Has the OGL ever lead you to other purchases?

[Mark CMG]

At the very end of all the legal boilerplate is the Copyright Notice, which serves as something of a bibliography.

All of the works listed in the Copyright Notice were (one way or another) used to produce the work you hold in your hands.

Yup. It's a product's pedigree, so to speak. I glance first at the section 15 and if it includes companies or products I know to have unsound game mechanics (and I'm not talking about poor editing, here, but actual rules implementation) I take a much harder look at what is within the product in my hands. Transposing mistakes from one product to the next by use of OGC lets you know that the publisher utilizing that OGC has no better grasp on those game mechanics than the one from which thay have borrowed.

 

[Justin Bacon]

Yup. It's a product's pedigree, so to speak. I glance first at the section 15 and if it includes companies or products I know to have unsound game mechanics (and I'm not talking about poor editing, here, but actual rules implementation) I take a much harder look at what is within the product in my hands. Transposing mistakes from one product to the next by use of OGC lets you know that the publisher utilizing that OGC has no better grasp on those game mechanics than the one from which thay have borrowed.

You have to be a little bit careful with that technique. There are some people who will take the opportunity of the OGL to either cull or fix the worthwhile material from a broken product.

Justin Alexander Bacon
http://www.thealexandrian.net

 

[Mark CMG]

You have to be a little bit careful with that technique. There are some people who will take the opportunity of the OGL to either cull or fix the worthwhile material from a broken product.

Naturally. That's why I take a harder look. If the mistakes aren't transposed then we're closer, again, to stable ground. However, extensive use of OGC from companies with bad track records can lead even the best Mister Fixit to miss mistakes and once I've written off a company as being shaky, I'm less likely to want to spend my time checking their future products or the products of companies that cite them extensively in their section 15. There's only so many hours in a day, afterall. I've really got to have some serious, serious interest in a product to jump through that many hoops.

 

[Psion]

Did you specifically read the OGL statement at the back of the book? I haven't seen the product, but I understood that it referenced the source in each monster entry.

It puts its "self referencial" line in the Section 15 in each monster entry. Not any references to other books (I'm not sure there were any. But ToH is probably one of the most pilfered from OGC sources I have seen.)

 

[Pinotage]

Nope. But I do scan through it to see what's been used. However, it's kinda hard to tell how much material has been used from each Section 15 source, and as such you can't really make an informed decision on any product on the list.

Pinotage

 

[Crothian]

No, it's useless for this sort of thing. I might know what products helped build the one I'm reading but I don't know what parts were used or what came from what.

 

[dpmcalister]

Yes, both this year in fact. I'd gotten hold of Swashbuckling Adventures and was feeling a little deflated by it, however, the Section 15 entry gave me the heads up about Black Flags and Seas of Blood. Both of which I've since bought - and glad I did so. They are much more suited to what I was looking for than Swashbuckling Adventures. Now I just need to retool my campaign a little

 

[pogre]

With rare exceptions, the only people who read these things are publishers.

 

[Crothian]

With rare exceptions, the only people who read these things are publishers.

I'm a rare exception. While I don't use it to determine other books to buy I do use it to help determine if I 'm going to buy the book. Its one of the first thing I flip to after table of contents.

 

[Sledge]

I bought the complete minions pdf because it was referenced in Arms & Armour 3.5 Too be fair however it was also mentioned in the main text. Still Bastion did get an extra sale from it.

If I were publishing I would throw a "Permission to use the name of this product in reference to ogc used from it." on my books.