philreed said:
Exactly. And I -- stupidly -- thought that others working in the game industry felt the same way. For most people working with the OGC and OGC the concept that OGC is intended for publishers and not free online distribution isn't strange. And as long as the concept of an "all the OGC in the world for free!" website was being thrown about by people without any influence there was little chance of it happening.
Who made you in charge of who can enjoy the OGC and who can't?
The OGC was designed so that fans and people who wanted to try to create 3rd party products could. See that first part?
fans People who liked the game.
Honestly, the hubris in that statement makes it sound as if you are saying if you aren't a publisher, you have no business mucking about with the OGC.
Today, though, we have a "name" author pushing for such a site.
As a non-name author, I hereby endorse the idea of such a site, and wish to subscribe to it's news letter. Simply drop Kerrick or I a line, and we will be glad to donate both published AND unpublished OGC material to such a site. Nearly a thousand spells, 100 feats, and 50 PrC's should be welcome.
How do I say this? Nicely. This is ENWorld after all.
OK, let's say I'm writing "The complete guide to donkey punching." Now, I remember there being a feat in "Blood & Farms" that resembles one I want to make. I go to the sight, use the search engine, search through 15 pages of feats, to find the one I want. YAY! There it is! A feat that gives you a +2 to knock out furless animals when wielding a 2x4! Thanks Chuck! So, I reprint it (with a byline on the feat labeling where it is from, as is my style) and save myself -20 minutes because I stopped at several webcomic sites and posted here at ENWorld twice.
Let's say I'm getting ready to run a module. Or start a a campaign setting. Yeah, we'll go with that. I start a campaign setting, but I'm a skinflint cheapskate who pinches Lincoln until he screams, so I decide that instead of buying books, I'll go to the website. Now, I'd NEVER buy a book anyway, and would probably boot up a file sharing program and steal the damn thing anyway, so I hunt through this HUGE site, that contains everything from "Lipstick Wearing Robots d20" to "The Complete Llamma Rider" to "d20 Future Robots: Whiners and Snivellers" and spend the next two months looking over feats, and wasting more ink than a scientist trying to teach a monkey to draw portriats of lab rats. Who loses out? Not me, not any other publisher. Nobody like this even buys your product anyway. He steals it.
Let's say I'm getting ready to start a campaign setting. I go to this site, and look, using the fantastic search engine, for: Feats, desert, non-human, non-stupid, non-broken, non-dark elf, non-fluff text, non-modern, non-future, non-Trued20, non-Goathead, non-blather....
WTF was I doing? Oh, yeah, searching through GIGABYTES of data looking for a free feat. Screw this, I'm going to RPGNow and buy the book or make my own. Hell with it, I'm gonna go read something awful and post about how I hate Britney Spears.
Yeah, the site is such a menace. If it ever gets going, nobody will ever buy hardback or PDF gaming books again, online dice generators will rub the color off of your dice's number, Monte Cook will come to your house and urinate in your fish tank, and ENWorld will go down.
Grow up. If nothing else, the entry: "
SOURCE: Drooling SImpletons Guide to Some Lame Location by Stinky Monkey Press" will be about the best advertisement you could get.
Now, as to the other points...
Yeah, you don't have to ask. It's fine if you don't. You'll be considered rude and a jerk, but if you can live with that, that's fine. Like it was thrown around several years ago: "Nothing is stopping someone from taking a bunch of OGC, adding in some flavor text and pictures of a duck waddling across the road, and making a new book out of it, and selling it on RPGNow for $5 a copy." Of course, nothing is stopping me from standing by the road and punching hobo's in face.
You don't ask, you reprint someone else's stuff, you don't put it in the Section 15, and you'll pretty much get slammed everywhere. You'll be known as a cheat, a thief, and at the very least, as sneak.
Oh, and if asking someone if you can use thier OGC material in a homebrew is assinine.
Asking if you can publish it shouldn't harm your creative juices. If it does, the well may be a bit dry, and you might consider an X-Box.
