<<
That's the idea, yes, but implementation can be tricky. For instance,
you create your race of snakemen, but you want to keep the race closed.
So you name the race and describe the race's culture in the regular text
of your book and put the statistics in a greyed out 'stats block.' No
problem.
Now you move on to your next creation, mongoosemen. Mongoosemen hate
snakemen with a passion. In fact, this hatred is so great that it gives
mongoosemen +2 to hit when fighting snakemen. So in the greyed out stats
block you put "+2 to hit when fighting snakemen." The problem is that
you've just opened the name of your snakemen race. Your book is leaking
your IP through 'open' holes.
>>
What you could do is provide your settings name of the race in the
closed text, then give a general name for the Snakemen as an "open" name
which is listed under the OGL stats. It's like giving the race an
alias. You could also provide a table that lists a races real name and
then the OGL alias (of course making sure the side of the aliased are
noted to be OGLed names).
This is probably the easiest way to implement this, without getting into
anything too complicated.
<<
This is the heart of my concern. The example above demonstrates what I
mean when I say that rules and adventure material are not wholly
distinct. They overlap and merge and get muddled together. When this
happens, you must be very careful to preserve the integrity of your IP
because the OGL will tend to leak your IP. The difficulty this presents
(and perhaps impossibility in many cases) will tend to keep non-WotC
professionals with new IP away from OGL.
>>
In these kind of situations you need to get creative.
--
Korath,
http://www.korath.com
"He was already dead, he died a year ago, the moment he touched her.
They're all dead, they just don't know it." --Eric Draven, The Crow
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