<<As a customer, I would find that version most annoying. Basically
you've written every sentence twice: "affects a number of people
including the caster" vs. "affects WIS/2 people". No matter how good
your editing, something OGL will end up in a story element or the story
element and game elements will conflict under certain circumstances.
>>
Actually, I very much disagree with this. You could definitely write up "thumbnail" sketches of what spell effects are that are tied to NO mechanical system. So I think that's an overarching claim that OGC will always end up embedded into "thumbnail" descriptions of characters, spells, etc.
If one did a "real language" paragraph and a "gamespeak" paragraph, the "real language" paragraph could be entirely PI.
<<
From an economic view, you are showing me the EXACT fluff/crunch ratio
of the book. This may not be such a good thing for some people. Those
who favor crunch, over time, will get annoyed at the story element
sections.
>>
And those who prefer flavor will probably get annoyed a system that's flavorless and is reduced down entirely to numbers. I think this point represents an interesting point of view, but it has nothing to do with the per se licensing legalities of the approach.
<<
From my 100% OGC advocate point of view, I have to ask, what have you
really "protected" by keeping the story element out of my hands? >>
His skill at crafting the written word. Outside of the OGL, you and I could right about news events in the public domain. If you are better than I am at writing, then even if we review exactly the same facts, your story may be more interesting, thoughtful, or insightful than mine. Authors who take pride in their craft may, on some occasions, choose to protect the fruits of their labor.
Whether that is always economically advantageous depends on the quality of writing, its distinctiveness, and the nature of the target audience.
<<Most
annoying is that you PIed the name of the spell. Makes it completely
useless from my perspective.
>>
People are doing this an _awful_ lot in the industry from what I've seen. They PI the spell names, any flavor text, and/or verbatim expression and open up the underlying mechanics of the spell in question.
I can't say that this is not useless to you. I'm not you and wouldn't dare to question your assessment. But I find such things to be hardly uncommon in the industry.
<<
Personally, I think Wizards can still fix this. They just have to add a
clause to the d20 license that clarifies what clearly means and says
your OGC declaration cannot include an phrase that basically means "all
content derived from OGC is OGC." Once that circulated for a while,
they could then update the OGL itself. The beauty of this is they don't
have to polute the OGL until they know what will work. Of course, this
assumes that they care.
>>
I don't have the OGL in front of me right now. But are people legally obliged to use the most current version of the OGL?
I can't remember if they are.
Lee
