Let's pull out some categories, and poke at them a bit.
I strongly doubt that anyone on this list, or in the wider community of OGL creators and users, would deny anyone's _right_ to engage in any speculation they wish within the simple constraints of libel and slander, factual accuracy, and the like. If your data are sound and you're not doing something blatantly destructive, it's certainly legitimate to do - and asking for sound data is equally good.
More people have ideas about how gaming should work than can be heeded. We have, therefore, much need to select from among competing voices. There are a bunch of criteria that we can and often do apply, but these are common ones:
Experience. If someone tells me "this is how and why we did it, and what came of it", and I can go look at their stuff in the store or on my shelves, that's a big plus. Note that experience is not always a positive feature - there are some folks who make a great deal of noise whom no professional I'm aware of treats with any respect at all because their stuff is routinely awful and sells terribly. They learn nothing, as nearly as any of us can tell, and if we were to see signs of someone new falling into their orbit we'd probably issue gentle warnings on the side. Others have tremendous standing because they consistently turn out excellent products that a lot of people want to buy, or that fewer want to buy but they know how to make smaller runs worthwhile. In any event, when talking about the market, having products on the market makes a big difference in how others will receive your words; when talking about standards documents, having written or contributed to an important RFC or other technical definition will; and so on.
Knowledge. This isn't the same thing, precisely: there are people who know a lot about how gaming works who haven't themselves published much. There are a few long-time reviewers in this category, and some others whom I'd definitely pay heed to if they want to tell me "this is how and why they did it, what came of it". It's also possible to bring to bear relevant knowledge from other fields; I've learned a lot about how people use game books from my friends who write documentation, for instance.
Rhetoric. This is the whole area of "writing well", including careful logic, entertaining metaphors and imagery, knowing when to continue and when to stop, and so on. A persuasive enough argument can arouse the interest of others who then supply the knowledge and experience to flesh it out.
Now, nobody's born with any of those three, so how do we cultivate them?
Practice. We all do things and write things and either we get better with practice or we don't. But there's no way apart from practice to improve. We can (and should) be reading about etiquette and rhetoric, studying general business procedures and philosophy, the history of our field and others, and like that, but in the end...we gotta do something.
One of the things professional writers (and artists, and musicians, and other creators) learn that the public at large almost never does is that ideas are cheap. The general public tends to think of the core ideas of a story, the basic essence of a character, the key bars of a melody, and the like as hard to come up with, but if you do it on a regular basis - either as your livelihood or just because you like do it a lot and do it for the love it - you soon learn that it isn't so. The hard part is the development: the chapters of a novel that develop the plot and characters toward satisfying resolutions, the harmonies and choruses and supporting lines of a song, and so on. Much of this isn't exciting or even particularly interesting, but it has to be done, because in its absence the work won't be appealing.
That applies in spades to the gaming industry. Really, any successful GM or player is likely to have a bunch of ideas for adventures, campaigns, rules, and the like, and many of them are actually good ideas, with genuine merit. No game company lacks for neat ideas. What they lack for is neat ideas of that particular sort which makes them susceptible to commercial development and marketing. The same is true for non-commercial gaming, as anyone who's ever realized anything like "it's a great setting except that nothing happens" or "I love this character but they can't actually do anything in this campaign" knows.
Someone who really wants to influence discussion of a generalized master System Reference Document should do the following. I offer up these ideas for anyone to poke at, and I really hope someone will take me up on it.
Take several SRDs currently made available in editable text format. That includes the D&D 3.0 and 3.5 SRDs, d20 Modern, BESM d20, and probably several others. (If you want to get really ambitious, add the Action System, but I suggest starting with just d20-based products.) Now, assemble all that material into a comprehensive whole, footnoted or otherwise annotated to show sources in more detail than the scope of a Section 15 declaration.
You will find several things.
First, there are directly contradictory passages, on all kinds of mechanical issues. How do you decide which to use? If you try to include two or more alternatives, how do you select and present them? Keep notes as to your methodology here, because people will want to discuss it.
Second, there's divergent phrasing for passages that don't directly contradict. Same deal: how do you decide? Be prepared to discuss it.
Third, SRDs have been presented in several different ways so far, including WotC's "every section its own file" approach, GoO's "each chapter its own file", and so forth and so on. What do you do? Why?
Fourth, you have to make decisions about document formats. Text? RTF? PDF? HTML? Something else? Several of the above? What fonts, sizes, paragraph formats, and the like, do you use? Why? You could try to keep everything formatted as in its source, but then the document's gonna look really hodge-podge. If you decide to privilege some existing presentation, whose? If you decide to adopt a new standard, on the basis of what information about successful style and design do you make your decision? Expect arguments about this, and ones probably at least as intense as the ones about content.
Fifth, you have to decide whose judgment is governing all of the above, and everything else that you might do. If you try to do it by committee...well, you've seen this list, at a minimum. If you do it on your own sense of appropriateness, be prepared to be denounced as a dictator and other bad stuff.
And note that all of this is working with open content that creators have specifically chosen to make easily available to you - there are at this stage no issues at all about using content in ways the publishers may not approve of.
But if you actually DO it, we'll have something tangible to evaluate. You will put yourself on the map as, quite literally, one in a thousand or even more, as one of those who actually did something rather than just talking about it. Folks may not LIKE it, but you will certainly make your mark on the ensuing discussion. And you'll have the accomplishment in itself.
Right now, we need a lot more action and a lot less talking. I've got some projects of my own which I'm deliberately not talking about much until I can show results and analyze those rather than my hopes or speculations. Anyone interested in a sort of Omega SRD, for good or ill as may be, would be well-advised to actually try making one. I suspect that it won't turn out quite like what any of us expect, and I'd rather know than guess.
_______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
