Publishers Opinion Of PCGen

[Hardhead]

Huh.

My concern as a publisher is that the number of people who won't buy my products unless they are in PCGen is significantly LESS than the number of folks who won't bother to buy my products because they are in PCGen. I think that's the most realistic view.

I can say that I have as yet not found a single product in PCGen that is usable without the book.

I can honestly say this following scence has happened several times within my group:

Player: What does Spell X do? I has a neat name.

DM (me): I've never heard of it. What book is it in?

Player: Book Y, by Third Party Publishing.

Me: I don't have that one, what does PCGen say it does?

Player: It says "Awakens a nearby tree to fight for you." (or somesuch).

DM: That does sound neat.

Player: I'll have to check that book out next time we're at the store.

And we do. And it has resulted in several buys (including Relics and Rituals, the Books of Eldritch Might (One and Two), and two others that I can't think of at the moment. PCGen describes spells ambiguosly (just enough to give you a reminder of what it does - if you know already, similar to what I wrote above), gives out the names of PrC special abilities (but not what said special abilities do), and a description of most feats that is similar to what I listed for the spell.

No matter what you think of PCGen's OGL compliance, they have made a concerted effort to make sure PCGen can not replace the actual book.


- Z a c h

 

[Leopold]

Re: Huh.

No matter what you think of PCGen's OGL compliance, they have made a concerted effort to make sure PCGen can not replace the actual book.


- Z a c h

That is and will always be our motto to live by. We PURPOSELY keep the names and descriptions vague and obtuse. In this regards then you are forced to own or have access to a copy of the material to look that up in. If there is any doubt of this policy ask away at our yahoogroup please and you will get the same answer.

Our goal is to make it easy to create a PC/NPC/Monster for the user with only the material they have at hand. Can they load all the sources and build off of them. But I highly doubt that they will know the SA's for a foamer slitheren with the blooded feat and with the wand or orcus equipped without the material in front of them. The only thing they are going to get is some vague text or blurb gleaned from the material and nothing more.

 

[kzin]

That's certainly incorrect. "d20" is trademarkable - in fact, it is a trademark already.

* In 3 separate trademarks, with differing G&S.

TESS only lists 2, one of which is dead (cancelled in 1991), and neither of them is in the RPG industry (remember, context counts (and sometimes geography does as well)). Within the RPG industry, d20 is a common term and in common use, and there is no existing trademark on "d20" within the RPG industry/context.

And, what I meant by "trademarkable" is "you could make a trademark you could likely defend". It would be trivial for anyone with a passing knowledge of the RPG industry to show that "d20" and "D20" have been in common use in the RPG industry for 30 years. Further, they could easily show that it is a common (non propper) noun that names a plain object and not a distinct object/identity. (it could still be sucessfully defended if you could show that its use is distinctive, like the way "NeXT" made the word distinct by the way it was capitalized ... but neither d20 nor D20 fits that bill)

Further, WOTC uses it in a manner which is consistant with it being a common noun ("When you make an attack roll, you roll a d20" (PHB 1st printing, pg 118, 2nd collumn, under "ATTACK ROLL")), which would further erode their ability to defend any claim to a trademark on "d20".

(they could make a stronger claim on "D20", but I believe that is erroded because it's easy to show that in the industry at large, the capitalization of the d doesn't matter, so d20 and D20 are equivilent)

 

[Hastursaur]

These kinds of rabid defenders are most definately not doing us any favors, or making life easier when dealing with people/companies that have legitimate questions about PCGen.

There are a lot of publishers reading about PCGen in this this thread (and others). If the misinformation being spread by those fans and PCGen team members doesn't cease, I think will be losing more and more support. Since out last exchange I can count half a dozen reasons (without directly pointing fingers) why a publisher would be less interested in being associated with PCGen. They think that they are showing support and helping you by theorizing about legal issues and your opinion of things, and they are wrong. They should stop before they damage PCGen beyond any hope.

 

[merton_monk]

That depends on which fan-site policy you refer to. Right after WOTC bought TSR, they had a policy that was summarized as:
"According to the policy (above), as long as (1) you're not copying our text, (2) you're not copying our art, (3) you're not copying our logos, and (4) you're not making money off of it, you can use our properties to make your own fan material (within good taste - no porn, etc.). That's it. Make your stuff. Have fun."

Seeing as the policy in question even allowed the use of TSR's IP to make MUDs (as long as they didn't generate revenue), PCGen would be totally legal under that policy. However, soon after the release of 3e WOTC took down that policy. The only thing I've seen about fan-created material since is Ryan Dancey saying "Right now, my plan is pretty simple: If you're charging money for any aspect of D&D, you're going to be required to use the OGL and the d20 STL. If you say you're following the OGL or the d20 STL, you're going to be forced to follow them. So, if you've got a fan site that's a collection of characters, and they don't claim to be using the OGL or the d20 STL, and they're not charging money, we're going to ignore them." (from http://www.d20reviews.com/Eric/d20guide/d20intro.htm)

It's definitely easy to see how the PCGen folks could have considered themselves "safe".

Sigh - I have so much trouble posting here because I type long messages and then when I hit reply it says I'm not logged in (even though I am!) and I lose my eloquent message. Combine that with the incredible lack of freetime that I have, and you get why I don't post here often.

Without retying to 1,000 word treatise that I just lost....
Staffan, you are absolutely correct. Add to this that I had emailed Wotc back in early 2001 (January I think) to get their permission, and didn't receive a response, and I exchanged email with Ryan Dancey after GenCon 2001 in which he re-itereated his comments in the link you provided above. I felt like we were free and clear of any trouble, but I still wanted official permission... I've had contact with another brand manager at Wotc (not a D&D brand manager) and he also told me that as long as we were free that Wotc wasn't concerned with us. Still, I asked him to forward an email to whomever would be the person I should contact about permission - it turned out that it was Anthony Valterra. Shortly after that was GenCon 2002 and we happened to hear that Anthony wanted to talk to us. We'd been wanting to sit down with him, so it was perfect timing. We walked up to the Wizard's castle, and they paged him for us. He was kind enough to meet with us right away. He requested that we pull all their non-SRD material. Our policy has always been to remove material if a publisher requested that, so we readily agreed. We asked him what we could do to get Wizards to let us include that material again - this is something we would do with any publisher. He said that if we became OGL and D20 compliant, they would consider it.

In january of 2001 (or thereabouts) we had started releasing PCGen in 2 parts... code in one zip and data in another... in preparation for OGL compliance. This was 18 months ago! The OGL actually makes for good coding practices - the logic should be contained in the data to make the code as generic and flexible as possible. I didn't think we needed to become OGL compliant, but it made a lot of sense to aim ourselves in that direction. As we contacted more and more publishers, more of them voiced their preference that we become OGL compliant, so we've had a number of factors leading us in that direction. Add the major carrot of potentially getting Wotc's official permission for all their non-SRD material, and you've got a no-brainer to finish off OGL compliance and go the extra step to D20 compliance. Our release of 3.1.0 was very helpful in that it allowed our userbase to see the changes and to nitpick any remaining issues. At this point all coding issues have been resolved and only the data and documentation need some attention. We hope to have these resolved so we can send our material to Wotc for their inspection. This has gone along very quickly, and my impression is that Wotc is happy with the good faith gestures we've made and the speed of our progress. If they asked us to stop releases until we were completely compliant, we would do so. One of the interesting side effects of our investiations is that a large number of the section 15's of the books we include are not compliant.

Mynex has become my right-hand man and is very plugged into where I want things to head. He's also much more silver tongued than I am, so I'm quite happy to let him be the front man and contact the publishers. I'm more concerned with the aims of PCGen and doing a fair bit of the coding myself. I try to keep up with all the posts on our yahoo board (250+ a day lately), which generally soaks up all my freetime that isn't spent coding. Otherwise I'd be glad to hang out here more, but Mynex and the others seem to handle things well enough.

We will continue to pull any material a publisher doesn't want included - we'll work with publishers who have concerns and we're willing to change the data or functionality to address their issues. We now have a policy in place where we'll send all data to a publisher for their final approval before we include it in our releases. We're trying to be as publisher-friendly as possible. Within PCGen you can view the options from lots of books - click on an item you're not familiar with and PCGen will indicate who the publisher is, what book it came from, and even what page the details are on. You can even right-click on it and go straight to the publisher's webpage to buy the book or find out more about that and other offerings from that publisher. For the details on how that option works, and to use it in an actual game, you need to have the book. No one has ever told me they didn't buy something because it was in PCGen - on the contrary a lot of users have said that they buy things *because* they're in PCGen.

My original post was much longer - I hope I don't lose this one too!

Bryan McRoberts
Benevolent Dictator of PCGen
who plays an 18th (nearly 19th!) level Monk named Merton


NOTE: I've lost to replies... these forums just don't like my account or something!

 

[RobNJ]

Regarding the comment that "PcGen (and other software projects) is that it just entered it's grace period, and it might be wise to be a bit more helpfull instead of being condesenting." I dont think that is true.

Does anyone else get off on the irony of a publisher of written material has such a poor grasp of simple apostrophe rules?

I do hope you hire an outside editor for your "professional" products.

 

[RobNJ]

I'm anal, sue me. You probably meant to say you're not "Jane Goodall." Jane Pauley is a Dateline reporter. Goodall did all the seminal behavior studies on pygmy chimps.

In terms of evolutionary advancement, your chart should be:

Monkey
Lemur (a kind of monkey)

One anality deserves another. The very idea of evolutionary advancement is bankrupt. There is no one animal that is more or less evolved than any other. Each animal is as evolved to its environment or niche as any other. Putting things on a chart of increasing complexity or even intelligence implies that evolution has a "goal" of increased intelligence or complexity. It don't.

Incidentally, of all the apes, chimps have the biggest testicle size-to-body weight ratio and gorillas have the smallest. It's true.

And humans? We get the biggest penis.

 

[merton_monk]

Does anyone else get off on the irony of a publisher of written material has such a poor grasp of simple apostrophe rules?

I do hope you hire an outside editor for your "professional" products.

I consider myself a good speller, but I know I got at least a couple of words wrong in my post... I don't expect anyone to hire an editor to check their posts. Forums are held to the same scrutiny that a conversation is, not literature!

BTW - I've found Clark's comments to be helpful in our finding any issues we've missed in our effort to become compliant. I've worked on PCGen as a hobby, whereas he's been much more immersed in OGL/D20 issues than I have, so I'm glad to have someone with his familiarity with the issues pick things over like only a lawyer can.

 

[Hastursaur]

We will continue to pull any material a publisher doesn't want included - we'll work with publishers who have concerns and we're willing to change the data or functionality to address their issues. We now have a policy in place where we'll send all data to a publisher for their final approval before we include it in our releases.

This concerns me. It seems to be contradictory. If you are talking about OGC, publishers do not have to expectation that you will pull it on their request. If you are talking about PI or other copywritten material that is not OGC, why are you coding it in the first place without permission. As we all know, once the genie is out of the bottle, it is not possible to put it back in. In a volunteer organization it is nigh impossible to to be sure that such files won't get spread across the internet, and no real way to hold anyone single person accountable once they are. Wouldn't it be best to not create the data files until after getting permission? As a show of good faith to publishers that you are as careful with their PI and non-OGC material as they would like you to be?

 

[Leopold]

There are a lot of publishers reading about PCGen in this this thread (and others). If the misinformation being spread by those fans and PCGen team members doesn't cease, I think will be losing more and more support. Since out last exchange I can count half a dozen reasons (without directly pointing fingers) why a publisher would be less interested in being associated with PCGen. They think that they are showing support and helping you by theorizing about legal issues and your opinion of things, and they are wrong. They should stop before they damage PCGen beyond any hope.

i think Mynex is refering to more along the lines of "ETools suX0r and PCGen r0X0r!!!" postings. Yes that doesn't help our PR image at all.

As for the legality issue I have given up trying to post on it and gone back into "customer service" and "support" mode. On this you are correct. Let the people that handle it speak on it and let those with a lesser 'voice' in the matter hold off. It does us no good to keep cross-posting with different reasons.

Hence, I'll let Bryan and Mynex handle those legal battles and I'll just go back to helping users out onhere and posting some announcements here and there and posting on things sans the legal aspect.


That and work on WULF's files to get them in PCGen!