At 05:10 PM 11/14/00 -0800, you wrote:
>As far as I'm concerned, if you've got the balls to speak up in private
>email about your beliefs; rumors; fears or concerns, I want you to have the
>fortitude to do it in public too.
Since you're fishing for criticism that may not have been expressed fully
here ...
1) Why is this taking so long? Your OGF/D20 proposal is eight months old, D&D
3rd Edition has been published, several D20 products are out and there is no
official D20 SRD, no D20 trademark license and the OGF has no board of
directors, no mission statement and no stated guidelines for membership.
I can understand some delays in getting stuff past your lawyers, but people
who are waiting for an official D20 license have been put at a considerable
disadvantage to those who signed NDAs and used early drafts.
I don't understand why the OGF is still a private one-person group, though.
There are several dozen people on this list who strongly share your vision
for what you are doing, including several who have put money into the
effort by publishing D20 material already. Some of those folks would make an
excellent interim board of directors to help create the group, set up its
not-for-profit status and establish how members can participate.
2) Why hasn't WOTC registered D20 System as a trademark with the U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office? As you must know from past rec.games.frp.*
discussions on Usenet, the term "d20 system" were used with some
frequency prior to this year in describing RPG rules systems that use
20-sided dice. It has even been used to generically describe D&D.
Here are some examples from Usenet postings in 1995 and 1996:
a) "The 2nd ed. DMG magic item chart is so awful it leaves me aghast.
Percentiles work for the distribution of really rare items sure....they're
still be
a 1% chance to get that Staff of the Magi, but the *d20 system* raises that
to 5%!"
b) "In developing my own game, I realized that on a twenty-unit scale (using
a *d20 system*) the differences between a 10 and 11 tend to get lost in the
randomness of the die roll."
c) "As far as the arquebus and D&D goes it was with the game in the
beginning when you still used Chainmail's Man to Man rules but was left out
when they whent to the *d20 system* officially."
d) "The system itself is a *D20 system* we hashed out here (watch out what
happens when you have a bunch of computer programmers helping develop
a probabllity system)."
e) "Costikyan's THE PRICE OF FREEDOM had an explicit ruling that rolls
made under non-stressful circumstances get doubled. It was a *d20 system*,
so anyone with a score of 10 could count on definitely succeeding if she had
time and equipment to make a careful go of it."
Here's some more from a Web search of pages that predated your original
announcement of D20/OGL:
a) "Combat system has been simplified. Basically, its a *d20 system* now,
instead of d100, with DRMs based on 150+ variables." -- a review of Babylon 5
Wars by Christopher Weuve
b) "Fading Suns uses a *d20 system* where players attempt to succeed at
various tasks by rolling equal to or less than a predetermined target
number." -- a catalog description from The Game Preserve
c) "TimeLords (and its various related systems also by Greg Porter/BTRC,
including the more distant relation, CORPS) basically uses skill points to buy
skills (at a steeply increasing cost -- it's a *d20 system* where an
average skill
of level n costs n^2 points) ..." -- a Usenet posting by [EMAIL PROTECTED]
archived on a Web site
d) "Harnmaster is a d100 (percentile) system. Pendragon is a *d20 system*. This
makes it very easy to convert between them." -- a game conversion system
written by Lydia Leong
e) "The new edition of the game is basically just a reprint of the old GDW
material.
Some new rules have been incorporated, especially in character generation. The
*D20 system* included in the original Empathic Sourcebook and Proto-dimensions
Sourcebook Volume 1 replaces the D10 system in the original rulebook." -- a
review
of Dark Conspiracy 2nd Edition by Geoff Skellams
f) "Dark Conspiracy was the first role-playing game I ever designed from
the ground up.
(As a matter of fact, although the game was published with the GDW 'house
system'
from Twilight: 2000 at its core, I'd originally built it around an
experimental *d20
system*.)" -- game designer Lester Smith on his home page.
g) "I am currently working on a *d20 system* for STAR FRONTIERS and would
like any
suggestions and input for new rules." -- Thomas Fuller in a 1996 posting to
the Star
Frontiers mailing list
h) "Home Rules. This variant allows Alternity game players to generate
Ordinary, Good,
and Amazing results using a simple *d20 system*." -- Wizards of the Coast
on its own
Web site at http://www.wizards.com/alternity/station.asp
As you can see, the term "d20 system" had meaning in the public domain prior to
Wizards' use of it (even Wizards was using it generically). This would
appear to preclude
its use as a distinctive and unique trademark, at least to my thinking as a
layman who
has gone through the process of selecting and registering a mark with the
U.S. Patent
and Trademark Office.
Since the whole copromotion effort involving the D20 System depends on a valid
trademark, I'm surprised that WOTC hasn't registered the mark yet,
according to a
search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office trademark database, which
was last
updated Nov. 15.
Rogers Cadenhead
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Web: http://www.prefect.com
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