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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nellisir" data-source="post: 7691206" data-attributes="member: 70">First of all, you still hold the copyright to material you release under the OGL. The OGL is an additional license that allows you to use other people IP in exchange for sharing your own.That said, I consider declaring the proper names of characters, places, events, and so forth Product Identity, and making everything else OGC, to be the default, baseline option. It is, in large part, exactly as complicated as you chose to make it.For instance, you write a new spell. You could call it Ygart's Goldenfist, or you could call it goldenfist. The first is more complicated than the second. If you interweave a lot of fluff material into the mechanics of the spell ("Ygart hated dwarves, and the spell inflicts double damage on dwarves."), it's more complicated than if you put the fluff in one paragraph and the description of the spell effect in a separate paragraph. (I'd say the latter is also better writing.)You can also use different fonts to designate PI from OGC. Atlas Games did this on some occasions. I thought it was a big hassle.Overall, I think the more difficult you make your OGC, the less reward you're going to get out of it. There are publishers I stopped buying from because their declarations were intentionally obscure. There are products I picked up because I knew I could reuse parts of them, if I wanted to, without leaping through giant hoops.The hard fact is that almost everyone who's inclined to self-publish thinks their stuff is better than yours, and your stuff isn't worth stealing. If they do think yours is better, then it's probably good enough to have a significant audience that will recognize a plagarized product, since your audience and the ripoff artist's audience are the same.If you're really concerned that no one else use a really awesome monster you created, or a spell, or a feat, then you're probably better off not publishing at all, or creating your own system and not using the OGL, rather than trying to build a private palace on a public foundation.</blockquote>

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