Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 Edymnion Oct 10, 2003 19:43:40	One thing I see over and over on these boards is that the SRD is this wonderful free copy of the books on the internet, and how wonderful it is to have everything up for free for us players to use. This sentiment, while not exactly wrong, is naive. The SRD was not made for us as players (when I use “players,” I am referring to Players and DMs together, as in those that play D&D). It was made for third party publishers as part of the Open Gaming License to increase Wizards’ own profit. It has nothing to do with "being nice to the players" or any such thing. It is a legal document used as a reference by Wizards to enforce the terms of the OGL. Remember, anything that is in the SRD is OGC (Open Gaming Content), and may be reproduced by anyone without needing Wizards’ express permission. Anything that Wizards does not want to give away for free is not in the SRD, and this still seems to surprise some people. At least once a week, there is a post of "Where's the __________?" where they say they were trying to look something up in the SRD and it wasn't there, and they don't understand why. The answer is because Wizards loses money if it is put in the SRD, or that’s what it boils down to anyway. Lets clear up WHY Wizards has used this open source gaming real quick before we go farther. TSR, the old company that created D&D, went on a bit of a rampage trying to squash fan made material on the internet, and lost a lot of money at it. Wizards realized that there was a market for this sort of thing, and it was going to be done regardless of anything they could do to stop it. By creating the open source material, it officially endorsed third party books on the principle that to use those books, you first had to buy the core books. None of the third party books would ever be allowed to recreate enough of the d20 mechanics to make their own games (more on that later), so they would always act as incentive to buy the core rulebooks. However, Wizards did not make much of it's intellectual property open source, and left key mechanics out of the SRD that most people don't think to check. The one most people will realize is that spell names that include the names of D&D characters are gone. There is no Tenser's Transformation, there is a Transformation spell. No Melf's Acid Arrow, just Acid Arrow. This is because Wizards wanted to put the spells out there, but NOT the names of their big characters. Otherwise, Melf and Tenser and Bigby would be fair game for third party publishers to write on. But, getting back to recreating the d20 mechanics, there is nothing in the SRD about character creation. Not an xp table, not a mention of when you get feats or attribute bonuses, nothing. This is a keystone of how and why the SRD was made with third party developers in mind, not the players. If character creation was made open source, third party publishers would have everything they needed to make their own d20 gaming lines that have nothing to do with Wizards. Wizards would be sponsoring their own competitors with many year's worth of hard work in balancing a system, so it isn't included. What the SRD really is is a document that says, "This this and this you can use, but you can't use that and that." That’s all it is. However, by its very nature, open content is viewable by anyone, which includes the players. Enter these very message boards. Thousands of people talking about the game, only a fool would think they wouldn't start talking about items and spells, and start trying to post up the stats for everything at the drop of a hat. Again, the SRD as a legal document comes to the rescue again. It is easy to point to and say "That’s what you can talk about, the rest is copyrighted, don't copy that stuff out in here." Again, the SRD is being used as a legal buffer against copyright infringement. Is the SRD a wonderfully handy thing to have? Yes, it is. It’s very nice to be able to look stuff up when you left your books somewhere else. Was it originally designed as just an online reference tool for the players? No, it wasn't. It was, and still is, first and foremost, a legal document that lets Wizards funnel the creative talent of dozens of independent publishers into free advertising for it's own product. Wizards isn't giving it all away for free, Wizards is getting massive amounts of free advertising for their core rulebooks. And the more popular those third party items get, the more popular the game as a whole gets, the more core rulebooks they sell. Don't make the mistake of thinking the SRD was done for players out of the goodness of Wizards’ heart. It was and is a money-making tool, like any other.
#2 tzor Oct 14, 2003 10:38:40	Edymnion, I agree for the most part with your argument, but at the same time there is an element where all players, specifically those players who are active in various online forums, are to some extent “third party publishers” whose knowledge of what is OGL and what is not OGL is important in order to be able to “publish” articles on these forums without being in danger of violating copyright material. Knowing the boundaries of OGL and closed content material is also useful to players as well. As an example of this argument, I recently posted an article on medieval weapons in the “Regdar's Repository” forum. I deliberately made an effort not to include the range value and damage dice of these weapons, because that is not listed as open content within the OGL. This is important not only for the writer making a Renaissance campaign world, but for a writer who wants to write an article or a forum message. But is the reverse really true? While the SRD is clearly an indicator of what is open content, is it an accurate indicator of what is closed content? Does it really say what third party third party writers cannot produce? Not having the range and damage values in the SRD does not prohibit any third party make their own rules about firearms, for example. While campaign world specific names are clearly closed content, what about specific monsters omitted from the SRD? A good example of this caught my eye in a pop up advertisement on En-World lately. E.N. Publishing is producing “The Complete Guide to Beholders.” Recall that beholders are not a part of the SRD listings. Assuming that everything is above board, and that all parties have received any special permission, it does show that the SRD, in and of itself, does not specifically indicate what you can’t use. It indicates what you can freely use, and the rest require care and due diligence. The SRD also obfuscates the blurry lines of copyright law, by allowing all parties to simply use the least common denominator of known safety. Take the example I gave above. I have a good feeling that the citation of the damage of a Renaissance rifle, and its range would easily fall under the definitions of “fair use.” Listing the MM text information for beholders verbatim would just as easily not fall under “fair use.” Balrogs and Hobbits didn’t get erased from D&D, for example. Their names were changed but the basic flavor was uncopyrightable. In the end, the writer’s best friend is his lawyer.