[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-h...
And we never needed Apple's permission to have overlapping windows. Alas…
There was a long history of C&D letters and outright lawsuits. Heck, up until recently one of the head honchos of WotC was working at one of the companies being targeted by TSR in the 90s for their "Role Aids". A detente where you didn't have to worry about that as a small time publisher or hobbyist was rather appreciated.
Never mind that "mechanics" isn't as clearly described as we engineer type of nerds would like. So I'm writing my third party D&D-ish adventure. The players encounter a bunch of Orcs lead by an Evil Wizard. "Wizard" and "orc" existing way before D&D, so we're good here. But now I need to provide stat blocks, with abilities, hit points, "magic missile" spells etc. How far can I go where we move beyond "mechanics" and into "trade dress" or whatever lies beyond that legal dimension door?
Never mind that from a usability POV, there's a big benefit of having your stats exactly as WotC did them.
I often get the feeling that people citing the "rules can't be copyrighted!" adage don't game or are one of those people with three binders full of house rules.
Part of the problem is this is a gray area even in the law, just look at the kerfuffle around the Warhol prince print that is still ongoing.
Reminds me of the Judges Guild "Universal System" where they had a lot of weird stats in their books, often with some made-up rules, just to avoid any issues with D&D at the time (late 70s/early 80s, I think).
Event went so far as to have three-digit stats, stating that the first two are the regular ones (to correspond on the D&D 3-18 range) and the last is "how often you can use it without having to roll for a stress test".
If you're going that unusable, you might as well write for your own or a non-litigious system and let the people convert it themselves. It's a lot of homework anyways…
There were some rather elaborate rules for constructing armor that didn't really map to D&D's armor class, though. Probably even more of a curve ball.
The hit points – sorry "hits to kill", my mistake – were either what you'd expect from a D&D character with the same (first digit) level or the sum of (the first two digits) of Constitution and Strength.
Don't remember much more than this…
For example, World of Warcraft has had the virtually identical Arcane Missiles spell for nearly twenty years now, and Terraria even had the identically-named Magic Missile for over a decade already.
In trademark law lack of enforcement can lead to the trademark becoming genericized, which is why words like Aspirin, Videotape, or Escalator are no longer trademarks but regular everyday words.
If you never enforce your IP rights despite being well aware of violations, and even actively promote use of it by third parties, at what point does it stop being IP and become common culture?
This is something that I've been seen written over and over again.
While the mechanisms themselves are not subject to copyright, the rules, as authored by Wizards of the Coast, are. That is the specific implementation of those mechanisms (e.g. the definition of a feat, skill, or spell) is subject to copyright.
The OGL and D&D SRD allowed limited republishing of copyrighted material by third party publishers.
If you aren't using the words from the D&D rulebook you can publish a game that's 100% compatible with D&D. You would also have to spend a lot of time reimplementing the spell, skill, feat, and weapon boilerplate.. Which is why the D&D SRD and OGL were created.
It's like a hash table. While you can't implicitly[0] protect the concept of a hash table you can copyright and implicitly protect your hash table. Someone else can create a hash table but they can't copy and paste the code from your proprietary implementation. It's yours.. Unless you give them a license to use and/or distribute it.
The death of/community moving away from the OGL and D&D SRD is a good thing.
The RPG world is a victim of the OGL and D&D SRD's success. How many games are based on the six attribute format? I've been playing games like that for 30 years and I've had enough. When I pick up a book and see dex/str/con/wis/int/cha my eyes glass over. I want D&D to fade, I want publishers to create new, entirely novel, systems, and I don't care what it means the status quo. The ideas haven't been there for many years now.
What's great about the OGL and D&D SRD is that it brought an open source mentality to game publishing. It created a framework for companies can collaborate on a system and made that the default way of thinking about the creation of RPG material. That isn't going to go away. We're just going to be getting more and, possibly, better systems.
It's going to cause fragmentation, turmoil, consumer confusion, and it's going to be great. We'll get a burst of creativity, followed by a plateau, and finally everyone will congregate around a new system in a decade or so.
[0]: Copyright is implicit, patents and trademarks are not.
The conclusion I've drawn from this is that the system doesn't really matter. The game rules are incredibly secondary to the concept of role-playing - the universe, the people, the motivations, the personalities etc.
We've got a system, it works and everyone knows how to use it. We've met the bar for a foundation we can build our universes on (until now, and this controversy).
That said, I don't think I've spent enough time playing other systems to really be sure of my feelings on this - the above is based on the situation we've got to. I've got Call of Cthulu on the shelves next to me and plan to run a game, partly because I want to answer that question: "does the different stat and mechanics system really bleed through and affect how you experience the world"?
In my experience, they do because of the sort of players they attract and the engagement required of them.
Complicated games with many source books attract rules lawyers, who dominate the group experience by way of using their knowledge of obscure rules to control the play.
Whereas overly simple games, like FATE, lack enough structure to guide more timid players through the experience, and so play becomes dominated by the prominent story tellers in the party.
Play "Warhammer Fantasy Role Play" and get back to me. How many fingers did your players have by the end?
Or Dungeon Crawl Classics.. How many level-0s made it through the meat grinder?
The randomness in other system leads to some interesting developments that you don't see in D&D. There's also the culture of the games. In modern D&D there's almost a contract between the players and DM that the players aren't to interfere with the DM's world building and the DM will not interfere with the grand destinies of the characters.
It's completely uninteresting to me. I want to play and play with as many different characters as possible so I can see different parts of the system and worlds. Playing the same characters from level 1 to godhood is dull. Character death should be frequent and glorious.
I also like Blood Bowl so.. I have a pretty high tolerance for nonsensical, dice driven, narratives. There are so many good story hooks if you just go with it.
Wargame systems where combat is the focus and fudging is cheating tend to use more small dice so you end up closer to a normal distribution of values, rather than a uniform distribution. That avoids stuff that doesn't make sense like a shepherd rolling repeated natural 20s while a dragon rolls 1s - if the dragon is rolling 5 dice for an attack the floor of that is still above the shepherd's ability to defend.
It is, however, an OGL-covered rule in Pathfinder:[2]
> The rules presented are here to help you breathe life into your characters and the world they explore. While they are designed to make your game easy and exciting, you might find that some of them do not suit the style of play that your gaming group enjoys. Remember that these rules are yours. You can change them to fit your needs. Most Game Masters have a number of "house rules" that they use in their games. The Game Master and players should always discuss any rules changes to make sure that everyone understands how the game will be played. Although the Game Master is the final arbiter of the rules, the Pathfinder RPG is a shared experience, and all of the players should contribute their thoughts when the rules are in doubt.
1: https://theoutcastrogue.tumblr.com/post/685341001180741632/r...
2: https://pathfinder.d20srd.org/coreRulebook/gettingStarted.ht...
Damn, have I got, like, 20 years of blogs, 40 years of forum and BBS posts, and 60 more years of magazine, zine, and rambling manifesto articles for you.
Even if technically game mechanics are fair use, where exactly to draw that line has never been tested in court, and in the past, well before the OGL, RPG developers publishing something that was intended to be compatible with someone else's game, have been sued over that. Including WotC itself in their early days.
So just that already gave WotC an incentive to want a more open license. And in the late 1990s, before they released the OGL, the RPG industry was shrinking, with each company on its own island, and no exchange of material between different systems. WotC reasoned that the value of an RPG comes primarily from how easy it is to find players to play the game with, and if all RPGs are built on the same core mechanics, they have a common player base and players can much more easily pick up a new game. That's why they created the OGL: to connect all the islands, create a common player base for everybody, make all RPGs more valuable as a result, and thereby make the entire industry bigger. A bigger pie, of which WotC got the biggest piece.
On top of that, they hoped that third party contributions would also improve D&D itself. Inspired by ESR's the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
But the real thing that convinced other publishers to contribute to this common OGL system, much more than any of the legalities, is the trust that WotC built. The OGL was a solemn promise that they would never sue anyone who stuck to the rules in the OGL. Instead of the vague complexities and grey areas of copyright law, there were now clear lines drawn about what you could and couldn't do. And that is what convinced other RPG publishers to go along with this. To trust WotC. And everybody benefited from it.
And now WotC destroyed that trust, and may never be able to repair that. Paizo is trying to rebuild a new similar agreement and the accompanying trust from the ruins of WotC's sudden idiocy.
WotC seems to be seeing the RPG industry as a zero-sum game, where any money made by someone else, is money not made by them. That's not how it works. WotC benefited enormously from the OGL. The biggest editions of D&D are those that used the OGL (3.x and 5), whereas 4 was significantly less popular, and at some point even outsold by Paizo's Pathfinder. RPGs have always been a community effort. 20 years ago, WotC understood that. Modern Hasbro leadership only thinks in terms of products and consumers, and that attitude is going to hurt D&D.
Oh, and Oracle now has to pay billions of dollars to Amazon for providing an S3-compatible storage API, completely ending their cloud ambitions and cementing the AWS monopoly.
[0] Adobe published documentation on SWF specifically to encourage browser vendors to reimplement.
It's the size of Google that I feel makes it lose rights. When you are a giant you should lose to compensate for all the power you have as a consequence to the natural accumulation of power. So that Google should pay, doesn't follow that a small start-up should. Unfortunately, the laws are not written that way.
Furthermore, the underlying reason why we're making Google pay is still total bullshit. Remember: we're not arguing for "start-ups should get a pass on copyright infringement but Google should pay billions". We're arguing over 20 function signatures. Nobody should have to pay for that, and any copyright law that covers function signatures is unfit for purpose, even if it's a bill of attainder[0] that only applies to Google.
[0] A law that specifically prescribes a punishment to be applied to one person and one person alone. For example, if Congress were to pass a bill saying "Larry Page is guilty of copyright infringement for scraping the Internet and has no civil rights", that is a bill of attainder.
This is such an easily abusable process that the Constitution, unamended, forbids it.
A new license is absolutely necessary in the context of the modern court system.
Correct. This is where patents come into place.
For example https://patents.google.com/patent/US7264242 and https://generalpatent.com/professor-s-company-wins-1-6-milli...
https://patents.google.com/patent/US3208754A/en is another fun one.
But lore and wording gets into trouble. Is "Magic Missile" copyrighted? How about Halfling ( https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/116283 )?
> A missile of magical energy darts forth from your fingertip and strikes its target, dealing 1d4+1 points of force damage.
> You create three glowing darts of magical force. Each dart hits a creature of your choice that you can see within range. A dart deals 1d4 + 1 force damage to its target. The darts all strike simultaneously, and you can direct them to hit one creature or several.
Without looking which one is D&D and which one is Pathfinder?
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/m/magic-missile/
https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Magic%20Missile#content
Would the pathfinder version be considered a derivative work of the D&D version (well, not that D&D version since that was 5e... still).
Excepting a few, most of their monsters are generic fantasy monsters too or random combinations of "let's stick this head on this body".
The stuff that is copyrightable they do a terrible job at monetizing (Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Eberon, various planes, higher powers, etc.)
On the other hand, claiming copyright or trademark on D&D terms and mechanics that have diffused throughout the RPG universe for nearly 50 years (experience points, hit points, ability scores, spell levels, character classes and levels, alignment, saving throws, initiative, etc.) seems like a fool's errand.