I've always allowed "fan made" material in my games - after discussing with the player why they want to include it and looking it over to make sure it isn't something crazy or overtly game-breaking (and my line for "crazy" is far enough out there that typically I'm more concerned about the game-breaking part). And if it turns out that its covertly game-breaking, well, my players aren't interested in breaking my game so they're usually the ones who come to me and ask "is there a problem with this spell we added or this class feature I'm using? It seems too good" just as I'm starting to think the same thing.
This is basically the attitude I had towards Dragon magazine articles back in the 80s - some of it's good, some of it's REALLY good, sometimes it's overpowered garbage, and sometimes it's under-powered garbage. I carried that idea over to Usenet and the fan supplements that would be passed around there (and hammered by the heavy hands of TSR legal back in the day), and then into the 3e explosion. Nothing has really changed on that front except that the Internet and the OGL means that there's a lot more of it floating around than there used to be.
(Oh and I think that the idea that there's some line between third party and "fan-made" material was basically blown up by the OGL back in 2000. At that point the distinction between the two of them essentially became "do I have the money, determination and ego to self-publish my material, or am I not interested in doing the work of self-publishing and just want to share my ideas". Plenty of crap gets published as professional third party material and plenty of good stuff gets released as just "here's some stuff I think is cool" by amateurs. And vice-versa of course.)
This is basically the attitude I had towards Dragon magazine articles back in the 80s - some of it's good, some of it's REALLY good, sometimes it's overpowered garbage, and sometimes it's under-powered garbage. I carried that idea over to Usenet and the fan supplements that would be passed around there (and hammered by the heavy hands of TSR legal back in the day), and then into the 3e explosion. Nothing has really changed on that front except that the Internet and the OGL means that there's a lot more of it floating around than there used to be.
(Oh and I think that the idea that there's some line between third party and "fan-made" material was basically blown up by the OGL back in 2000. At that point the distinction between the two of them essentially became "do I have the money, determination and ego to self-publish my material, or am I not interested in doing the work of self-publishing and just want to share my ideas". Plenty of crap gets published as professional third party material and plenty of good stuff gets released as just "here's some stuff I think is cool" by amateurs. And vice-versa of course.)
