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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BSF" data-source="post: 1824361" data-attributes="member: 13098">Wow - An interesting conversation if nothing else.  I am digesting it all and trying to correlate my thoughts.  One thing that does strike me though is that the OGL seems to mean different things to different people.  I like to think that the OGL means that no one company will be solely responsible for the "health" of my gaming system.  I like d20.  With the OGL, I can see lots of good and/or interesting stuff put out there that WotC might not ever touch.  And if WotC solely put out marginalized garbage, it wouldn't be the only material to buy.  As a secondary concern, good ideas that belong to companies that close won't necessarily disappear.  Let's face it, good ideas and good business don't always go hand-in-hand.  Sometimes a company closes despite good ideas because the business was mis-managed.  As well, companies may close because the owner is unwilling/unable to continue running the business.  With the OGL, there is the potential that those good ideas will live on.  Assuming of course that those ideas were ever made OGC.I do not subscribe to the idea that Unearthed Arcana shouldn't be distributed just because WotC published it.  The reason is simple:  They repackaged OGC from other sources as well as adding some of their own OGC.  There is a secondary reason and that is most of the material in UA is less useful to players.  There are a lot of things in that book that need to be implemented on a campaign-wide scale.  (Are you going to let one PC use armor as DR and not the others?  Will only one PC use wounds/vitality while the rest use standard HP?)  As a DM, I could put together a primer for a campaign based on these forklift replacements of the rules and doing so would be easier if I could get them in electronic form.  I don't _need_ them in electronic form, but it would be easier and I would be willing to pay for that convenience.  The compilations of OGC feats/spells/etc always made me roll my eyes.  Less than stellar books that I don't need.  Does this mean that redistributing OGC material for free is desirable is a much more relevant question to me.  IF somebody were to snarf all of Phil Reed's content and make it available for free, I would probably still not get it.  I would much rather buy it from Phil.  But that is just me.  I have already bought some of Phil's PDFs because they look neat and I like Phil.  To date, I have only been able to use material from one of his PDFs in a game (Campaign Planner if you are curious) but I keep looking for ways to use more.  I want Phil to keep cranking stuff out because even if I don't use anything specific, it helps my idea factory.  (Kind of like all the time I spend on EN World helps my idea factory.)  One general question for everyone though.  Regardless of what we think the intents of the OGL might be, or how the OGL affects the market, what does the OGL mean for you?  What is your 'personal stake' in the OGL?  I have to wonder if there is a different perception between publishers and non-publishers.  I suspect there is.</blockquote>

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