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How Many RPG's Are Being Made Because of the WotC OGL Debacle?
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this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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What's truly funny is that this isn't the first time this happened. 4th edition had WotC bamboozle third party creators by fiddling with the OGL, and third party creators responded by making a rival to D&D. They called it Pathfinder.
Then you look a little further afield and you see a massive indie TTRPG community that I have to assume had an influx of new designers who only found out about it due to the OGL incident.
TSR had the exact same issues back with 2.5 edition. That's how WotC even managed to acquire the property.
@AngryCommieKender @Susaga Eh, I wouldn't really call TSR's issues in "2.5"/late 2e similar to the issues surrounding the cancellation of the d20 System Trademark License, the 4e GSL, or this past January's OGL debacle. For one thing, the game never officially had an open license before 3e came along. For another, late TSR's woes had more to do with their reach exceeding their grasp.
They didn't have a license, true. What I was referring to was them getting sued happy, for good reason in a lot of cases, because people were slapping "Gary Gygax's D&D" on homebrew modules and trying to sell them. Got them a lot of bad publicity, and they ended up selling.
@AngryCommieKender As far as I'm aware, that happened far earlier than the era you cited. I've heard that people were calling them "T$R" and "They Sue Regularly" in the early 90s, before the general public exploded onto the Net.