Slayers: Dungeons and Dragons

[Keiokie]

While at Anime North, a friend from a D&D session bought a Slayers book that had character sheets, spells, adventures... All you'd need for a D&D session. Has anyone else tryed to play out of the Slayers D&D Handbook? We're still debating whether or not to introduce characters into our current session, or make an extra playing session that would involve ourselves being the cast.

[hooliganj]

Guardians of Order had a table at A-kon where I saw this, but the information leaves me a little confused.

This is another d20 game, which means it's produced under the Open Gaming License offered by Wizards of the Coast. I understand that to mean pretty much the same thing as the Open Source License for Unix code, in which you can make any changes and make as many copies as you want, as long as a credit for the original (WotC) staff is left in. However, on the webpage (http://www.guardiansorder.com), they only have character sheets for Slayers available for download, while the book must be paid for.

Can anyone explain the details about the OGL? It seems like someone could buy the book, make several copies, and sell for profit themselves. This doesn't seem like the best business model for Gurdians to fall into.

BTW, the games are pretty good, and they also offer d20 versions of BESM and Trigun, with Hellsing coming soon. I prefer the older tri-stat system, for which they've promised a 3rd edition, but most of the products they make are fun to play.

[StormD]

Originally Posted by hooliganj

Can anyone explain the details about the OGL? It seems like someone could buy the book, make several copies, and sell for profit themselves. This doesn't seem like the best business model for Gurdians to fall into.

The rules for the system are open and can be re-used without the need for royalties. The additional content supplied by game-creators, which can include new character classes, game-worlds, settings, descriptions, characters, new spells, etc. which BUILD ON the open rules, can all be copyrighted under other licenses. So, you can, say, make a new game world for D&D, or make a new game that uses the same rules as D&D, and you can publish those, and still receive copyright protection (provided you comply with the terms of the OGL, which would require that you print the license and let people know they are as free to steal the basic rules, but not the content, from you as you were from WotC), but you cannot, say, just make copies of the D&D rulebooks, or someone else's sourcebooks, and publish them, nor could anybody do that to anything you published, without permission.