4E looks to be more and more restricted. I certainly can’t do ‘Spychanger City’ under it. It seems unlikely that I can’t do any other of my setting material (such as Pulps, or Materia Arms) either. In fact, it looks like that if I’m not making ‘generic adventure module #252’, then I cannot use 4E, period.

And even if I AM making such a module, WotC gets to tell me what I can and can’t do with it.

This isn’t an issue of the MECHANICS of 4E, but of how the license is approached. For many small-time contributors, the likes of which are all over rpgnow.com and the like, 4E really doesn’t seem to make any sense.

I am only hoping that 4E perhaps makes a more interesting car from the start, and will hopefully push people away from creating endless “dungeons” and instead cultivate an environment where the game is either reinvented, or rehashed entirely.

An example is Greg Stolze’s “REIGN, a game that resparked my interest in fantasy settings. I’d like to see more developments in that vein than I would another campaign world. Of course, this is all what I would want, and I know this is not what everyone else wants, but it’s all I know sadly.

Cheers to anyone though that does try. I will, in the end, appreciate that effort.

In my own campaigns with 3.x, we ditched Challenge ratings on sight, got rid of Staggered at zero HP, ignored Flat-Footed AC, and simplified the combat sequence among dozens of other changes. Some of the things that are happening to 4e are the result of feedback from folks who made these mods long ago. Effectively, some groups are already playing at least some parts of what will be 4e.

WotC’s original intent is backfiring – rather than unifying the gaming world under one set of rules, they gave the world the keys to the car. Some have driven the car into the wall, while others have gone the distance. Now, WotC realizes they’ve pretty much given away the core of D&D;, so they’re changing the design of their car and starting a new racing league with new regulations so that they can get back on top again.

However, there are enough competitors around (amateur and pro) with enough spare parts and ingenuity to support their own racing series without any input from or control by WotC at all. So, expect some folks to put on challenging road races with finely tuned machines and others to do little more than paint smiley faces on their demolition derby cars.

WotC now knows that while they have the muscle to attract players with brand identity and pretty paint jobs, the underlying structure of the system is no longer theirs to control. The cat is out of the bag. Some will buy their products for look and feel alone, but the audience is critical and would rather drive something that’s fast and reliable over something that’s overpriced and flashy.

How’s that for pushing the analogy envelope? 🙂

Your notion of 3.99e is already a reality in some groups and will grow in popularity even (and maybe especially) after 4e is released.

First place, even with deep pockets, judges don’t like frivolous lawsuits designed to use the legal system as a weapon against the plaintiff’s competitors; such actions can backfire hard.

Secondly, lawsuits aren’t cheap. Even if you have deep pockets, you’ve got to pay attention to whether it would be worth what it’s going to cost you to get rid of a very minor competitor. And really, GURPS gets ten times as many google hits as OSRIC, and only three out of the first 20 hits are for OSRIC the RPG. I doubt OSRIC even comes up on the radar.

Thirdly, T$R is still remembered as such. If WotC/Hasbro starts suing companies without good cause, you’re going to turn off part of your core audience.

It just seems to me that WotC sort of opened Pandora’s Box when they released the OGL / SRD. I’m not familiar w/ how a company protects its IP, but in the day and age of open source it’s an increasingly difficult issue to cover under current law.

I dunno…maybe I’m way off base here.

WotC has indeed benefited from the training provided by 3rd party companies. If you look at the folks working on 4E, many of them previously wrote books for Green Ronin. That’s not just freelancers, but many current staffers as well. I think Dragon and Dungeon used to fill the role of farm system, but now that they have gone digital I’m not sure that’ll continue to be the case.

Even if 4E were more palatable, a lot of the attitude copped by the 4E designers over the last few months is a little off-putting, a distinct tone that this game is only for cool kids, which does not necessarily include us.