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Charity
2008-04-18, 05:25 AM
http://wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/4news/20080417a

Third party publishers will be dancing in the streets the license has finally arrived. This is good news for all you fans of third party stuff like Ptolus.
For all of you too tight to buy the books there is also good news -

The license associated SRD will be available on June 6, 2008


If you want to stay at home.
Wizards of the Coast is pleased to announce that third-party publishers will be allowed to publish products compatible with the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition game system under the new Dungeons & Dragons 4E Game System License (D&D 4E GSL). This royalty-free license will replace the former d20 System Trademark License (STL), and will have a System Reference Document (SRD) available for referencing permissible content.

The D&D 4E GSL will allow third-party publishers to create roleplaying game products in fantasy settings with the D&D 4th Edition rules, and publishers who register with WotC will be granted the right to use a version of the D&D logo that denotes the product as compatible with the D&D 4th Edition Roleplaying Game, in accordance with WotC’s terms and conditions. The effective start date for sales of D&D 4E GSL publications will be October 1, 2008.

The license associated SRD will be available on June 6, 2008, at no cost. A small group of publishers received advanced notice and will receive these documents prior to June 6, at no cost, in order to prepare for publication of compatible materials by the effective start date. If you haven’t already been contacted by WotC, you will be able to access the documents on the Wizards website beginning on June 6, 2008.

Wizards is also working on the details of a second royalty-free license, the d20 Game System License (d20 GSL). This license will allow third-party publishers to create roleplaying game products in non-fantasy settings with the 4E rules. The exact details for the d20 GSL will be released as they become available.

DeathQuaker
2008-04-18, 06:50 AM
Will it still be legal to make things under the (3.5) OGL?

Rutee
2008-04-18, 07:25 AM
Will it still be legal to make things under the (3.5) OGL?

Impossible to tell, but as they haven't announced that they're revoking consent, it should be fine.

THe rest is meh to me. Quite frankly, my dear, I just don't give a damn if third parties can use DnD. The only use I've seen of it was wasting page space in Silhouette Core.

Kurald Galain
2008-04-18, 07:50 AM
Quite frankly, my dear, I just don't give a damn if third parties can use DnD.

Come on, you must admit that the Portable Hole Full Of Beer was at least fun to read :smallbiggrin: as was the Munchkin RPG, and the BOEF.

Ok, I wouldn't actually play with any of that, but nevertheless.

Personally, I'm sure third parties will use DND because that's a good source of revenue for WOTC. I only hope that websites like d20srd.org won't be nuked by the new licensing.

Tsotha-lanti
2008-04-18, 08:05 AM
Quite frankly, my dear, I just don't give a damn if third parties can use DnD. The only use I've seen of it was wasting page space in Silhouette Core.

I'd say it's pretty critical, considering that the best things to come out of D&D 3rd ed. were all third-party d20 games not made by WotC.

Charity
2008-04-18, 08:06 AM
Paizo are publishing their new game Pathfinder under that 3.5 licence.

http://paizo.com/pathfinder

So I imagine this is evidence (albeit empirical) that the 3.5 licence still stands.

Duke of URL
2008-04-18, 08:28 AM
Will it still be legal to make things under the (3.5) OGL?

Yes -- they really can't revoke the license once it's put out there like that. Such things haven't been tried in court, however, but it would also be massive bad publicity for them to try anyway.

DeathQuaker
2008-04-18, 09:03 AM
Yes -- they really can't revoke the license once it's put out there like that. Such things haven't been tried in court, however, but it would also be massive bad publicity for them to try anyway.

Okay. I was concerned because of lines like


This royalty-free license will replace the former d20 System Trademark License (STL),

Now the STL isn't the OGL, but they're related, I think. I am not good at legalspeak. So I am not sure if this is absolutely meaningless or not.


Wizards is also working on the details of a second royalty-free license, the d20 Game System License (d20 GSL). This license will allow third-party publishers to create roleplaying game products in non-fantasy settings with the 4E rules. The exact details for the d20 GSL will be released as they become available.

Huh, I wonder if this means they're doing a new d20 Modern.

Person_Man
2008-04-18, 09:14 AM
I'll believe it when I see it. Word has been that Hasbro corporate is pissed that one of their properties is "losing" money to independent publishers. If WotC was really going to just continue with royalty free OGL, they wouldn't need a new license. They would have just announced months and months ago that they were keeping the old license. But they're not. I smell shenanigans. And independent publishers have been pulling out their hair begging WotC for more information.

Charity
2008-04-18, 09:22 AM
Hmmm, I certainly get the impression that there is no fees -
Clark from necromancer games said this over on Enworld, he has received a copy of the pre-release


Lets not get too much into revisionist history here. Some of the doomsaying was well founded. What was not well founded was the evil conspiracy nonsense. But there were some dark days along this road, some times were I believe it was possible that open gaming wasnt going to happen for 4E. But luckily Scott and Linae pulled this out and got it done. Lets not pretend there was no resistance and no struggle and that this was how it was supposed to work all along, cause it wasnt.

But what we had (and have) is a company with some real good people that hear us, that listen, that understand the benefits of open gaming and are able to convince the powers that be that open gaming is the right course.

This is an awesome day for open gaming and, in my view, for D&D. But the trip to get to today was fraught with peril and there were quite a few times when it was a legitimate possibility that we would not end up where we are today. It is an absolute credit to Scott and Linae and the other good folks at Wizards that this happened.

So rather than requring doomsayers to man up, how about we just all celebrate that this got done!

Hurray Linae and Scott!

Clark

AKA_Bait
2008-04-18, 09:40 AM
9. Updating the License: Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy, modify and distribute any Open Game Content originally distributed under any version of this License.

As far as I can tell, this clause here means that everything distributed under the 3.5 liscence will remain under the terms of that lisence in perpituity. My suspiscion is that the liscence associated with the 4e SRD will be called something other than the OGL, so that this clause doesn't potentially bite them in the rear.

Tsotha-lanti
2008-04-18, 11:34 AM
I'll believe it when I see it. Word has been that Hasbro corporate is pissed that one of their properties is "losing" money to independent publishers. If WotC was really going to just continue with royalty free OGL, they wouldn't need a new license. They would have just announced months and months ago that they were keeping the old license. But they're not. I smell shenanigans. And independent publishers have been pulling out their hair begging WotC for more information.

I dare hope they remember the lessons of TSR's final days. Hunting down people for noncommercially publishing stuff online for your game and the like is not a great idea.

I think Chaosium / Avalon Hill screwed up that way too, didn't they? That's why Mongoose's RuneQuest OGL is so critical and cool - no more doubt about whether people can noncommercially publish characters, cults, and alternate rooms on their websites.

Rutee
2008-04-18, 01:35 PM
As far as I can tell, this clause here means that everything distributed under the 3.5 liscence will remain under the terms of that lisence in perpituity. My suspiscion is that the liscence associated with the 4e SRD will be called something other than the OGL, so that this clause doesn't potentially bite them in the rear.
Correct. The "Any authorized.." bit is the part that seals it. Unless they'd like to go the shaky route of claiming they'd revoked authorization (Possible, but a pretty darn difficult avenue considering they could just say "We can revoke authorization at any time"), they've pretty much granted people the right to use the OGL in perpetuity.


Reformation: If any provision of this License is held to be unenforceable, such provision shall be reformed only to the extent necessary to make it enforceable.
Yeah they're pretty much saying you can do it forever. They've revoked their right to remove parts from the license in any meaningful way.


Yes -- they really can't revoke the license once it's put out there like that. Such things haven't been tried in court, however, but it would also be massive bad publicity for them to try anyway.
Not /this/ license, no. They've pretty much revoked their rights to make major alterations. But had they not given this right away, it'd be pretty easy.

I'd also like to note that I suppose third party retention would be better. Primarily, I had forgotten about IK and MnM2e, which pretty handily blow DnD out of the water, IMO, but are easy to use with DnD players because they keep so many system trappings.