[DF] Holy water seems to have no purpose

[MKMcArtor]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

1) I've read the OGL. In fact, I had a copy at arms' length as I wrote the post. (My printout of NPC Essentials happens to be with my printouts of Dungeon Fantasy.) There is not only no such prohibition in there about making non-OGL games, section 8 clearly states that you need to designate which is closed content and which is open in the work in question, thus indicating that you can use OGL content to make closed content, which in fact happens constantly in any number of d20 products, like the one in which the license to which I referred is.

The OGL has more worms than ten cans, and the open/closed content thing is a can's worth of its own. The generally accepted interpretation in that part of the industry is that once something is designated as open content by its creator, it remains forever open content. So yes, you can extrapolate open content to make closed content, but the originally open content remains open in your interpretation of it.

Thus, if Company A makes Creature Alpha and designates its name and statblock as open content (which is a fairly common practice for monsters), Company B could take up Creature Alpha and create a whole new society for it (since Company A didn't make the original society open content) as well as several derivative and related creatures based on Creature Alpha. What Company B couldn't do is to make the original Creature Alpha name and statblock as closed content, and it would need to mark in its section 15 (I think that's the one, I don't have an OGL handy) where Creature Alpha came from. What Company B could do, though, is to make its society for Creature Alpha closed (which it should) as well as the names and statblocks for its derivative versions (which is legal but *******).

The point of the OGL was originally to make a community where people could create fundamentally compatible gaming material in an open and sharing environment. Humans are humans, though, and it didn't really materialize like that until much later, after the 3.5 switch shook out almost all of the chaff.