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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5607936" data-attributes="member: 4937">Granted, there are a lot of stinky house rules out there and some people might feel that way about mine (in fact, some on the board I think do), but I take your point.For me, there have been times when I have felt that TSR/WotC's official position on your rights to the game as a DM were such that it was illegal to make house rules.  Not merely that they discouraged it, or that they stated in the rule book that these were the official rules and that if you caught someone departing from them with so called 'house rules' that you should by all means shun them but that taken literally, that they'd take you to court for having house rules.   That is to say, there were times when I felt like TSR/WotC's official stance was that you could buy the game, but that it was illegal for you to play the game.That is, they seemed to suggest that if I wrote my own modules, or made up my own rules, or adapted any of their material in some derivitive manner that depended on there IP that I was infringing on their IP.  Now I can understand where they are coming from at times, but at other times it felt like the very act of playing the game was supposed to be in some fashion breaking copyright laws because I was distributing copyrighted content to my players!  And heaven help you if you made something up, like rules for sailing ships or whatever, then photocopied it and gave it to another DM!  I mean, I often felt like my own gaming notes were contraband of some sort, which had to be passed around in secret despite the fact that I wasn't quoting anything they'd published but just playing the game described by what they'd published.The OGL to me felt like a big step toward legitimizing and welcoming how the game was actually played, and encouraging DMs to go ahead and form communities - like at EnWorld here - where it was safe to just make crap up without fear of bringing down a 'Cease and Desist' notice because you know, technically, at some point in the future they might want to make money off their own sailing rules and this talk about sailing house rules was infringing on the future viability of that product.  That it allowed a few enterprising and hard working DMs to make a bit of money or even go professional with their house rules was just frosting.  I wasn't one of those; I just wanted to feel like the freedom the game books seemed to offer was something I actually had in fact and not just theory.</blockquote>

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