OGC Settings?

[Yair]

What settings are 100% OGC, including their names and everything?

I know of Murchad's Legacy and SpirosBlaak, and was told Freeport, Bluffside, and Second World also qualify. Anything else?

 

[Roudi]

What's the benefit to making the entirety of a campaign setting OGC?

 

[Yair]

What's the benefit to making the entirety of a campaign setting OGC?

From the publisher's point of view, it increases the chance the material will be used by another publisher.
Once open, anyone can freely make characters, adventures, and so on in it. People using any setting could, for example, place Freeport on their world allowing DMs to use easily use any adventure designed around it, increasing the value of both Freeport (as there is now more material regarding it) and their setting (as they suddenly have a lot of more supplements).

From the end user's point of view, it is only useful if you care about the legalities of the matter. For example, if you want to have the option of writing down and selling your Story Hour, or if you just want to be able to put campaign stuff on your site without, you know, breaking the law. (Regardless of whether you'll get sued.)

 

[MavrickWeirdo]

From the publisher's point of view, it increases the chance the material will be used by another publisher.
Once open, anyone can freely make characters, adventures, and so on in it. People using any setting could, for example, place Freeport on their world allowing DMs to use easily use any adventure designed around it, increasing the value of both Freeport (as there is now more material regarding it) and their setting (as they suddenly have a lot of more supplements).

From the end user's point of view, it is only useful if you care about the legalities of the matter. For example, if you want to have the option of writing down and selling your Story Hour, or if you just want to be able to put campaign stuff on your site without, you know, breaking the law. (Regardless of whether you'll get sued.)

The most costly phase of any new product is the "develpoment" cost.

Let's say a publisher decides to create a quality OGC setting, you don't just test the "crunch" you have to review the fluff and make sure it works well as a whole. After your initial investment of hiring writers and artists, playtesting, market surveys, consistancy review boards, you release your Campaign Bible.

1. Someone imediately posts the entire content online, so people don't have to buy your book.

2. An amazing author decides to write a story/adventure set in your world, which makes money for some other publisher, and is priced very low, because they don't have any developement costs.

3. Some hack writes a unbalanced story/adventure set in your world which utterly ruins the mystique/charm/appeal of the world, and you can't stop them or claim that it isn't "canon" because it is OGC.

 

[Vascant]

Bluffside is completely OGL? When did this happen..

 

[Roudi]

For the most part, I don't see other publishers having trouble writing supplements for settings from other publishers. Look at the Northern Crown support coming out of Adamant Entertainment, or Blue Devil Games' AEvolutions line (supporting Arcana Evolved). I think that many publishers are glad to have another publisher develop setting support material for them; so long as the setting's original producer has some say over what gets released, I think most publishers would see such support as nothing but a boon. You don't need to release a setting as OGC to do this. An OGC setting is probably less beneficial to the publisher in this respect, because other publishers can produce supporting material, but the setting producer isn't guaranteed to have any say over such expansion.

I'm not saying OGC settings should be published, or derailing current OGC settings. I just personally do not see the benefit to releasing an entire setting as open gaming content. To me, there appears to be no benefit, either to myself as the publisher, other publishers, or the gaming community at large.

 

[Yair]

No one needs to use the OGL or d20STL to release D&D-compatible products, they can just go to Wizards and work jointly to produce new material for their settings and games, no?
[sarcasm]Hammer and Helm, Plot and Poison, the Penumbra Fantasy Bestiary... what a waste that OGL is, the assurance of being able to produce materials without needing to answer to WotC certainly didn't lead to any new products that are worthwhile being produced.[/sarcasm]
An OGC setting allows the publisher an assurance that he can work without being subject to the changing whims of the original publisher. I would think that increases the chance of use of the material. You trade off control of the setting for better chances of being used.
While it is possible that the material will be extracted and released for free or otherwise exploited, in practice this doesn't happen. Not for the OGC campaigns, and not for the multitude of other 100% OGC products out there by now.
While it is possible for bad products to be associated with the setting, that is the same problem that the d20 System products share - and yet d20 System products are commercially viable.
While the original publisher does not benefit directly, his name will generally be associated with the setting so he is in a better position to benefit from the setting's success than his competitors.
I believe SpirosBlaak also releases several products that are not 100% OGC as follow-up products meant to cement the publisher's hold over key content/prized locations, much like WotC is reserving the right to Mindflayers or Beholders.

At any rate I'm not out to defend the practice. I'm not at all convinced that the benefits outweigh the risks and flaws. I'm just asking what's out there

 

[Roudi]

While the original publisher does not benefit directly, his name will generally be associated with the setting so he is in a better position to benefit from the setting's success than his competitors.

This is actually what worries me the most. Say I release an OGC setting. Another person looking to expand the setting does so, without permission (as the OGL allows), and creates an utterly terrible product (there's a ton of them out there). Now my name is associated with something I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot digital pole. And, me being somewhat of a pessimist and an egotistical jerk, I don't think anyone other than myself and the folks I approve of would be able to do my setting justice. I don't think I'm alone in this belief; I think a lot of publishers share this sentiment about their own work.

Publishing an OGC setting is a risk. You could, as a publisher, benefit from it or burn because of it. I'm not coming down on the OGL at all; I think the OGL and open gaming content is great, for mechanics. I just don't see the benefits of releasing an entire setting as open gaming content. The benefits already listed are, well, still available to publishers whose settings are not OGC; they just require one to ask and/or work out a deal first.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

The benefit to the setting publisher is the same as what WoTC gets from allowing the d20 license and OGL in the first place - if you buy an adventure set in Spirosblaak (which I think is the only completely open setting out there - Freeport is available via license, but not OGC, IIRC), you may decide to buy the setting as well. And so might your players. Its an untested concept, but its worth trying.

 

[Yair]

Spirosblaak (which I think is the only completely open setting out there - Freeport is available via license, but not OGC, IIRC),

As I said in the original post, Murchad's Legacy is another one. Although their legal text is a bit messed up, they pretty clearly mean that everything is OGC. It seems that actually saying so in plain language in the OGC designation is a bit hard for them, having failed to do so twice...

I am not familiar with Freeport or Bluffside or any other "pretender" (or SpirosBlaak, for that matter). Which is why I'm asking.