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I’ve found myself aghast at the multiple (not loads, but still) conversations I’ve had online where I’ve proposed an open-source RPG, and I’m told that this really isn’t adding much, because people can already copy systems.
I have personally copied a system. I have rewritten White Wolf’s rules[a] so that I could modify them, and it took over a month of nearly all of my free time. I really doubt everyone is willing to spend the time they require to recreate a book, just to add a few rules, and I doubt most people could do it in the same time.
The project went far faster than it otherwise would by using tesseract ocular character recognition to pull text from pdfs made from a series of pdfs (no plain text lying underneath), sed to make initial changes, vim for more fine-grained changes, and of course LaTeX to pull the whole thing together, with formatting, et c.
And it has no images!
I’ve never met or heard of an RPG enthusiast who has a bunch of SRDs printed on their bookshelves - everyone buys official books, because they contain art and proper long-form explanations and examples.