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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 8880235" data-attributes="member: 5948">I'm not a lawyer or a 3pp, but it seems to me like rendering any OGL version revokable at WotCs pleasure would have a massive broader chilling effect on the 3pp industry as well.RPG supplements have long lead and development times, especially hardcopy.  But if this goes through, for a creator - how do you possibly justify committing time and resources to a project when WotC has said, and demonstrated by revoking previous OGLs, that the licence you're writing against may disappear or change radically at any time and that the whole foundation of your project is built on sand?  Even if you've poured your heart into a successful kickstarter, got it to the printers, and it's wending its way through shipping purgatory to fulfillment - then WotC decides to change the OGL underneath your feet, revoke the one you're using, and you're stuck.  Hell, I think I have backed 10+ OGL-based kickstarters pending fulfillment, at least three of which are already printed.  I've got no idea what happens to them - if WotC kills the licence they were written under on 13/1, can they even be delivered?  are the creators stuck with a containerload of material that they've paid for but now cannot legally sell?  Cos if WotC argues that they can revoke OGL 1.0a, you can bet your bottom dollar that they'll be reserving themselves the power to arbitrarily revoke OGL 1.1 should they so choose.  Which makes an utter mockery of the whole concept of a licence.  An at-will revokable licence isn't a licence in any meaningful sense at all.People will keep developing 3pp material because so many people do this for love.  You don't get into RPGs to make a fortune.  But this is going to strangle the pipeline of new voices into the industry.  Even the bigger, more successful non-D&D systems often get their start through name recognition - a company gets a loyal  customer base through their OGL D&D products, and when they branch out into systems, that base follows.  Paizo's D&D work created the loyal base for Pathfinder, Green Ronin's created the base for AGE and M&M.  Hell, even Level Up probably wouldn't have achieved the success it did if a relative unknown had written it on their own and chucked it up on DTRPG, because they wouldn't have the EN Publishing base to get excited about it.</blockquote>

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