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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steel_Wind" data-source="post: 3543091" data-attributes="member: 20741">In fairness, they have not got petty and vindictive...yet.If it's a legitimate patent, then the shareholders deserve to have that IP protected.I just have a hard time accepting that the prior art supports that this is a  novel idea.  The idea was publicly presented to the marketplace before - and on WotC's own convention floor in 1997 at Gencon. This does not seem all that different from Steve Jackson's Pirate Lego Wars - rules he published in 1998 as shareware and which were demonstrated to thousands of gamers on the convention floor in 1997 at Gencon. For that matter, Lego Wars  in 1991 was shown at cons. So if it was packaging plastic lego blocks its old news, but if it was punching out pieces of styrene it's all new?A buddy of mine who used to own Global Games and I were so impressed with what we saw in SJ's Lego Wars, we thought we would do something similar with lego block based robots, sold in little packs like McDonalds' was doing with Happy Meals at the time. We would have dials on the weapons and include a tri-colored colored string as a range finder. Add a d8, and we were off.We didn't do it, as ultimately, the cost for injection molded plastic was far beyond our capital. Still - it seemed a pretty obvious idea to us based on what SJ was showing on the Gencon floor.Guess we should have patented the idea right there. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I have a hard time swallowing this patent - but there it is.</blockquote>

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