Crippled OGC Questions

[jmucchiello]

When you PI the name you effectivly reduce your total effect because your "personal touch" has been removed via the PI. Sure you "own" the name of the spell. Big whoop te doo. Its a pain in the butt to get permissions to use PI, so a lot of publishers will merely bypass your attempts to "control" your OGC via a PI'd name.

When other publishers use your OGC and rename it you've lost many of the benefits you could have gotten by their resuse of your material. Effectivly, you're stabbing yourself in your back in the hopes that one day, your PI will make you a lot of money.

This has been my point from the beginning.

I have not felt any ill-will in this thread.

 

[Nellisir]

Warlord Ralts said...

I PI'd the name of the spell, not to keep anyone from using it, but because the spell has a history, and if the spell is going to be reused, I'd like to see it with it's original name.

I think this is everyone's stumbling block. By making the name PI, you're guaranteeing that only those people that make an arrangement with you (outside of and unrelated to the OGL) are going to preserve the "original name", and that is almost guaranteed to be only a portion of the people who utilize your OGC, thus undercutting the very thing you were hoping to preserve.

I understand the concern...if you make "Silvester's Silver Bullet" OGC, you may one day come across the NPC "Silvester, Warden of Evil", an utter violation of everything your "original" "Silvester, Defender of Good" stood for. There's no good answer to that, except that that's not the reason you've given. (I've seen the errata reason also, but frankly, if I thought something needed "fixing", I'd fix it, and if I didn't, it wouldn't matter to me if you did.)

Ethically, we'd have to agree to disagree. It's nice to notify someone that you're using their OGC, and it's very nice to ask permission, but you've already given permission by using the OGL, just as you asked permission from WotC to use the SRD by abiding by the terms of the OGL and d20 license. Using the OGL means you give permission for other people to reproduce your OGC (actually, that's not totally true. It means you have to give permission for other people to reproduce your OGC). Having them actually ask is nice, but it not unethical for them not to, since you knew the rules when you released OGC.

Just my thoughts,
Nell.