On Sat, 31 Mar 2001, Neal Rogers wrote:
> Putting something in Closed Content means that you
> intend to control its use by other developers. Got
> that. With regard to a campaign world, it makes sense
> to me that a game company might want to protect the
> names of countries, major NPCs, deities, and such.
> Doing this with creature names and other things that
> are much more connected with the mechanics than the
> setting is a little harder for me to see as
> reasonable, however. The D20 license says that any
> D20 product must have 5% Open Content. Dumping in a
> bunch of stat blocks that are useless to another
> developer is a way to achieve this 5% without giving
> anything up, I guess?
I fail to see how a stat block is useless simply because you can't use the
same name for the monster/creature/item/character that the original
authors used. And how exactly is the name of a creature connected to any
mechanic used?
In principle I agree that it would be nice if monster names and the like
weren't PI unless they are directly related to setting material. However
in a piece of work like SSS's Creature Collection, where some names are
setting related an others aren't, it's probably a lot easier to simply
make all the names PI rather than identify each specific one needing
protection. It's still rather simple to use any creature from the
Creature Collection - just rename it (Undead Ooze -> Undead Slime) and
describe it in your own words (which is neither all that hard and likely
needs to be done anyone since many of the creatures' descriptions refer to
the Scared Lands setting).
later,
alec
-------------
For more information, please link to www.opengamingfoundation.org
