Actually he isn't a jerk and isn't stopping you from using his open content. What the author is doing is 100% on the up and up and is ALLOWED by the OGL. Furthermore, the author has included a license to use his PI for FREE! He just wants to ensure that he gets credit for his creation, is that wrong or unethical?
In part, i agree with you: the fault is primarily in the license, for being too ambiguous, or possibly too generous, in what can be PI. But i don't accept "hey, it's legal" as blanket protection for doing anything--sometimes, what is legal is not moral. And vice versa. The correlary being that it's possible to do what's legal and still be a jerk. Which may or may not be the case in this case.
As for the generosity of free PI-reuse, and wanting attribution: It seems to me the best way to do that is to make your spell name OGC. And somehow include attribution in it--either fold it into the spell's name (whether explicitly: "Joe's Game Design's Cool Spell", "Cool Spell, by Joe's Game Design", or implicitly via, say, an iconic character: "Aratan's Cool Spell"), or attribute it explicitly: provide a license to use your trademark, in limited circumstances: "You may use the phrase 'Originally appearing in The Big Book of Cool Spells', but only as annotation to unaltered spells from this work". The latter solution would support the spirit of open-content development better than the WotC OGL does, by providing an attribution chain--you'd get both reuse *and* credit, unlike the current license. PI-with-free-reuse is a cludge, trying to do something that open-content development does naturally--provide attribution for unchanged works--while also retaining extra control that is, IMHO, anathema to open-content development. I know i, for one, will rename spells (etc.) rather than use PIed names, permission not withstanding.
In most cases 99% of what you want to reuse is reusable. Is it a pain to have to go through and take out the PI? Yes, but if you want to use the stuff so badly why not just take what was offered and create the rest? Some of the things I have reused have had various pieces of them PI'ed so far it hasn't been a problem to come up with a name for some character, feat, spell, etc. Who cares it has a different name? The meat of what you want has been freely given! I have never understood why ppl get so hung up on NEEDING the name that was PI, I am starting to think that the basic reason is because it is off limits.
Because when you're forced to change the name, you're undermining one of the virtues of open-content development: credit where credit is due. It makes it that much harder to figure out what came from where. It's not about the effort involved in renaming, it's that some of use believe in open-content development not because it makes our lives easier so much as because it makes the products better, and gives a chance to reward those who make good stuff, by reusing it.
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woodelf <*>
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