, feats, and items/powers into the same style format as the core books. No full entries from anything that can be copied and pasted to duplicate the core books though.

If they have short stat blocks for every monster, class, item, power, and race it will be pretty good, though you could no longer use the srd to learn how to play D&D (combat, etc.). This would be useful to DMs doing the same stuff as publishers (creating adventures or settings), and a little bit for players (spell, race, class stuff).

It will just remove the functionality of DMs and players being able to reference the rules of the game from the srd.