Ideas for GURPS Community Licensing

[Tom H.]

I branched this topic from What GURPS needs... now.

Originally Posted by Propjock

. . .
There's a whole stack of easy and not so easy things to be done here from collecting 1-page adventure seeds published for free (written by the community) on a GURPS microsite, to evocative pre-gen characters/templates, to creating a suite of online tools that GMs/Players can use to manage their games and campaigns (if there were one game that would benefit a crazy amount by modern web tooling it's GURPs).

Yes, there truly is a lot of material that GURPS can use.

The bottleneck appears to lie with the availability of company resources or the aversion to high, market risk.

One solution appears to be opening up some kind of licensing for the community to absorb these risks.

I have been thinking about potential ways to make this more palatable to SJ Games in protecting their intellectual property.

What if SJ Games instituted a Tiered Community Conformation Scheme.

Tiers.

1. SJ Game Source Products
2. SJ Game Authorized Community Products (conforming to rules and style)
3. SJ Game Rules Compliant Products (conforming to official rules)
4. Community Products (least conformity)

It would be important and mandated as part of the licensing that each tier use a special logo or trade dress to indicate its fidelity to the SJ Games GURPS standard.

Obviously the closer you get to the top of this list the more "official" the product is. This would seem to help protect the intellectual property by allowing SJ Games to control the "legitimacy" of products that use GURPS rules.

It seems to me that there are three significant attributes (taken into account in the list above) in conforming to SJ Games standards.
1. Official rules adherence
2. Presentation style
3. Writing style

In order to ease the burden on company resources, could appointed boards of community members or MIBs voluntarily review products (of tiers 2 through 4) for conformity and then assign the appropriate tier badge?