3 ms·
That’s what I don’t understand. Can’t people buy a set of dice and start making their own rules, characters, monsters, and spells? What am I missing.
by jasondigitized 4y ago
That’s what I don’t understand. Can’t people buy a set of dice and start making their own rules, characters, monsters, and spells? What am I missing.
- tptacek 4y agoThey can, but (as I understand it) there are pretty well-established commercial teams that have invested heavily in the IP-encumbered stuff we're talking about here; this is a little like embedding a PDF rendering library into your program, losing the license to it, and being told "can't you just take a text editor and a compiler and write your own PDF renderer?". Sure, you can.
- trynewideas 4y agoLots of people have for decades, and continue to do so. There's a much smaller commercial market for that right now that doesn't interact with the OGL, either though D&D 3E/Pathfinder or D&D 5E. The question isn't whether you can make it, it's whether you can access the specific markets and marketplaces that make sustainable money from it.
- crooked-v 4y agoIn particular, plenty of indie authors have noted that anything D&D-branded gets exponentially more sales, even if it's otherwise completely identical to something without the direct D&D association.