> Clark Peterson
>
> I agree with Kenan. I would like to hear how others
> would do the designation differently now.
>
> For instance, do you think things like the short
> reference to stirges needs to be grayed? Should every
> spell name have been greyed?
You have some big advantages over plain-text distributions by using PDF, why
not take advantage of them? You made good use of bold and italics to
highlight certain phrases, but I think if you had been just as bit more
methodical about it you could have marked nearly all of the OGC in this
manner.
Fonts are used to great effect in computer books, where code is usually
displayed in a monospaced font, while prose is in a proportional font. The
same sort of thing could be used here, with OGC in a sans-serif font, and PI
in a font with serifs. That way you could keep using your bold and italics
to highlight important sections in both types of material.
The gray boxes work well for supplemental information outside of the text,
and I love the sidebars on the edges of the pages. Some of those sidebars
have information that isn't eligible to be PI (like the Sleeping in Armor,
Determining Surprise, and Initiative rules on p6, also Cover on p12, and
Attacks of Opportunity is questionable on p13), and need to be changed.
Overall, I really liked to professional look of Wizards Amulet. I think if
you Necromancer guys put your heads together you'll come up with something
even better for OGC on your next pass.
> I tried to keep this principle in mind when designing
> Amulet regarding open content: probably only 5% of
> persons using the module will even care about what is
> designated as open content.
I think this is an excellent point. The OGL does not require that a reader
be able to identify OGC quickly, only that it be clearly marked. You can
use some pretty complicated logic to mark your OGC, so long as there is no
ambiguity. By doing this you can *almost* make it blend into your PI to the
casual reader. Be extra careful of logic-bombs if you try this.
In works that are PI-heavy like "Wizard's Amulet" this has even less impact
on most authors, because it doesn't really come up with anything new in the
way of OGC. A smart author will derive from your source material rather
than try to parse out the OGC from a module like 'Wizards Amulet'.
> I would like to be able to use the trick I used in
> Amulet in future products: putting a reference to the
> license on our website and incorporating it into the
> product that way.
>
> Ryan's complaint with that was that my site may not be
> around as long as the printed modules. That's fair.
> But why not allow a ling to the OGF where the license
> is located? If the OGF (or some similiar site, maybe
> better yet the WotC site) stops posting the license
> then we can assume they dont care anymore.
Unfortunately, he has a point. The OGL doesn't ever terminate due to time,
so it must survive as long as the document itself, or at least as long as
the copyright on the document. That's an eternity on the Web, which is
barely a decade old.
> I was also worried about reprints. In other words, if
> there was a change to OGL/d20 content I didn't want to
> have to recall and reprint the modules. So with Amulet
> I used the "we reserve the right to change the
> designation of open content" trick. Currently, the
> Necromancer products in the production pipeline dont
> have that language in them. What does everyone else
> think about that?
IANAL. You'd better run that one past one. I can see arguments for both
sides. If it's legal I don't have a problem with it, but the OGL doesn't
have any provision for separating the declaration of OGC from the work
itself.
-Brad
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