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D&D 5E Super hype about 5e, all kinds of stuff is popping up but the question is.... how?

Evenglare

Adventurer
Everyone seems to be warming up to 5e, issues are explained or sorted out. Good stuff. Companies like frog god games have put out some stuff and... wait... what? How are companies putting stuff out? Did I miss a new OGL announcement or something? I'm pretty interested in producing some stuff but I haven't seen any sort of community guidelines / liscensing etc etc. So yeah... did something pass under my radar?
 

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http://www.d20srd.org

It's been around for a while, surprised you've missed it. ;)

The 3E SRD has been used clone and/or create 0,1,2,3,3.75 edition along with dozens of non D&D rules, there is nothing stopping someone publishing game material that is 5e compatable, as long as you avoid trade dress etc. FGG just first to do it. I imagine there will be a lot of errors in the products, but not enough to make them bad. Matt Finch or Skeeter Green mentioned on the kick starter that the lawyers have checked the legal stuff, so they are not going into it blind like the SRD5 site
 

Ha ha, I am aware of srd, but I wasn't aware you could publish 5e stuff through it considering how you couldn't publish 4e stuff through it. Is 5e officially supported by SRD? I must have missed that. If you can publish any D&D material why has there not been a surge of 4e material?
 

You can publish 4E stuff through it, you just can't say compatible with 4th Edition of D&D or some such. No one really wanted to I guess. There is nothing in the OGL saying you can use this to make a clone of 1E or 0E or whatever... but people wanted to so they did.

There is some 4E stuff out there, not much. The is a thread somewhere on making a 4E clone using the OGL on ENW. Not sure how far they got with it.

EDIT: going through a few of my 4E PDFs I can see a lot are published under the OGL
 
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You probably missed my edit but there are 4E products released using the OGL for example Dreamscarred Press' Psionic classes.

This is very very interesting to me. I really like 4e but I hated that no one really published anything for it. I must have completely missed this stuff. Not that I plan on running 4e anytime soon, but I'd still like to see what came out. Is anyone planning on doing some sort of resurrection of the system like OSRIC and other various people have done with older editions with the OGL?
 

The 3E SRD has been used clone and/or create 0,1,2,3,3.75 edition along with dozens of non D&D rules, there is nothing stopping someone publishing game material that is 5e compatable, as long as you avoid trade dress etc. FGG just first to do it. I imagine there will be a lot of errors in the products, but not enough to make them bad. Matt Finch or Skeeter Green mentioned on the kick starter that the lawyers have checked the legal stuff, so they are not going into it blind like the SRD5 site

I AM NOT A LAWYER, but I have published a product that used the OGL. I do not believe the above is correct.

Here is what I believe is the case:

D&D 3.x was published under the OGL. It constrained anyone making 3.x-compatible products.
D&D 4.x deliberately avoided the OGL, which meant third-parties were not free to make compatible products, and doing so could be a violation if IP. Doing so would put you in a legally questionable position.

Other companies, writing game products for non-OGL games, could and did use the license voluntarily in order to secure a particular place in the market.

The license does not grant IP to WOTC, but it does ensure that any derivative projects must also use the license. The OGL is, as far as I can tell, a genius invention that can continue to be used by companies who either are creating materials that derive from OGL stuff, or are wanting to have others build on their work, and have it also under the OGL. In our case, it was both.

Possibly the 4.x products that have been mentioned fall into that latter category, or perhaps there is something else afoot. In any case, to my knowledge 5.x is not OGL, and there have been no official announcements for unrestricted third-party materials. We know they've hired other companies to produce adventures; I would be hesitant to do anything that potentially infringed on 5th, because I can't hire lawyers who can beat their lawyers.

I hope this helps.
 

The OGL essentially gave away a lot of the rules framework for D&D, which went beyond allowing third party supplements into allowing third party competitive products, able to lift huge chunks of the d20 rules whole cloth and stick them in their own games. Spycraft, Fantasy Craft, Mutants and Masterminds, and numerous 'd20' versions of other games came into existence, culminating in Pathfinder.

Because of this, WOTC was, ah, a bit overzealous in the liscence agreement for 4th Edition, especially about what wording can't be reproduced and the sort of content that can be included (not wanting a repeat of the Book of Erotic Fantasy). This led to a number of 3PPs simply not supporting D&D at all through 4th Edition's life, either because Paizo made it convenient for them to stick to the older ruleset or because they were afraid of being steamrolled by Hasbro lawyers.

There's some 4E 3PP material out there, including EN Publishing's 'Zeitgeist', but yeah a lot of developers took the path of radiance least resistance. I think repairing the relationships with 3PPs who aren't Paizo is kind of a big priority for WOTC this time around.
 

You could be right I am not a lawyer etc either. But there is a list of DnD clones published as long as my arm which all are published using the OGL. Just opening up my folder of OSR games:

ACKS, A Dark & Deep, East Mark, Ambition & Avarice, AS&SoH, Basic Fantasy, Beyond the Wall, Blood & treasure, Blueholme, C&C...

And that is just getting to C! Some free, some commercial, none 3E, some a specific direct copy of a previous edition of D&D, some going out there a bit. But all published under the OGL.

M
 

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