Massive Open Content SRD

[Psion]

The problem with this is that OGC is not for public consumption. It is so that publishers can take others' rules and other cool bits and use/alter them for their own books.

The OGL doesn't say that. It allows anyone to follow the terms of the license. Anyone with the time and inclination can be a "publisher".

It's just that most of those who do have the time and inclination do become publishers in some fashion.

One of the big hurdles I see (beyond the ethical arguments of who you are hurting, despite the legality) is that some material simply isn't worth the effort. A policy of blanket OGC-extraction (as Phil says) would burn out those involved. The most potentially successful "products" (be they free or pay) would target meaningful and useful topics. This limits the scope of the work and at the same time makes it so that those interested in the OGC would have to sift through it for stuff they would be interested in. If the people are interested in your chosen topics, they will come...

 

[Napftor]

...The most potentially successful "products" (be they free or pay) would target meaningful and useful topics. This limits the scope of the work and at the same time makes it so that those interested in the OGC would have to sift through it for stuff they would be interested in. If the people are interested in your chosen topics, they will come...

There is a work which took me 3+ months to put together that is coming out soon in pdf. I dubbed it a "Campaign Theme Pack--Undead" and it brings OGC from well over a dozen sources to make app. 82,000 words of necromantically-themed goodness. Besides spells and magic items, the real treat is the humungous monster section which updates older products to v3.5 and includes sample treasure caches as well as roleplaying and variant ideas for each monster. It's my belief and hope that such a product (which is essentially spruced-up OGC) will catch consumer attention. In this way, we'll see if this topic has any relevance.

 

[DMH]

Bret, which publisher is releasing that? The guy who owns my FLGS loves undead and necromancy and I know he would want it.

 

[Napftor]

Bret, which publisher is releasing that? The guy who owns my FLGS loves undead and necromancy and I know he would want it.

That would be Adamant Entertainment: http://www.rpgnow.com/default.php?manufacturers_id=470

The monsters (at least some of them I know) will have brand new artwork as well. It was a lot of work but ultimately very satisfying to put this book together. I think people are going to love the monsters. The stuff I grabbed from the Creature Collections will likely be unrecognizable even to the people who wrote the originals!

 

[Turjan]

One of the big hurdles I see is that some material simply isn't worth the effort. The most potentially successful "products" (be they free or pay) would target meaningful and useful topics. This limits the scope of the work and at the same time makes it so that those interested in the OGC would have to sift through it for stuff they would be interested in. If the people are interested in your chosen topics, they will come...

A good point. This is why I was never interested in products that only threw together some OGC stuff and sold it anew, like the 'Ultimate' guides. Just lists without any editorial work on the content (and not only on layout, like we had it before) don't really interest me.

Btw, I don't see such a big threat to third party publishers from the current efforts to compile OGC material, simply because of this reason. I want products to save me some work, not to cause it. I'm not sure whether this is a generally shared sentiment though, because I heard that the 'Ultimate' guides were commercial successes. Does anyone have any further information about this?

 

[BSF]

Bret,
That sounds very cool! I will keep an eye out for it. Especially since I am liking a lot of Adamant Entertainment's material lately.

 

[DaveMage]

I think (as has been sort of stated above) that in this case, we should ask, "what do we hope to gain?"

Once such a database was created, it would have so much inconsistency in the level of quality that its usefulness would be questionable.

I'd rather see products created using a lot of OGC, but then cleaned up and made more consistent - kind of like what Arms & Armor v3.5 did. There's a ton of OGC that was cleaned up, organized, and updated to 3.5E. That's useful. Just throwing a hodge-podge of all OGC together would be a mess (IMO).

 

[Psion]

I think (as has been sort of stated above) that in this case, we should ask, "what do we hope to gain?"

Once such a database was created, it would have so much inconsistency in the level of quality that its usefulness would be questionable.

I'd rather see products created using a lot of OGC, but then cleaned up and made more consistent - kind of like what Arms & Armor v3.5 did. There's a ton of OGC that was cleaned up, organized, and updated to 3.5E. That's useful. Just throwing a hodge-podge of all OGC together would be a mess (IMO).

That's a good point. What bastion did was, doublessly, a lot of work.

But I'll tell you what I would get out of it. Not so much access to stuff I don't already have so much as electronic versions of stuff I already own. I would know what I want, I just don't want to spend the time typing it in and/or I don't want to delve into a stack of books just to get that one race/class/monster I want for a game.

 

[Napftor]

Bret,
That sounds very cool! I will keep an eye out for it. Especially since I am liking a lot of Adamant Entertainment's material lately.

Thanks, BSF! I hope it goes over well.

 

[jmucchiello]

If you do this, I would think most of the publishers and d20 writers would stay away from it since we would have no way of knowing if you did it right. Suppose I'm browsing your megaSRD and find a spell in it called Cool Spell. How do I know that it is in fact OGC? Who extracted it? From what book? Did that person extract it correctly? Who double checked it? Where do I find the Section 15 to use it in my work? Etc. Some of those questions are simple. But others are impossible from the OGL.

Why am I going to take a chance on this megaSRD? It's my legal butt on the line. Some random community project is not a good legal shelter for me to bet on.

So while this idea would be helpful to DMs compiling campaign materials, I doubt it would cause publishers to start reusing more of each other's OGC.