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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Halloween Jack" data-source="post: 5616431" data-attributes="member: 6678037">Got any links?I wasn't paying attention to the lead-up to 4e because I was taking a  long break from D&D at the time.The problem with the OGL was that most of the best stuff to come out of it was standalone and largely proprietary. You don't need a 3e PHB in order to play Mutants and Masterminds, Spycraft, or Star Wars, and there's enough rules incompatibility between them that buying something like a Monster Manual to incorporate its contents into your game (if you even want to) is not going to be a simple plug-and-play job, which kinda defeats the point of a universal system "reducing demand for other systems to zero." <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/ponder.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":hmm:" title="Hmmm    :hmm:" data-shortname=":hmm:" />What you eventually got from the OGL was in fact the same problem with late-TSR era AD&D: A bunch of different properties that have their own rules and brand loyalty and can't honestly be described as one big fanbase.The fact of the matter is that a game system built to service D&D is going to do a poor job of being a universal system and need a lot of rules hacking to adapt it from genre to genre. This is why forum debates about D20 were always a farce; in defending D20 you can always point out that D20 games don't necessarily have to have classes, levels, ability scores, hit points, spells, armor class, saves, or really anything at all except rolling a D20 and adding a number to it.I'm not surprised that WotC didn't repeat the OGL with 4e. They're neither allergic to nor incapable of making money; if they thought a 4e OGL would be good for their brand or their revenue flow they'd have done it.</blockquote>

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