Pramas said:
I often see people say things like "I only buy d20 from GR and Malhavoc"
This is not unlike someone saying "I only read short stories that appear in the
New Yorker or in a Year's Best collection." It's phase 3 thinking: recognizing the value of editorial selection.
In phase 1, readers are so glad to see new faces that they'll try anything once. In phase 2, the newly emerging professional authors establish names for themselves, and readers start looking out for products with those names on them. And in phase 3, those names coalesce into organizations: GR and Malhavoc aren't just publishing work by themselves/their house developers, but acting as a selection mechanism for top quality work by the best in the field.
This process is good for everyone. The established reputations of the publishers and the authors are magnified by their association with one another. A new star in the field doesn't have to go through the Phase 2 process of rising from the primordial ooze; being published by GR (i.e., passing a quality selection process) automatically marks them as someone to watch. Customers with a limited budget or limited time to research their purchases can be sure that anything they buy from a top publisher will be good, and (unlike the pre-Phase 1 bad old days) there's nothing stopping them from exploring the wide range of products that aren't from a "name" publisher.
Reputation is the engine that drives Phase 3, and the analogy to the Year's Best anthologies should indicate that full entry into Phase 3 is vital to the continued growth and success of the field as a whole.
Unfortunately, I believe that we'll never achieve a mature Phase 3 if publishers use currently-accepted methods of attributing their source material, because of the potential harm to reputations.
I'll use Chris's post about Corwyl as an example, but this isn't meant in any way to slam him; on the contrary, I salute his use of OGC (and his participation in this discussion), and am just trying to point out some emergent problems for the field as a whole.
Let's say that Behemoth3 announces the forthcoming release of the
Book of Re-Used Food. We let it be known that the
BoRF contains Open Game Content that's reprinted from books by the top names in the field. When asked to elaborate further, we say "Here's the
BoRF Section 15 declaration." It looks just like the one Chris posted for
Corwyl, except for the addition of the "Book of Re-Used Food copyright 2004 Behemoth3, author B. MacGougal."
When the
BoRF hits shelves, two things become obvious:
1) Re-used food is crap. 99% of the book is unbalanced, uninspired, unappealing OGC. It's so bad that anyone who bought it is going to be forever turned off buying anything else they associate with the
BoRF.
2) Only one small chunk of the
BoRF OGC has actually appeared elsewhere: a single spell taken from
Corwyl. The 99% that sucks is all original.
Releasing such a terrible product is tremendously damaging to Behemoth3's reputation. It's almost as damaging to the reputation of everyone listed in its Section 15 declaration, even though most of them had no actual connection to the content of the new work (in fact, some of them even had nothing to do with
Corwyl), and those who did were responsible for the one good thing about the
BoRF.
This situation arises directly from the inaccurate source attribution set up by the prevalent interpretation of the OGL v1.0a. In every other culture of publication, being re-published in a crappy work isn't a blow to your reputation because your contribution is accurately cited. When your name appears in connection with the part of the work you're specifically responsible for, you can stand out as the gem in a sea of crap instead of being submerged in it and tarnished by association.
Here are some things you could do to help improve the situation, Chris. (Again, I don't mean to pick on you, except insofar as these steps would be much more meaningful if taken by someone with your standing in the community):
1) Release a "References" document for Corwyl and other works that re-use OGC, making it clear which pieces of the text come from which sources
2) Encourage other publishers to do the same
3) Promote an interpretation of the OGL Section 15 that requires listing only those sources which contributed content that is actually being used in the new work.
If the Section 15 from Corwyl doesn't repeat the System Reference Document 31 times because it appeared (or should have) in each of the 31 prior sources, you've already moved away from a strict exactly-reproduce-all-prior-Section-15-declarations interpretation. Obviously, no one does that because it doesn't make sense. Does listing prior works that have no actual connection to the current work make any more sense?
The creation of an accepted community system for accurate citation of which OGC comes from which sources could address this problem, as well as protecting reputations from being tarnished when work is re-used in a Book of Crap.
