I got the new laptop yesterday.  I also got the full Adobe Creative Suite installed last night after work.  Today I transferred all the Skortched Urf’ Studios files to it so I can work from either my desktop at home or my laptop anywhere else.

I see that WOTC will be releasing a revised GSL.  It seems to me that the cold response of the third party publishers, everyone from the Piazo and Kenzer “Big Dogs” to the legion of mid-tier publishers as well as the little fish like yours truly have prompted WOTC to find something a little more appealing.  I don’t have much hope it will do any good.  You simply can’t go from an open license like the OGL and think most folks will be happy with anything more restrictive, especially when the first license was so fucked up as to be laughable.  Who in their right mind would toss all their IP eggs in the WOTC basket with no hope of ever, EVER getting them out again?  Utter bullshit.  So yeah, they are gonna take out a few things and try to get a bunch of support for the new license, but I think it will end up being too little to make any difference.

If WOTC wants active, enthusiastic third party support for 4E they need to allow works to be published in multiple formats like 4E, 3.5, True20 etc. None of this “I must either choose 4E or some other license” and NEVER be able to change it back BS.  They also need to let people publish friggin’ stat blocks in their products.  What the hell good is a module if it simply sez “The party then fights six Kobolds. (See page 52 of the MM.)”  Oh wait, you can’t even do that cuz its a PAGE NUMBER!  Yeah, that’s gonna make lots of third party modules real easy to us.  Don’t get me started on the “You pay all our court costs even if we lose” clause.  Sign me up!  When this is where we are starting from, forgive me if I am not all excited about where  the “revised” GSL will take us.  I hope I am wrong, but I doubt I will be.

WOTC has also fumbled the ball significantly on many other fronts.  Retire Dungeon and Dragon mags for digital versions, including an online tabletop where we can get together and play with our friends spread across the internet.  Yeah, hows that working out?  You’d think a company as big as Hasbro could afford some software programmers to, you know, hit a realese deadline.  (Yes, I know about the guy that killed himself and his wife.  While a tragedy, he didn’t go in and bust caps on the WOTC programmers so I don’t buy that ONE GUY is the cause of the hold up.)

Oh, and while the production values are first rate on the 4E products; a friggin 1st level module is selling for $29.95 retail.  Wow.  The two follow-on modules are $24.95 each, which looks like the new price-point for WOTC modules. Those will take you to 10th level; so in order to “play out” until 30th level using WOTC released modules your gonna shell out $225.00 in MODULES if you get ten levels out of three modules.  (How much is the full subscription to the War of the Burning Sky Campaign Saga again?)