I'm curious about
the place of the older TSR/WoTC products in this Open Gaming thing. Obviously,
they're not going to go to the hassle of classifying everything specifically as
open game content, but can they claim copyright on, say, the substats used in
Player's Option?
Also, the blurry
line between game content and product identity is troubling me. I'm no lawyer,
and while I THINK I know where the line falls, I really can't be sure. And then
there are the hundreds of things which have been adopted by TSR/WoTC from
fiction, mythology, real life, etc. Can this sort of thing be interpreted as
Product Identity? For example, many of the deities used throughout TSR's older
work are directly or indirectly copied from mythology. I'm sure we could still
use the names, etc, but what of the TSR - manufactured mechanics such as bonuses
and granted powers of specialty priesthoods, and so on? Can we begin to include
these in publicly available OGC on the premise that they're now "obsolete", or
must we tweak them a little around the edges, claim the adaptation as your own
invention and release it that way?
As someone who has been playing a homebake, frankenstein system made from a mix of 1st, 2nd, Player's Option and 3e D&D (among other things), I'm very interested in the boundaries.
Cheers,
Lewis
Stoddart
