> "Actually I can support it as I've been told by nameless people > who use to work for Hasbro that they have copies of all of our > products sitting on a shelf in their production offices and > that they are referred to often."
I can't speak for anyone in R&D, but I can state that I carried a copy of Palladium Fantsy RPG to virtually every Open Gaming meeting I had at WotC. When someone started in on the value of our unique IP and how nobody in gaming had anything like D&D, I would slide the book across the table and ask them what they thought about it. Since PFRPG and D&D are essentially fraternal twins, it was always funny to watch as the eyes widened. PFRPG is a perfect example of the idea that "games can't be copyright"; it stripped D&D down to the basic (non-copyrightable) fundamentals and then rebuilt it from scratch to create a wholly new work. It's also an example of the power of Open Gaming. PFRPG (and essentially all 3rd party D&D 'clones') are all "not quite" compatible with D&D. Due to the way they're designed, and the very real copyright issues that do exist with RPG products, they represent iterations of the same core ideas rather than branches on a connected tree of mechanical compatibility. Open Gaming solves that problem by permitting direct compatibility at a level visible and usable by players - the terms, arrangements, templates, and actual proper nouns of the game system itself. On the other hand, I would be astonished to learn that anyone in WotC's R&D department had anything more than a passing familiarity with Palladium's products. They're all outside the demographic Palladium targets, and if they wanted to have a half-dragon, demonic ninja assassin in a game, they'd just design it themselves. Ryan _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
