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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Christian" data-source="post: 81821" data-attributes="member: 381">One could argue that the reason many people were 'shut down' by TSR is that they couldn't afford a lawyer to defend their case. WOTC has made explicit exactly how far you can go in using their material; someone who is in compliance with the OGL and/or the d20 license, who then receives a cease-and-desist order from WOTC, could almost certainly get a lawyer to take the case under contingency, since it would be blatantly obvious that WOTC would lose ...And under the OGL, you couldn't even use the term 'd20'-the system is OGL'd, but the name is product identity. Go figure. But in theory, you could take the SRD, develop a system for level advancement that used nothing from the D&D system, and publish it under the OGL. If you want to take advantage of the existing experience point system, you need to publish under the d20 license and refer the readers to the PHB for details. But at least then you could use the term 'experience points' in your system/adventure/whatever.Since I'm pontificating already, I'll go one with the bit I alluded to up above. An interesting point to ponder is that, if the PHB et al had been published under the OGL, WOTC would not have been able to reserve the experience point system-it's clearly not eligible to be labelled as 'product identity'. By publishing the rules under copyright, and publishing d20 as a separate system, they effectively bypass this OGL provision ... If you look at the SRD, you'll notice it hasn't been updated in several months. Dancey says that's because they're focussing on adding additional material to the 'unreleased' section; but I'd be willing to bet that another reason is that there are long debates going on about how to release the spells, monsters, and magic item sections without reference to xp costs for casting and crafting, and xp awards for CR. Because once a reference to experience points makes it into the SRD ... <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=":)" /></blockquote>

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