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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 5707027" data-attributes="member: 40166">Was PCGen ever a serious option for most 3.5 players? I would think trying to use it in an heavily WotC supplement-friendly environment would be an exercise in futility.They did it in 3.*; what'll be new in a non-OGL 5E? Even if 4E is similar to 5E, are they really worried about people who use 4E versions to make 5E characters? One of the frustrations we had with a not long-lasting person who played with us was his continual referencing of 3E material in a 3.5E game.I've always wondered about that in RPG context. Copyright law provides for certain, not clear, protection for characters and fictional elements. If you cloned the stat block for a mind flayer completely, a lawyer could claim that these qualities, from the mind blast to the tentacles down to the AC 15 (+2 Dex, +3 natural) and Speed 30 ft, amount to copying of the literary construct. You could defend yourself against it, but the problem is what you really wanted was that mind flayer; there's not a whole lot of value in a collection of stats. So, you say, we'll pass over the mind flayer (and without the OGL, a bunch of other creatures; can D&D's distinctive color-coded dragons be so protected?) Spells are probably not copyrightable, right? No more than recipes, surely. But like a recipe, an original collection of them is probably copyrightable; take the fireball, take the magic missile sure, but take them all and you're looking at copyright infringement.  From a practical perspective, once you've renamed the spells and the skills and the attributes and other stuff, what's the point in trying to maintain 100% compatibility; you've already lost compatibility in the major sense. So you can go ahead and create The Fantasy Trip or Palladium Fantasy or a fantasy heartbreaker; that's nothing new.More interesting then copying the whole thing is making something compatible. That still has problems; mind flayers are still copyrighted, and color-coded dragons are still up for question. But you can probably get away with a lot more; WotC has no literary protection in the idea of a couple halflings, a dwarf, an elf, and a human going into a dungeon.</blockquote>

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