Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5616291" data-attributes="member: 22424">There's no denying there was a lot of horrible product. But that was, quite simply, the price that we had to pay to get the &quot;good stuff&quot;. We could not have had the one without the other.I'm not sure if you recall the days when TSR ran the show. They absolutely did claim absolute ownership of everything related to D&amp;D, they did sent out C&amp;Ds to people running fan sites (even if they only published homebrew rules materials), and they even tried to assert ownership of any campaign that people posted online.Legally, they probably had no case, but they also had a very big stick, and appeared to have the will to use it.In that environment, nobody would have published compatible materials. They would have been mad to try. (Hell, it's fairly mad even to go into the RPG market. Doing so in that environment...?)Heck, even the OGL was met with huge scepticism. Lots of people believed that this was all a bid on the part of WotC to lay claim to their homebrew IP, which WotC would then 'steal' and incorporate into D&amp;D without having to pay for it!It really was a completely different world then. The OGL massively changed things.They can do that now, and in part do so having been emboldened by the very permissive years of the OGL. Nobody would have tried it while TSR were running the game, because even if they were legally absolutely right, TSR still had a habit of using lawyers to destroy their competition, or 'settling' by buying out their opponents and the burying their work.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="delericho, post: 5616291, member: 22424"] There's no denying there was a lot of horrible product. But that was, quite simply, the price that we had to pay to get the "good stuff". We could not have had the one without the other. I'm not sure if you recall the days when TSR ran the show. They absolutely [i]did[/i] claim absolute ownership of everything related to D&D, they did sent out C&Ds to people running fan sites (even if they only published homebrew rules materials), and they even tried to assert ownership of any campaign that people posted online. Legally, they probably had no case, but they also had a [i]very[/i] big stick, and appeared to have the will to use it. In that environment, nobody would have published compatible materials. They would have been mad to try. (Hell, it's fairly mad even to go into the RPG market. Doing so in that environment...?) Heck, even the OGL was met with [i]huge[/i] scepticism. Lots of people believed that this was all a bid on the part of WotC to lay claim to their homebrew IP, which WotC would then 'steal' and incorporate into D&D without having to pay for it! It really was a completely different world then. The OGL massively changed things. They can do that now, and in part do so having been emboldened by the very permissive years of the OGL. Nobody would have tried it while TSR were running the game, because even if they were legally absolutely right, TSR [i]still[/i] had a habit of using lawyers to destroy their competition, or 'settling' by buying out their opponents and the burying their work. [/QUOTE]

Verification