Antinous: Not only is it legal if drilled and weighted properly, as a design, it was pretty popular for a while among amateurs and some leagues. Apparently, when Mystery Men came out, people started asking for the skull ball to the ball makers and the ones who made the original broke out the mold again and made a licensed version. It was pretty much the first popular clear resin ball, as far as I remember.

Mord: WotC has traditionally published only a few adventures per year. So a lot of GMs end up relying on third party sources to fill the gaps or otherwise deal with problems that present themselves... The list of the commonly referenced third parties for a while included Dungeon, though it was licensed from WotC, because it was published by Paizo. But a lot of those third party sources take stuff freelance. Without those freelancers, the 3PP sources don't do so hot, as they're stuck having difficulty producing huge numbers of adventures per year. Neither will WotC in the DDI era, as they'll be needing those same freelancers even more than they do now. And the best way to learn how to write a professional-grade adventure is to write them and publish them. So allowing fans to publish material helps keep the talent pool of good writers topped up. Suing the potential members of that pool is bad mojo, in part because they're often the most influential types (the ones who decide their friends are playing D&D and not Rifts, Shadowrun, World of Darkness, or any of a hundred other games) but also because you're destroying your own talent pool of contributors.

And while any given GM may stick to WotC's published material, the number of games out there means a diverse amount of material is needed, because not all groups want to play what's given to them by WotC. Other GMs which roll their own may derive inspiration or simply look for convenient material to swipe from what's easily available and those which stick to WotC sources may do the same when their backs are against the wall and they need to find something on the fly but don't want to make it up. Do a majority of GMs choose WotC stuff? Yeah. However, the popularity of certain books probably indicates that not all groups go for the same type of campaigns. In fact I can think of 4-5 relatively successful third party companies in the 3.x era who primarily focused on adventures and who tended to have quite widely differing styles, from old-school dungeon crawls to modern site-based adventure paths, all of which tended to range somewhat far from WotC's own house style. Look at the massive split between FR players, Greyhawk players, and Eberron players... many groups which play in one setting don't play adventures for the other two settings. So already WotC's own market is comprised of 3 groups which don't like to interact. That should say that the market still supports a diverse range of play, but WotC's need for huge numbers probably keeps them from publishing anything more than a small number of adventures.

OK, I'm not going with my page-and-a-half-at-10-pt.-font-and-1-inch-margins (I checked) rant on this thing, at least not unless I'm asked, but I'll just say this: I'm still wondering if this will provide any protection to fans who aren't publishing commercially, or if Wizards will revert to being one of the companies like Palladium where fans don't always publish material for the company's system even if it wouldn't harm the game in the marketplace because of fears over C&Ds and legal action.

The pencil-and-paper RPG market is fairly small as gaming sectors go, and the fanbase is mostly developed by a small cadre of outspoken, true fans who love to publish their own stuff, so penalizing those fans for being fans via legal threats tends to diminish the size of the fanbase for a game over time, as they quite evangelizing the game and recommend other systems instead. The rest of the fanbase tends to need regular influxes of new material, and requires it to be of a variety that it makes it impossible for the small number of publishers to provide it all, so unlike in the computer gaming world, saving some sectors like the competitive FPS genre, fan-made works for the game are often a critical part of support for the game as a whole, even before new players brought in by the aformentioned true fans are taken into account.

This is one of the reasons I'm really skeptical of Wizards' actions so far, and am disgusted with their marketing plan in general; they want to act all open, but the most glaring, important things to know are left unstated unless the fanbase gets up in arms about it. I suppose we could call it "Decision by Ranting Crowd" marketing. I get that the developers are excited, but frankly, they're the developers; if anyone is going to be excited, it will be them and the portion of the fanbase that finds anything new for their favorite game to be A Good Thing.

Another use may be in some types of IT shops when doing some type of rapid deployment, particularly when there's not much chance of a master server to simplify rollouts or where the IT techs have a specific need to bring their software tools with them in a pre-installed form. For example, Best Buy's Geek Squad home setup services. One USB key w/ the tools, then a small array of additional ones with other software ready for auto-installation that are wiped and re-duplicated as the software they typically install changes. Heck of a lot easier than carrying around a bunch of disks and handloading them. Particularly useful when the tech knows that the current OS is fried and (s)he would have to re-install the OS anyway.

Other than that, I definitely think the ideas expressed earlier vis-a-vis band demos and non-profit demonstrations are an interesting consideration.

Another thing to realize is that the GSL is revocable at any time at Wizards' choice. The OGL is not. So unlike the OGL, Wizards can have their cake and eat it too; if they think that some upstart's doing too well, they can call off the thing and force them to pay such high licensing fees in order to keep going with production that they basically force the new guy either out of business or to sell to Wizards.

So it's not really as open as the OGL is at all; it's just saying "we won't sue you... unless it looks like it's good for our bottom line." The OGL is revocable and says "we won't sue you for using this material, and from now on, we never can." That is a big difference there.

So far, the exec releasing the rumor known to be working with Wizards has reportedly been told the no double OGL/GSL provision will likely be a company-wide blackout by Wizards themselves.

Furthermore, the OGL is a GPL-like license. Wizards does not have claim to the legal text of the OGL anymore even if it could be argued that it was copyrightable; they released ownership to a non-profit foundation. So I can publish under the OGL without giving up title to the game to Wizards. So if I start from a non-d20 base, or have a game so substantially modified that for all intents and purposes it's not anywhere close to WotC's implementation, it is my system and no one else's.

Thus, I'm fairly sure that it is a poison pill clause, as there are non-WotC derived systems licensed under the OGL, (Spirit of the Century, for example, uses the open source FUDGE ruleset as a base, which is sort of based off of d6s and pool mechanics)and as Wizards does not own those games, to say that companies cannot publish material for SotC while at the same time publishing for 4th ed. sounds pretty anti-competitive, as they're the biggest fish in the hobby games pond by an order of magnitude at least, with the exception of White Wolf/CCP.

Fnarf: At least in the US, if you can avoid taxes legally, you have the right to do so, according to the Supreme Court. Their official position is that every person has the right to pay the lowest legal amount of tax they can. Emphasis on the legal.

Already read the book, and dsfinitely nice to see the stories freely available, as they're good ones. Sadly, I've already read the book, so it does take some of the fun out of reading them, as they're not completely new now.

But they're good enough that I don't mind reading them again.

Yeah, I notice that the dog has certainly figured out how to use it. Smart dog. I wonder how long it took him to learn how to load and cock the machine.

Seriously, if I had a dog and thought that the dog would learn how to use the machine to throw their own tennis balls for games of fetch, I'd seriously consider building it for use when I'd be away from the house and the dog would be home alone. It seems like a perfect way to help keep a dog from getting bored. Only thing I'd worry about is that the dog might snap one of the parts and hurt himself.

I'd so want to build that if I had plans and a dog. I'd probably want to upgrade it a bit.. build a new base that would allow it to change horizontal and then have a program that throws it with different power levels, altitudes, and azimuths just to keep the dog a bit more interested. Well.. and myself as well.

But yeah, it's like 2 minutes of pure, unadulterated joy.

If Good Omens were up in that list, I'd immediately go for that one, because it IS such a good introduction to both Pratchett and Gaiman. I'm glad I picked it up randomly in the bookstore one day. So yes, there are people who don't know about them. Thankfully, most people are enlightened after reading one of his books.

I've just finished Smoke and Mirrors, even, so I'm happy to see it up there. I'd recommend it in a hearbeat. However, while I'd recommend any of his fiction, I can't help return to my first loves when I try to bring it to others, and that would be American Gods in this case.