Pathfinder and OGL

[The Nightgaunt]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this thread. If it's better suited for a different forum on this site please let me know.

I'm looking into self-publishing my own setting using PDFs, and it looks like my best bet would be to follow in Pathfinder's footsteps, so to speak, and use the "no actually d20" OGL.

I'm a big fan of Pathfinder and I've looked at how they incorporated the OGL into the design of their system and made it wonderfully unobtrusive in the design. They haven't had to segment off OGL content in grey boxes or format it differently, instead it's all covered by the first page of the Core Rule book in 2 paragraphs defining Product Identity and Open Content.

So does anyone know if that's ever caused the Pathfinder folks any issue? Most of the advice I've come across has been to explicitly set apart all OGL content within your book. But it looks like that's exactly what they didn't do with Pathfinder. Or are the rules just different for a decent sized company like Paizo?

[Matt Thomason]

I'm aware of a couple of instances of third parties misunderstanding the definition of Open Game Content in Pathfinder and assuming they could also use parts of the Golarion setting.

Other than that, it's a fairly common alternative with some publishers to simply say "all rules content" and not bother with boxed OGC text.

The rules aren't any different for Paizo than any other publisher in that respect - they just chose to do it this way. Identifying specific portions of text as OGC is certainly good advice for a new publisher as its far easier to understand how much of your own work you've just opened up that way. It can, however, result in a product which uses "weird formatting" for the end user who doesn't really care what is OGC and what isn't. By going the "all rules content..." route, at least you're then free to format your product with players in mind rather than other publishers.