I'm a 4e guy, but I don't see this as taking the place of OGL -- the big advantage of OGL (from my point of view) is that it enables the community to produce shareable content.I dunno. I honestly could see them doing this. A sort of reverse OGL. You get the rules of the game (largely) for free, but no one is allowed to publish them. Anyone who wants to publish 5e material will have to do individual licenses with WOTC. This way, they don't run into the Pathfinder issues sometime down the road, and they get all sorts of goodwill from the people who play (rather than those who publish) by making the game so available.
Heck, the play test rules are already out there on exactly this sort of agreement. Why not carry one like this?
Given this (from the front page):
I think that's the key assumption right there - that options will be scattered across many books.
looking back we were talking about the 8 pound price. that is, I think, a loss leader for someone, probably Amazon.
I'm a 4e guy, but I don't see this as taking the place of OGL -- the big advantage of OGL (from my point of view) is that it enables the community to produce shareable content.
This is an odd thing to believe if you also think there should be more in the box...
Heck, it's already a loss leader, might as well add a 300-page book to it and be done with it.
Seriously, though, these guys are game designers. They probably wanted to include as much as possible but had to cut corners somewhere to squeeze it don to the price point they wanted. The compromise was to allow what had to be cut as a free download.
That, or these guys are right bastards, and did it just to spite people that post on message boards.
One of the two.
So, I'm going to look inside my crystal ball and do a small prediction:
At tomorrow's L&L Mike Mearls is going to announce that they will release Basic D&D, for free, on WotC site in July, he will probably give some details on what will be in it and what wouldn't be in it.
There might be something about Standard and Advanced D&D but it might be the subject of later L&L.
Warder
Where do you buy your crystal balls? I want to upgrade and you obviously have access to top-of-the-line models.So, I'm going to look inside my crystal ball and do a small prediction:
At tomorrow's L&L Mike Mearls is going to announce that they will release Basic D&D, for free, on WotC site in July, he will probably give some details on what will be in it and what wouldn't be in it.
There might be something about Standard and Advanced D&D but it might be the subject of later L&L.
Warder