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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 8894188" data-attributes="member: 6796468">Okay... lemme try to 'splain it this way:I'm gonna make a book for Pathfinder 2e under the ORC or OGL 1.0a or whatever other license I am afforded by Paizo. I design some Rage Feats for their Barbarian Class. At no point do I include the full SRD Ruleset to explain what Rage Feats or Barbarians -are- in my product. I don't have to. Because of the ORC/OGL 1.0a I am -referencing- the concept of Rage Feats which are part of their Ruleset. Their SRD. My customers know this because I've advertised the game as a Pathfinder 2e 3pp sourcebook. And they have access to the Pathfinder 2e SRD so they can use both sources.If I want to make Rage Feats -without- using Pathfinder 2e's SRD and the ORC or OGL 1.0a, I instead have to produce a book that provides context to what Rage Feats -are-. And gives them a purpose by creating my own Barbarian Class.And those Rage Feats can do the same thing, because the mechanic isn't copyrightable, but it takes a TON more work, pages of text, and a lot of time and effort to put it into context without referencing Pathfinder's Barbarian or my Compatibility with that system, since acknowledging compatibility references someone else's Intellectual Property.That's why Pathfinder initially used the 3.5 SRD so heavily. They literally copy-pasted most of it into their first books and then added changes where they wanted changes to make it their own thing. And they were allowed to directly "plagiarize" someone else's writing by the license itself. They were able to create a massive core rulebook off of someone else's work, essentially, due to the OGL.I put plagiarize in scare quotes because while that's what it would be without the OGL, they were given permission to do so by the OGL.Hasbro and WotC have no legal recourse if the writing is all new and under a different license. Even if the mechanics themselves are fundamentally the same, the words and the names don't belong to them.See, when Level Up was being written in the first place, Morrus had everyone re-write everything. No copy-pasting from WotC's work, no plagiarizing, nothing. The only things that the OGL covered were names. Like "Green Slime". A specific WotC owned idea. But change the name to "Azure Sludge" and since the words after the name aren't taken from WotC, they have no claim to it at all.Repeat ad-nauseum through 636 pages of the Adventurer's Guide, 367 pages of Trials and Treasures, and 530 pages of the Monstrous Menagerie.At least that's the working theory that's got us all doin' stuff. But it's a sound enough theory that the EN Publishing Twitter posted about it publicly and all of us are in the word mines hammering out diamonds.</blockquote>

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