Editing Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition (section)

==Open Gaming License==
WotC heard about this "open source" thing, and thought they'd get on the bandwagon with [[Open Gaming License]]. Players had been making house rules for forever and a day, but WotC riffed off the GNU Public License and wrote some rules where anyone could publish supporting material off the core rules, for free, just acknowledge the source and use the same license so people can make splatbooks for your stuff. The amount of non-WotC material written for 3rd edition skyrocketed, and the [[d20 System]] became the heart of dozens of role-playing games in dozens of genres. WotC didn't see royalty checks, but it helped cement their grip on the roleplay game industry during the 3e era and sold a lot of corebooks.

WotC chickened out in the next edition, offering a "new and improved" licensing scheme for it, which is more restrictive and far less used.