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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 8879660" data-attributes="member: 907">Ryan Dancey is on record as saying that one of the purposes of the OGL was to make sure that if Wizards went under or made intolerable changes to D&D, the game would be able to go on anyway. Pathfinder was not an unintended consequence of the OGL, one of the purposes of the OGL was to enable that very thing.Back in the day, there was a companion license to the OGL called the d20 System Trademark License which was much more restrictive. It allowed you to use the "d20 System" logo and to write something along the lines of "Requires the use of the D&D Player's Handbook" on your product (thereby claiming compatibility with D&D, something the OGL specifically disallows), and in exchange you had to follow a long list of rules. Among those rules were that you were not allowed to include the rules for creating or leveling up a character. You could have a class writeup, but you could not say "When you get so-and-so many XP, you gain a level and follow this procedure." In addition, the SRD did not include those rules, and nor did it (as I recall) include most other rules related to XP (such as how much XP you get for a level X encounter) – that, by the way, is why Pathfinder 1 has highly different XP tables from 3.5e and doesn't use the "level vs CR" system 3e used and instead awards a fixed number of XP based on CR, and adjusts the XP tables accordingly.So the idea was that the SRD itself was extremely open. You could do pretty much anything with it. One of the FAQs was even "Could I publish the whole thing?" and the answer was "Sure. If you think someone would be willing to pay for it, you're more than welcome to try." (And I do believe someone did publish a "pocket SRD", basically just reprinting the SRD in a smaller and more portable format.) But if you wanted to use the d20 logo and the name "d20 system", you basically had to make your product a support product for D&D (or eventually d20 Modern).</blockquote>

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