wizards of the coast and hasbro...

[ashurakain]

are you guys ok with the changes theyve made in theyre liscensing?
i dont want to see this game suddenly disappear because of a bunch of ascholes from those companies...
Makes me now more worried about the other many DnD games that were released, and will probably never be released anymore... I really like this game.

[Losse]

WOTC backtracked most everything as far as i can tell or a ton of the junk they tried, its a non-issue now for even later version that other games might use.

[Wraith_Magus]

While this has mostly blown over, I think there's a couple key points that should be highlighted.

First, you cannot copyright a method of doing something (like game rules). This is why there are tons of variants of Snakes and Ladders as board games, or a fajillion Bejeweled clones, or any of the MANY, MANY games that rip off D&D's mechanics without actually being OGL - copyrights do not protect rules, so long as they are mimicked with the developer's own code. Hasbro doesn't have a copyright on "strength", or the idea that having more of it makes you do more damage when you hit someone. The developer of Low Magic Age is clearly making their own work when coding, and cannot be sued for making their own work, even if the end goal were a replication of the rules of D&D on computer. (Again, many other games like the classic Wizardy did this before the OGL even existed, and weren't in violation of copyright.)

The only thing that can be copyrighted is the actual text in the SRD itself. At places like the help menu, the SRD is copied verbatim in the game, and hence there could be a case on that front, but this would be easily solved by just rewriting the text in their own words, even if the meaning is the same.

The ultimate reason companies even use the OGL is mostly just advertising. I'm sure more than a few of you looked at how this game was OGL and that was a factor in your decision to try this game out, because you already know D&D. OGL is mainly made for people making 3rd party modules like dungeons for D&D without making their own complete rulesets, so you're making something explicitly designed to "plug into" existing D&D - if you actually go further like Paizo and make Pathfinder, you don't actually need OGL anymore, because you aren't interacting with D&D directly. Again, if the developer just changed the text so it wasn't plagiarizing the SRD, they'd be in the clear.