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What's All This About The OGL Going Away?
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<blockquote data-quote="Dreamscape" data-source="post: 8832261" data-attributes="member: 6683246"><p>I'm a bit slow responding so this has already been answered by others. I don't want to give specific examples because I don't want to give the impression that those authors are mistaken on using the OGL. Instead, this is the basic principle:</p><p></p><p>You don't need the SRD for adventures or supplements, because you're not including the rules content - adventures generally have no rules and supplements will only have new ones. In spite of this there are lots of books filled with nothing but original random tables, yet published under the OGL. Even many full retroclones didn't use the text from the monsters, spells, or magic items from the SRD because they're emulating older editions where those things had totally different rules, so they could have avoided the OGL if they had been willing to write their own text instead of pasting in bits from the SRD. A lot of D&D-adjacent/not-clones did completely their own thing and had even less reason to do it under the OGL because not only did they not use the SRD text, they didn't even have to be compatible with "the world's most popular roleplaying game".</p><p></p><p>This brings up another common point of confusion, copyright and trademark. Individual terms such as "fighter" aren't copyrighted, you would use a trademark - and not that many D&D terms are trademarked (certainly not anything as generic as "fighter" or "hit points"). So you don't need to use the SRD just because you want to include a spell like Bless. Of course you'd have to write your own original text for it, but that's not hard and if you're producing a clone you're probably changing the spell effects anyway.</p><p></p><p>Hmm, at this point I should probably do the 'I am not a lawyer' thing for the benefit of anyone actually planning to publish something ...</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Dreamscape, post: 8832261, member: 6683246"] I'm a bit slow responding so this has already been answered by others. I don't want to give specific examples because I don't want to give the impression that those authors are mistaken on using the OGL. Instead, this is the basic principle: You don't need the SRD for adventures or supplements, because you're not including the rules content - adventures generally have no rules and supplements will only have new ones. In spite of this there are lots of books filled with nothing but original random tables, yet published under the OGL. Even many full retroclones didn't use the text from the monsters, spells, or magic items from the SRD because they're emulating older editions where those things had totally different rules, so they could have avoided the OGL if they had been willing to write their own text instead of pasting in bits from the SRD. A lot of D&D-adjacent/not-clones did completely their own thing and had even less reason to do it under the OGL because not only did they not use the SRD text, they didn't even have to be compatible with "the world's most popular roleplaying game". This brings up another common point of confusion, copyright and trademark. Individual terms such as "fighter" aren't copyrighted, you would use a trademark - and not that many D&D terms are trademarked (certainly not anything as generic as "fighter" or "hit points"). So you don't need to use the SRD just because you want to include a spell like Bless. Of course you'd have to write your own original text for it, but that's not hard and if you're producing a clone you're probably changing the spell effects anyway. Hmm, at this point I should probably do the 'I am not a lawyer' thing for the benefit of anyone actually planning to publish something ... [/QUOTE]
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