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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Sigil" data-source="post: 9519892" data-attributes="member: 2013">Thank you, Alzrius! It's been a while but I think my motivation there was a combination of wanting to figure out how to get around the problem of "multiclassing dips for just one ability" but also to give those that publishers that designed Prestige Classes some guardrails to make sure that they were all approximately of the same power level (and thus fight power creep).Voadam has it right here... if you're creating a compilation just for your own table, you probably don't need the OGL and it's likely to fall under "Fair Use" doctrine in the US or similar doctrines in other countries (IANAL, TINLA).Worth noting if you plan to compile stuff into a document that DOES rely on the OGL is that you'll want to pay special attention to your sources to make sure (1) their designation of OGC is crystal clear and (2) the stuff you want to use is OGC.To use the Enichiridion of Treasures and Objects D'Art as an example, you'll note the Product Identity claims are very narrow and specifically called out (basically my own name, the name of my products and product lines, and the name of my imprint plus similar notations for those entities whose permission I sought to use their Product Identity, usually in crediting their work - Wulf Ratbane of Bad Axe Games was always gracious in this regard) - and otherwise "all text" (but not images since I didn't own the copyright on those and couldn't release them). So for all intents and purposes, all of the text in the work is free for your use to remix with the OGL (except my name). Enjoy!Tangent/Rant:I would contrast this clarity in PI declarations that include phrases like "all proper names of spells except for those derived from other OGC sources" (how am I to know/prove which spells were derived from other OGC sources and which were not?) - and by claiming the names of spells, it becomes impossible to re-use the spells in another work without renaming them (which basically forces me to divorce them from being recognizable as your content) - while I get you might want to claim "proper names of NPCs" to protect that intellectual property, claiming a spell name like "Iron Spikes" so if I reprint it I have to call it "Steel Points" and only the most careful readers are going to connect my reprint to your "Iron Spikes" ... seems seems pretty silly. I frequently made purchasing decisions based on a company's track record with their OGC/PI declarations - if I bought from a company and discovered they "crippled" their OGC, I never bought from them again. Similarly, I bought books I wasn't necessarily interested in from companies that had generous OGC declarations, because of the promise I'd have an easy time remixing them if I was ever interested in the material.I don't have any hard evidence of this, but I'm convinced that unclear declarations (which Voadam refers to as "crippled OGC" - and it's possible I used that same term 20+ years ago on OGF-L, as I agree with the characterization) generally came out of one of two places:1. Folks that didn't really believe in the concept of the OGL and wanted to deny others the ability to piggyback off their own OGC (they may have believed in it enough to want to use others' OGC, but not grant that same right to use theirs to the next guy - I could call this group those that used the OGL in bad faith as they wanted the benefits but not the costs)2. Folks who handed the OGL to their lawyers, and for which the lawyers decided, "this is a clause we can use to satisfy the OGL which doesn't require us to do any additional work figuring out what should be OGC and what should not" (over the years, I have come to the conclusion that this was probably the reason most publishers used unclear declarations).In other words, I believe most bad OGC declarations came from a place of either "malice" or "laziness" and I think "laziness" is most often the answer... spending extra time highlighting your PI or making it crystal clear what is OGC and what is not will probably not sell even one more copy of your product, and it's extra time and work you have to pay for, so there's no business incentive to do it./End RantAlso, I'm probably not the typical "business man" - my goal when I wrote 3E/3.5E supplements years ago was threefold (approximately in order of importance):1. Give people fun stuff to use at their tables2. Use my hobby (RPGs) to finance itself (I was newly married at the time and my agreement with my wife was that my RPG habit would have to be fully funded by my RPG habit).3. Fill niches I found were lacking in other published products at the time that I though I could do betterSo because of #3, there were several products I started and abandoned because someone else did it better. Because #1 trumped #2 (i.e., I wanted to get material out there more than I wanted money), once the money got to be almost nothing (as it does for any product over time; you get a large bump initially which then turns into a long tail), I reduced the price of all of the products to "free" because it didn't really cost me anything - I wasn't making appreciable sales any more, so why not turn them loose on the world? (What I didn't want is for my works to become unavailable because of copyright funkiness, and while of course DriveThruRPG is going to shut down some day and at that point it will become more difficult to get my stuff, that day has not yet come).</blockquote>

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