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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 9557743" data-attributes="member: 177">Hey, [USER=6906980]@AlViking[/USER] and [USER=7034611]@mamba[/USER] - allow me to perhaps clear this up before the two of you get into it too nastily.I think the problem is in the bit I bolded, above.  It contains a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the OGL - the OGL was not there to "protect game rules".  Please excuse me if the following seems pedantic - we have to be specific to clear up the confusion here.Normally, all publications are automatically protected by copyright.  Copyright protects the specific expressions found in the publication.  If anyone wants to use the specific wording you used, they must come to you to get permission - a license - to use the material.Now, copyright does not cover logic, systems, or processes.  Those forms of intellectual property require a patent, and the D&D rules have never been patented.  Technically, if someone found a way to completely restate the logic of D&D rules and the processes of play, without using any of the original verbiage, they could do so and publish the result.  But, doing that is a right pain in the tush, and pretty much nobody wants to try it, because it means abandoning the shared language all the players have.The OGL was a way to grant license not to "rules", but to the particular and specific text of the SRD.  It was a way for other publishers to get access to the specific expression without having to contact WotC and negotiate a special deal to do so.  The OGL was offered such that so long as you followed its (pretty darned simple) strictures, your license was automatically granted, no questions asked.  It was crafted so that, if you wanted to, you could just copy whatever specific SRD text you wanted, in whole or in part, and fold, spindle, and mutilate it as you saw fit.As such, it was and is very much a license.  And it wasn't trying to do anything that licenses can't generally do.  The OGL was always about the specific expression.  Don't let anyone's fancy talk fool you otherwise.</blockquote>

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