Rants 'n' Reviews
This area holds various rants about RPGs and life in general. All my own opinion (which is why it's a rant). I will also be reviewing various D&D3E, roleplaying, sci-fi etc. products in this part of the site.
Where's the OGC?
Welcome to my first rant. Unfortunately this doesn't feel quite as satisfying as I thought it would (none of the <whack>, <crunch>, <thud> sound effects for instance) ... oh well.
This rant is pretty much targeted at Wixards, which is unusual for me, because I think they have done a fine job of getting the D&D brand back up and running again. But hey, sometimes even the best of us could use a smack upside the head.
What I want to know, is where's the OGC?
Now, for those of you not in the know, OGC stands for Open Game Content. Wixards has released a whole swag of their D&D game as OGC in the System Reference Document, or SRD.
However, there is a whole bunch of Wizards gaming content that is not covered by the SRD, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide for example. There is no plan that I know of to ever make it part of the SRD, yet it bears the d20 logo! Apart from the fact that this wrongly suggests that it is a d20 product (it clearly doesn't stick to the license), it also sticks in the throat as it means that none of this content can be used by anyone else.
When I say 'used' I don't mean copied en masse, or ripped off. I mean that none of the feats, skills, prestige classes, spells, etc. etc. can be in any other publisher's product, even if it's just in a character's stat block. That's less important for the FRCG than it is for the metagame rules in something like the Manual of the Planes, which is supposed to help us all create planes of existence and campaign backgrounds easily.
Now if every publisher of d20 content took that approach then there would be little or no point to the d20 license. The beauty of that license is that it allows publishers to build upon the work of other publishers to create better, more inventive and more consistent game content. You won't be seeing d20 publishers using the plane creation rules in MOTP to create planes of existence for their worlds (or even adventures) because they can't. There is no legal way for them to access that content without making some sort of licensing deal with Wizards first.
When you see the d20 logo you ought to be confident that the base rules in that product will be compatible with D&D3E, that they can be easily understood and that with a minimum of tweaking you can use that product with other d20 products you have. This is true of the Wizards products. But you should also be able find at least 5% of the product is OGC, this is not true of Wizards products.
Unfortunately, Wizards doesn't need to stick to the d20 license, they own the logo and can use it wherever they damn well like. I just wish they would consider using it properly and making at least some of their rules in each product OGC, rather than forcing us all to wait for updates to the SRD, or for some enterprising d20 publisher to come up with something similar themselves.
Ultimately that's the upside to this situation, it will force the d20 publishers to rely upon each other, and as people start to use their games it will become more and more obvious that you can either be a plain vanilla D&D3E gamer, or one who takes the leap into the brand new world of d20. From the plethora of game worlds out there using homebrewed or professional d20 OGC, I know which one I'll be.
Angus McDonald
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