Is the Unearthed Arcana SRD online?

[Bendris Noulg]

Is anyone out there still interested in making a UA SRD?

Well, I'm just about finished with Sanity. However, I'm still waiting to see if the Breakdaddy/Woodelf collaboration works out, as that would likely be the fastest route of completion. I'm also not sure how many others have been swayed by AC's post, so how much of the former offered contributions remain offered is anyone's guess at the moment.

Can we get re-confirmation from anyone still "in" the project?

 

[woodelf]

Does someone actually DO that? If so, they really aren't releasing ANY OGC, because you don't need to use a licence to copy rules if you aren't copying text. The copyright courts are pretty explicit on that one.

Can't come up with a specific citation right now, but i'd swear that i've actually seen a declaration that made "the rules" OGC, but "the text" either closed or PI--i forget which.

Hmmm. It bothers me. I mean understand some authors do it out of a concern over control of their property. That's their decision, but I don't have to like it. It is, if anything, against the "spirit of the OGL" if anything is. The point of the OGL is to create a body of work that can be shared and propagate; creating "IP mines" that make it difficult to do this run counter to that effort.

And it's cutting off your nose to spite your face. One of the basic precepts of open-content development, IMHO, is credit for authorship. Since the WotC OGL makes crediting sources accurately difficult, the easiest way to trace an item back to its original author is by its label. But if you make the label non-reusable, when the item is reused, nobody'll know where it came from. The author/publisher hasn't prevented reuse by PIing the name of the widget, all they've done is guarantee that nobody'll know it's their widget being reused--it may even be mistakenly thought of as originating with the first reuser to assign it an OGC label.

 

[woodelf]

Well, I don't think it's against the "spirit" of the OGL; if it has a spirit, it's "share the rules". What some people are doing is retaining copyright control over their expression. While they understand that their rules can appear in 50 different products, what they don't want is their expression of that work appearing in 50 different products. To a degree, I can respect that.

Hmmm. I'd say the spirit of the WotC OGL is "share the text"--the rules were already reusable, only the expression was protected/owned. The WotC OGL makes it crystal clear exactly how much you have to change the expression (i.e., not at all) to not step on the original creator's toes.

And, in all honesty, if it is being done to prevent their rules from being re-used, they are really only prolonging the inevitable, assuming the material is good (and if it isn't good, it's protected better than any editing trick coupled with legal mumbo-jumbo can ever hope to accomplish).

Not necessarily. They may be preventing it being reused. Which is bad for them, however, not good. And not necessarily bad for the potential reuser. Let's say that you want ship-to-ship fighting rules for your pirate game. There are two books out there with them. Book A has good rules (9/10), but would require rewording significant chunks because only "the rules" are OGC, not the particular expression. Book B also has good rules, but not quite as good (8/10), but all of them are OGC. If those in Book B are good enough for your purposes, you may just forgo those in Book A. Or, take the best ideas from Book A and apply them to make Book B's OGC just as good or better, thus not only not reusing or crediting Book A, but obviating the need for anyone else to do so in the future. Since ideas aren't protected to begin with, you can't prevent this, and if you've made it hard for the particular expression to be reused people will probably just not bother trying. Similarly, if i'm gonna have to rework the expression radically to reuse the rules, i may just forgo doing so at all, and invent my own.

 

[woodelf]

I really hope those trying to make a AU SRD will not be discouraged by the misguided complaints that have reared their heads. I think they're doing a really valuable service to the community. The big tragedy of OGC is that there are no large well designed, edited and organised online rules (except the main SRD). There's material that is explicitly released with permission to distribute it; but is it not being made widely available.

That's why i (and some others) think the WotC OGL should've had a clause requiring OGC to be functionally reusable--such as released as editable text. A time delay is perfectly reasonable, and wouldn't undercut the point of such a clause.

 

[JohnRTroy]

I never felt is was in the spirit of the OGL to allow people to blatently rip off the content of books and put them out there for free on-line for people to use. Nor was the spirit to provide a new game system.

I believe the true spirit of the OGL was to allow the following:

• To allow other publishers to create adventures and source-books for Dungeons and Dragons without having to go through a complex license process
• To maximize the marketshare of the D&D game

That's it. This was never an attempt to justify the GPL style of licensing that seems to be popular with younger people with a technical bent.

To this end, the SRD was released to give users a specific reference to what pieces of the WoTC IP could be legally referenced. It is not a replacement for the books, which is why monster descriptions were not placed there, just combat blocks.

It seems a select few are trying to push the bounds of the license to the limits. I think the reason other publishers have been stingy with OGLing areas is for fear of complication hording--take all the goodies and provide them for free which reduces incentive to purchase product.

I take a dim view when publishers work hard and people break the spirit of the publishers release of it by abusing the privilage. I mean, what we have now is a lot better than the late 90's when TSR went after all the Internet sites.

Depending on what happens with UA on-line, I fear what will happen now is Wizards will no longer release OGL product for any new 3.5 products, and I'll bet D&D 4.0 will not be released under the SRD and OGL. While people suggest that they'd never do that for fear of pissing off publishers, maybe they will instead do what Gary Gygax mentioned a while back they should have done--license the game to other publishers so they could (a) provide quality assurance to the product and (b) so the market wouldn't be flooded with bad product and (c) to make sure IP was protected. This would allow some of the high-quality players to continue to publish while prevent the abuse.

 

[woodelf]

I just want to thank everyone here for making it highly unlikely for WotC to release any more material under the OGL, and possibly even consider keeping D&D 4.0 closed as well.

If this stops them from releasing future materials as OGC, then it would just lend credence to what some have suspected from the start: they want to eat their cake and have it too. If they truly believe in open-content development, and want to promote it, then they can't very well complain when it occurs. Doing so amounts to cashing in on the cachet of "open source" without actually supporting the ideals. [Which, given the details of the WotC OGL, i actually believe they are doing.]

 

[woodelf]

Money. Money is made off the books when peeps buy it. If they simply posted it on the web in the SRD they wouldn't make any coin because it would be available for free. Probably one reason you don't see it the content in the SRD...it would cut into sales. Why buy the book if you can get the main parts of it for free? And yes, I know the major parts of the DMG, MM, and PH are in (or are) the SRD...but those are core rules...everyone wants to own a nice shiny core rulebook.

I don't buy the distinction. I suspect (yes, this is purely anecdotal), that those (like me) who prefer books, prefer books. Period. Doesn't matter if it's a core book that i'll use every session, or a supplement that i'm gonna pull 3 monsters out of. Those who will accept screen-reading, or a plaintext home-printout, for a supplement, will probably accept it for the core rules, too. (i've heard of at least one entire group that *prefers* using the D20SRD onscreen during play to using the core books, and some of them actually sold off their D&D3E books.)

 

[woodelf]

Andy, WotC modeled the OGL after the GPL, most GPL products are available for 'free'. So, please don't start about the spirit of things, WotC saw a business opertunity in Open Source, these are the consequences...

Now, i try my best to ensure that the product gets a good six months run before the OGC is released from the product, this should cover around 85% of the initial sales. We could have legally released the OGC parts within a day of it's release, we didn't, we don't really want to alienate a publisher (the hand that feeds us OGC).

Is that figure based on concrete information, or just a guesstimate? I'm asking because the small-press people i've heard actual (ballpark) numbers from indicate that probably upwards of 95% of sales are in the first 90 days. Which was why 6mo has been proposed as the lag-time for releasing free OGC in a couple of places--the print book is essentially "done" by then, with a solid 3mo of padding, to boot.

It's not about screwing publishers, it's about the 'spirit' of Open Source. First you make sure what's Open is available for easy access (text files online), second it's about building a better product from that Open Content, third it's about filling the holes that the available Open Content doesn't cover and see what you can do better.

Couldn't agree more. It is not only Not-Bad to make OGC easily reusable, it is Good. IMHO, the point of it is the game, not the publisher.

 

[Cergorach]

Is that figure based on concrete information, or just a guesstimate? I'm asking because the small-press people i've heard actual (ballpark) numbers from indicate that probably upwards of 95% of sales are in the first 90 days. Which was why 6mo has been proposed as the lag-time for releasing free OGC in a couple of places--the print book is essentially "done" by then, with a solid 3mo of padding, to boot.

Well, if it's small press, then i would agree with the +/- 95% of the sales in the first 90 days, but this a WotC product, these generally have a somewhat longer shelf life.

 

[woodelf]

Well, if it's small press, then i would agree with the +/- 95% of the sales in the first 90 days, but this a WotC product, these generally have a somewhat longer shelf life.

doh! yeah, i meant to finish off my question with asking if you actually knew that WotC books had a longer shelf-life, or were just guessing they did (i suspect they do), or were just guessing on the whole time-frame, without any actual data points.