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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8884274" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I always got the impression that what WotC focused on putting in the SRDs (and thus OGC) was more 'stuff that you need to use in play' vs other more supporting material. So parts of the DMGs that talk about how to play and whatnot, they're not OGC because, even if they can be construed in a sense as rules, they don't arise at the table in a direct way. Character creation is similar; you play with the character sheet you have and how it got filled out is more of a procedural issue and not a 'rule of play' in the same sense. How Fireball works is a rule, you invoke it in play, how you decide which ability scores you have on your sheet is a procedure, and subject to wide variation in actual practice. Few people change the definition of fireballs, but lots of them make up different character generation procedures, and how the character was generated has only the most indirect link to how a fireball works. The upshot being, neither 3.x nor 5e can be PLAYED from the SRDs, as the SRD is not a structurally complete game system. It contains what is needed to utilize a D&D-style Fireball at the table (IE the text of the spell and at least implicitly definitions of things like hit points, etc.). This is fine in practice, as each game naturally will want to discuss 'how to play' and quite possibly incorporate significantly different overall play processes than what WotC's D&D utilizes. It is also fine from the perspective of "I want to just publish another list of spells and a class to use them" since that will just 'plug in' to the existing D&D rules structure, which need not be recapitulated, and all I might need to do is reprint a few existing spell/monster/item/class/feat descriptions. Or again if I want to just write a D&D adventure, I can recapitulate the monsters/treasures/spells that are required for play as a reference along with my material. WotC certainly never envisaged people simply republishing its books entire, or even nearly entire, and that was easily accomplished via the SRD mechanism. I think the original architects of this approach really did a pretty good job, WotC gave up very little that was really key to its success with D&D, while enabling a LOT of 3PPs to participate in the 'ecology' of the game, or make substantively different games that wouldn't generally cannibalize D&D (though PF1 certainly tested the limits of that).</blockquote>

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