Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="BSF" data-source="post: 2807922" data-attributes="member: 13098">To build on an example,  I release a monster called BSF's Stingy Monkey with stats, including a new ability called No Backsies, then write up a great description of the history, ecology and combat tactics of the Stingy Monkey.  My OGC designation is that stats are OGC, but names of feats, spells, abilities and monsters is not.  Now perhaps another publisher wants to reuse BSF's Stingy Monkey.  It's a pirate game, with ninjas and dinosaurs, so it is a great iconic world.  The Publisher starts looking at it and realizes that reusing BSF's Stingy Monkey means renaming the creature, and then stripping out the 23 references to other non-OGC material in the description.  Publisher is frustrated and does this.  Gets product to final editting when it is pointed out that the publisher is still using No Backsies as the name of the special ability.  The problem is that the No Backsies mechanic has been reused for a spell effect now, and three additional monsters were created with the No Backsies ability.  Publisher is _really_ glad that the mistakes were caught in the final edit rather than after release.  But now the product is delayed and the Publisher goes over everything one more time because maybe there is another violation somewhere in the product.  Publisher now kind of regrets having even tried to use BSF's Stingy Monkey.  Even after all the changes are in place, the Publisher realizes that some people will look at the newly renamed monster with the newly renamed ability and some customers will think it is just a blatant ripoff of BSF's Stingy Monkey.  Because not all the customers realize that the mechanics are OGC but the names aren't.  And while there is clearly a reference in the Section 15 of the OGL, those customers won't look at it anyway.  They will just go to BSF's forums and start posting how Publisher is a rat and stealing BSF's Stingy Monkey without even giving BSF credit.  Crippled OGC doesn't make content impossible to reuse.  It just puts up hurdles to doing so.  Maybe the names are useful IP, maybe they aren't.  If I designate BSF's Stingy Monkey as IP, I can reuse the name for any system mechanics I like.  Maybe that has value.  But it does place that obstacle into the reuse concepts of the OGL.Why do customers care?  End user customers really don't.  Except that with crippled OGC, they are unlikely to see those cool things reused in other products.  With an OGC crippled BSF's Stingy Monkey, you would only see it in products that BSF produced.  You wouldn't see it in a module for our hypothetical pirate/ninja/dinosaur game world.  Personally, I would rather see cool things get reused and become part of the collective shared experiences of gamers.</blockquote>

Verification