[Ogf-l] (Clear) OGC Designations and "worthless" OGC...

[The Sigil]

Though I know it's an unpopular view, I still try to hold to the "six-year-old-with-a-highlighter rule" as a good "acid test" for determining whether or not my OGC designation is clear. (TEST: Give a six year old a highlighter and have him read the OGC Designation. Now have him highlight all the OGC - and nothing that is not OGC - in the product on the first pass. If he can't do it, you made the OGC designation too difficult).

The "worthless" OGC (my term was "crippled" OGC but oh well) is one of my pet peeves - and I have made a conscious effort NOT to spend my gaming dollars on products that feature this. Maybe I'm the only one, but it's about all I can do, since the license DOES allow it.

I have always been a fan of Bastion Press' OGC Designations - essentially "all the text but our name." It's the method I have used in my own publications also. Bad Axe Games, with their "This Page is OGC," is good too.

I guess my philosophy is different than most publishers'. My impression (right or wrong) is that those who see publishing/writing as a business tend to be extremely protective and limiting - their attitude seems to be "the less OGC the better."

I suppose this is natural - to a publisher, the content he produces generally represents food he puts on his table. Now, I happen to think that publishers - not so much in the d20 industry but in the world at large - have passed the point of reasonableness in regard to holding on to "their precious" (but I'm not going to turn this into a copyright rant). Basically, the attitude seems to be that they want to squeeze as much as they possibly can from their works. I may not agree with that philosophy, but I understand where they are coming from. To a publisher, especially one beholden to shareholders or to a mortgage company, the question is not "did you make money," but rather "did you make ENOUGH money to satisfy (your obligations, your shareholders, your needs, insert favorite incentive here)?" And they can't really be faulted too much for that, I guess. I might fault the targets, but I can't fault what drives those targets as much (especially when the targets are driven by food and mortgage).

I am a d20 fan first and a publisher second. To me, this isn't about the money. It's never been about the money. I publish because I want to - and so for I designate almost everything as OGC (everything but my name and product titles, basically, so I have some sort of identity that no one can appropriate). My success metric corresponds more closely to "at the end of the day, how many people use this and does it improve their game," rather than "how many dollars did I make?" Now, I can probably have that attitude since publishing isn't what pays my rent and feeds my family. (Publishing DOES fund my gaming habit.) I don't know whether a company that is first a publishing company could adopt this model in practicality or not, because it requires a different paradigm. Jim Butler and Bastion Press strikes me as a fan first and a publisher second. For me, publishing is about, "hey I made a little cash" more than "I made ENOUGH cash to do X or Y."

Which approach is correct? Both. Neither. It depends on your situation, it really does.

That said, my personal preference (as a fan first) is to have as many publishers as can do so (convincing the shareholders, et al) to open up as much content as possible because I want to see the game itself enriched as much as possible - and I firmly believe that easy re-use vastly enriches the game as it encourages others to build upon your ideas. The more builders we have, the more variety of sculpture we can see. Is all of it going to be good? Absolutely not. But there is always the "infinite monkeys" theory.

I will continue to designate 99+ percent of my text as OGC so that everyone else can use it. I will continue buying products from those that do the same - even doing so much as including a license for re-using PI (as was done in R&R but unfortunately not R&R II) is enough to satifsy me.

At the end of the day, I want a large pool of content that I don't have to ask to use - because publishers have already granted blanket permission. Why is this important to me? What if the unthinkable happens - suppose, for example, that Orcus were to appear and wipe out SSS (joking here, but you get the idea - the company and Clark cease to exist)? There would be no one authorized to give me permission to use the PI'd monster names in CC2. I would have to wait until these fell out of copyright and into the public domain (which may NEVER happen) to use them. The legacy of CC2 would wither and die. What a shame for such a great book to essentially be lost just because no license was included for re-using the monsters therein.

I want my stuff to outlive me. It's why I take great pains to make my stuff open - so if, God forbid, something happened to me, anyone could still use it. That's MY legacy. If I die, my stuff lives on and anyone can use it because it's open. Kind of a fatalistic POV, perhaps, but IMO a very compelling reason to open your content if you want "immortality" for your content. When you pass, your content eventually withers and dies, too, if you haven't given it enough "freedom."

Mushy sentimental rambling over. We return you to your regularly scheduled forum.

--Spencer "The Sigil" Cooley

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