D&D 4th Edition SRD And OGL Details
Five thousand dollars.
According to this Wizards of the Coast press release, that's how much an independent publisher will have to pay if they want access to the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition OGL before June 6th, 2008, at which point the SRD will be released to the general public and it all becomes free again.
The $5000.00 USD a publisher would pay for this privilege nets them an "OGL Designer's Kit," which includes pre-publication versions of the 4th Edition core rulebooks, as well as the OGL itself, an SRD, License Guide, FAQ, Registration Card, rules updates as they are finalized, final galleys including typeset text and artwork and advanced copies of the finished core rulebooks. They also receive the right to publish OGL products on August 1st, 2008—five months before the general public. (Of course, to make this deal at all, you need a business license, so any D&D fan willing to shell out five grand for advance copies—just don't. Please.)
The reasons they cite for this fee is to make sure companies are serious about creating quality 4th Edition material.
So, what are your two cents on the matter? Or perhaps your five hundred thousand cents on the matter?
Mad Pawn
Posted to Hot Stuff, Roleplaying Games on 10 January 2008
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: d&D 4e, dungeons & dragons, OGL, SRD, wizards of the coast
You left out the most important detail which is people who pay for the developers kit can start releasing their products August 1, 2008 while everyone else has to wait til January 1, 2009.
That's a pretty significant factor, given that it's five full months and the holiday season.
This ain't the OGL of 3.0, but more like a reformed d20 license, from what I'm seeing. The design seems to clearly break from the old OGL and make things like True20 and Conan unlikely, if not outright impossible.
I can understand why they are doing this, but I think it's a real stumble. Limiting who can release 4.0 content decreases the number of folks who are going to enthusiastically support and champion the new rules. Even Paiso, who would seem to be natural champions of the new edition seem lukewarm in their support so far.
One of the benefits of riffing off d20 was that you, as a player or GM, would be coming at a new game that used familiar tropes in its rules. Granted, the distance between D&D and True20 was a lot greater than the distance between D&D and Conan d20. Still, the idea was, people would be more willing to buy games in the d20 family after they'd invested the time and effort to learn one of them. If someone came into RPGs through the Conan, Thieves World, or Black Company games, they would be more likely to give D&D a try because the rules and assumptions would already be familiar to them.
I have no idea how many actual sales this sort of thing produced. I doubt anybody does. It's fairly clear, however, that WotC is cutting themselves out of this loop. Let me be clear, here: I am not predicting doom for WotC and 4th edition because they have broken from the old d20 synergy. Nor am I saying that the d20 family of games will be able to keep chugging along just fine and happy without their D&D flagship. But either are possible, and I doubt anybody has the real data necessary to make an accurate prediction at this point.
I think the few third-party products that are released are going to be scrutinized very heavily. If they do well, then we'll see the flood of new products under 4.0's OGL. If they don't do well, however, I imagine most of the heavy-hitters will just shrug their shoulders at the new version of D&D and concentrate on their own systems. The divergence in play styles that our peeks at 4.0 hint at means it's extremely unlikely we'll see many products that try to straddle the fence. All eyes will be on Paizo after the new year. If Pathfinder remains a 3.x product, it will be seen as a vote of no confidence for 4.0 not just on the part of Paizo, but also by a sizable portion of D&D's target audience. Honestly, I don't expect that to happen. However, the fact that Paizo's even openly considering such a thing is a bit shocking to me.