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Before a rather long comment...I believe the SRD is extremely high priority. WotC needs it too. I expect to see the same things as before: virtually everything from PHB and DMG will be in the SRD, as will almost all the monsters from MM 4e. Do we *know* that the 3rd party publishers still don't have the SRD? It wouldn't shock me if they don't...but it would surprise me somewhat, at this point. I very much doubt we'll see the public SRD until the books are released, but they can release to developers under an NDA.

CJM, it's more than that. Everything in the SRD is defined as being part of the Core Rules, the heart of the system. Incarnium and OA...they're not part of that. Indeed, one could take Joe's statement, and read in a suggestion that EVERYTHING they publish, should become part of the Core Rules after, say, 3 years...but that's never gonna happen. There's far too much product identity, FAR too much original material.

In reality: the content of the SRD has nothing to do with the OGL, nor did the OGL cause the creation of the SRD. Just because something is published as OGL material...so what? The SRD is WotC's formal statement: Here is our system, here are our rules. The OGL is: Here's stuff we came up with. We're keeping the major legal rights to it, but feel free to pass it on and use it (privately!) as you like, as long as you recognize that it's still ours. The OGL is simply the *license*...the statement of what can and cannot be done, legally, with the material published under that license. Indeed: I would assert you're backwards here, CJM. The desire to produce the SRD most likely came first, as a way to simplify the legal issues involved. Copyright law is a very funny thing. If you do nothing to defend your copyrights, you *can* lose them. The material becomes public domain. Some of you might remember, some years ago, when TSR's legal department was pushing that terms like "ranger" and "paladin" were copyrighted. Unfortunately, that's what defending your copyright MAY entail.

I also recall statements from Beth Moursond on the old gg-l Magic boards...specifically saying, no, DON'T publish the full text of a card, because that list was a public forum, and such postings weakened their copyrights. Note that, on the boards here, we've had very similar admonitions for AU/AE material...page number reference is prefect, or *short* quote from text. Same reason: potential loss of copyright protection.

So...WotC's concept was the SRD. The SRD contains the building blocks, the parts that you want out there for everyone else to use. BUT, in order to release it, they had to construct the legal fence between "this is stuff you can use" and "this is still completely our stuff." That fence is the OGL. The SRD created the OGL because the SRD required the OGL.

Now...since the whole SRD/OGL point is rather circular...I'll complete the circle of this post. Copyright law *again*...if there becomes a pattern and practice that large quantities of their formally published, copyrighted material is converted to be covered by the OGL...do they risk losing ALL their protection? I believe the answer is YES. And, note how careful they are, when publishing under the OGL, to genericize...it's Transformation now, not Tenser's Transformation, keeping that separation between product identity/copyrighted material and open material intact. Try doing that with Incarnium. Thus...no, much, perhaps most, of the splatbook or expansions stuff, cannot reasonably and safely be placed under the OGL. AND: covered under the OGL is NOT the same as being included in the SRD.

Yes, I meant they weren't listed as actions in combat, as they are over on d20srd.org. Who's gonna think to look in psionics? And the whole point of a document defined as the System Reference Document is to be well organized and complete. One can argue whether the Combat section's the place to define action types, but that's quibbling. It *is* true, tho, that every action type defined in the system *should be defined here*. The exception is an action type that is unique to a particular application or sourcebook...which almost certainly would never make the SRD anyway...can reasonably be defined only in that context. But as Guyver notes, they've been using Swift (at least) all over the place. And it's older than XPH; IIRC, it goes back to Minis, and has been used ever since.

I agree that I hate the redundant text. I don't want to see, for example, the whole bloody long-winded 3.5 text for Evasion on *every* class that gains it...especially given that the language has to include that Evasion + Evasion == Imp Evasion now. Heck, I'd have NO problem if the first 25 pages of the Classes section simply covered the class abilities of all the classes...in both PHB and SRD. In the SRD, this'd be even better...a good extension for this section would be to define in *which* PH was it included.

Of course, if they organize it this nicely...it could well be true that the SRD is GREATLY more useful and valuable than the books in a few years.