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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 3320533" data-attributes="member: 9225">You're free to believe that if you like. The OGL is a strange license. When I've talked to lawyers about it they've remarked that it's incoherent in spots and serves best as a social custom. It's been my experience that it's a Inkblot test that brings out what people want the business end of the hobby to be like. You're calling it a feat. My text refers to no such thing and I am certainly not responsible for you or anyone else calling it a "feat." The primary points of similarity are in an implementation of prior art, including the use of such terms as "Strength," numerical ratings thereof, and so on. You do not know whether this plugs into a D20 mechanic, whether movement occurs in squares, or much else, except for what you're inferring. The fact is, nobody can own describing the ability to attack another guy immediately if you drop a guy in an RPG.If the number of similarities went up? Then you might have a point. But frankly, there's no point to recreating D&D with different phrasing. It's easy to make a game that's substantially similar but with your own rules tweaks, and most distinctive features of the game (ability scores, classes and levels) are not protected.Hasbro claims that it owns rules instead of expressions thereof all the time (they did it in the letter that shut down Google Risk). OGC is supposed to content under copyright that third parties have permission to use, but the OGL doesn't actually define OGC this way. It uses a definition that encompasses things that can't be licensed because WotC doesn't own them. I  find the idea that anybody can, as you suggest, license something without having any rights over it to be extraordinarily bizarre.That covers your second point too.I'm not talking about the name. I'm talking about whether you can claim compatibility with an existing game. In Risk's case, there are in fact other commercial expansions for Risk that are listed as such, like One World Dominion:<a href="http://www.nobleknight.com/ProductDetail.asp_Q_ProductID_E_-1475851639_A_InventoryID_E_2147441095_A_ProductLineID_E_1241988826_A_ManufacturerID_E_726856413_A_CategoryID_E_16_A_GenreID_E_" target="_blank">http://www.nobleknight.com/ProductDetail.asp_Q_ProductID_E_-1475851639_A_InventoryID_E_2147441095_A_ProductLineID_E_1241988826_A_ManufacturerID_E_726856413_A_CategoryID_E_16_A_GenreID_E_</a>Or you could go for A House Divided:<a href="http://conquestgaming.com/divided/" target="_blank">http://conquestgaming.com/divided/</a>AFAIK, the last time anybody tested whether or not a third party could claim compatibility with D&D was Mayfair Games. I think Technomancer Pres tried something similar. They, by the way, release compatible products with no special license.I use it because it's the standard of practice. It's very useful as a pretext to do things you'd be nervous about doing otherwise.</blockquote>

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