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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Stark" data-source="post: 3014331" data-attributes="member: 38437">When it comes to lawyer-speak, its easy to understand why the legalities involved aren't always clear, heh. You're certainly not alone in this.IMO opinion, its entirely possible to publish something for certain out of print games using the OGL only, without reference to OSRIC at all.Some of the advantages of using OSRIC might clarify the difference between using it and not:OSRIC merely has already done the heavy lifting for you. They've provided the SRD terms and rules tweaked in such a way that they are become compatible with older games. The OSRIC writers have already dealt with the OGL issues and the SRD in such a way that they are confident that they are compliant with the terms of the OGL and have avoided infringing upon any trademarks or copyrights held by certain companies, and thus the work of dealing with rule conversions from the SRD (which is essentially a d20 system) to the older games is done already.Also, if you publish under OSRIC, it provides legal cover for you in the sense that until some company comes along and issues a cease and desist order against it, they can't come after you for using OSRIC. In other words, they can't let OSRIC continue to be distributed while coming after you for using it to publish something. As long as OSRIC goes unsuccessfully challenged in court, publishers are protected. The OSRIC authors believe that they have worked in such a way that a legal challenge against it would lose, and they had several lawyers working with them to this effect.Further, as I stated up thread, publishing via OSRIC provides free advertising for your own published work. The better known that OSRIC becomes, the more likely it is that your product will get hits from internet searches when people look for OSRIC products. Since the OSRIC authors require no royalties or payments for the use of OSRIC, you pay nothing for this free advertising. You can ride on the coat tails of the popularity of other OSRIC products, and the brand name, for free.None of these reason I've given mean you must use OSRIC to publish stuff for older games. They are incentives only, and OSRIC is certainly not meant to be the "one game to rule them all." There may be other options for publishing old school material that you think are better, and since I know that Stuart Marshall and Matt Finch (the OSRIC authors) are gamers first and foremost, I'm sure they would not only wish you the best even if you decided OSRIC wasn't your cup of tea, but they would also most likely buy your product, if it was quality work, simply to support a fellow old school gamer and writer. They are more interested in jump starting a growth of old school gaming than they are in how it happens. They've simply offered one avenue to do this, and its free.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />EDIT: There are probably other benefits I'm not thinking of in regards to using OSRIC. I'm having a bout of insomnia the past few days, which means I get a bit scatter brained, heh.</blockquote>

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