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Piell posted:Yes, but you can't do so if you want to do 3.X or 5E stuff. The point of this change is WotC wants to make other VTTs much more difficult to use for 5E/OneD&D in order to drive people to use their upcoming VTT Why not. Just don't quote word by word the SRD.
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Jan 15, 2023 19:34
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YggdrasilTM posted:Why not. Just don't quote word by word the SRD. The OGL is the license for what D&D stuff you can use. The license says "This license only applies to materials You create for use in or as roleplaying games and as game supplements and only as printed media and static electronic files such as epubs or pdfs. It does not allow the distribution of any other form of media. And does not apply to creation of anything else." Therefore you cannot use it for anything that isn't static, like a character/encounter builder or an adventure for a VTT that automatically sets up all the maps and NPCs and items
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Jan 15, 2023 19:37
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You can't say it's a 5e adventure though if you do that. The only way to explicitly interact with 5e mechanics and use Wizard's trademark is under the OGL.
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Jan 15, 2023 19:37
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Piell posted:The OGL is the license for what D&D stuff you can use. You can use totally D&D rules to create character/encounter builders or an adventure. You can't copyright game rules. What you can't do is to use the OGL, that allows you to say "this is product is for D&D 5e", or to quote parts of the SRD text.
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Jan 15, 2023 19:41
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YggdrasilTM posted:You can use totally D&D rules to create character/encounter builders or an adventure. You can't copyright game rules. With a looming possible threat of being sued, because WotC is intentionally doing this to try to drive people to using their own VTT
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Jan 15, 2023 19:44
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While it is true that rules per se cannot be copyrighted, this does not apply to a concrete presentation of the rules, so WoTC could conceivably prevent people from using character sheets that look similar to the official ones, phrasings that sound similar to the SRD, etc. The exact dividing line is somewhat fuzzy, and most people prefer not to take the risk (Also, even if WoTC lose the hypothetical case, getting sued is massively expensive and time-consuming). SimonChris fucked around with this message at 19:52 on Jan 15, 2023 |
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Jan 15, 2023 19:48
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Basically it means that if someone publishes an adventure module as a book under the terms of the OGL 1.1 they can't publish that same adventure module in a form that can be sold on the Roll20 Marketplace or similar under the same license, which they have been allowed to until now.
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Jan 15, 2023 19:54
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The business economics of RPGs has always been tough, because a defining characteristic of RPGs is how a group can play literally forever with just a single core book and set of funny dice. The history of the hobby is full of companies trying to figure out ways to get people to keep spending money once they've bought their core books - collector's/deluxe editions, supplement treadmill, tie-in novels, monthly subscriptions (magazines, web tools, VTTs), metaplots, new editions, licensing out IP (for video games or TV shows or CCGs etc.), and on and on.
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Jan 15, 2023 19:57
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You could actually pretty easily make a barebones VTT that doesn't reference any specific items or spells and is just set up for the mechanics of D&D, making users responsible for setting up the actual descriptions. If Wizards started making a stink about things being too close to their copyrights, the VTT could just blank the user's description and tell the user "make this more different" and they would be completely in the bounds of modern copyright law.
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Jan 15, 2023 20:00
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Kwyndig posted:You can't say it's a 5e adventure though if you do that. The only way to explicitly interact with 5e mechanics and use Wizard's trademark is under the OGL. According to the Legal Eagle episode and a bunch of other commentary, you can say "this adventure is compatible with D&D 5E" and even use their branding in an explanatory manner and you're legally off the hook, outside of how easy it is to sue in the US. Have you never seen generic store brands explicitly comparing themselves to existing brands? "High Efficiency detergent, compare with Tide® HE® Detergent", for example.
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Jan 15, 2023 20:06
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Piell posted:A: Yes, it's certainly possible. The most significant thing that will impact your effort is that you have to give all the recipients the right to extract and use any Open Game Content you've included in your application, and you have to clearly identify what part of the software is Open Game Content. And this is even looser in interpretation. Pathfinder 2e is (or was) based on OGL 1.0a, but most online character builders were web based and did not give the ability to access the OGC directly. While Archives of Nethys does host it all for free anyway, that doesn't follow this principle that "you" (the character builder developer/author) must give that right, not that you may depend on someone else doing it.
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Jan 15, 2023 20:28
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VikingofRock posted:This is flat-out false, though. Paizo was doing exactly what the original OGL was intended to allow them to do, as stated by the actual people who wrote it. Ah, how quickly we forget. "The D20 System Trademark License restricts you from creating a work that explains how to create characters, and how to apply the effects of experience to those characters. To be blunt, it means you can't take the D20 stuff and publish a complete role playing game to compete with the D&D Player's Handbook." -- Ryan Dancey Dancey really didn't want other people publishing complete rulebooks. He knew it was possible, but he put together an entire trademark license to discourage that, even though legally you can use someone else's trademark to indicate compatibility without permission. Paizo did nothing wrong and I'm glad they pushed the envelope, but WotC was certainly not planning on enabling Pathfinder as a competitor for basic rules.
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Jan 15, 2023 20:53
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YggdrasilTM posted:I don't think VTTs can legally be affected? The recent statement said that VTT uses won't be affected. moths posted:But the apology says less about the company culture than the initial mistake; How many WotC desks did "race of enslaved monkey people" frictionlessly glide across? It was intended to be a planet of the apes reference from what it seems.
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Jan 15, 2023 20:53
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MonsterEnvy posted:The recent statement said that VTT uses won't be affected. Both this and the "won't include a royalty structure..." are Evil Genie wording (and we know that WotC lawyers are into that now, from the original OGL) Most likely what it means is that OGL 2.0 will cover only free non-VTT material, and any commercial use will have to be licensed directly with WotC.
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Jan 15, 2023 20:57
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Thanlis posted:"The D20 System Trademark License restricts you from creating a work that explains how to create characters, and how to apply the effects of experience to those characters. To be blunt, it means you can't take the D20 stuff and publish a complete role playing game to compete with the D&D Player's Handbook." "The D20 System Trademark License" is not the OGL.
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Jan 15, 2023 20:58
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hyphz posted:Both this and the "won't include a royalty structure..." are Evil Genie wording (and we know that WotC lawyers are into that now, from the original OGL) I think we have to wait for the actual document before assuming stuff like that.
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Jan 15, 2023 20:58
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Kwyndig posted:You can't say it's a 5e adventure though if you do that. The only way to explicitly interact with 5e mechanics and use Wizard's trademark is under the OGL. You can explicitly interact with plenty of the mechanics, you can't explicitly invoke D&D/wotc's trade dress Judging by the range of Monopoly clones on the market, the degree to which you can get cute with this is pretty extensive I am not a lawyer but LegalEagle and a number of other youtube lawyers seem to be of the opinion that the OGL was never really necessary for most of the industry to participate in in the first place - you can't copyright mechanics or processes and a product would have to directly invoke the competing product or it's trade dress to really be an issue. Obviously this remains to be litigated but I get the impression that the industry is fine to continue making 5e products as long as they dance around what they're doing  Mirthless fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Jan 15, 2023 |
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Jan 15, 2023 21:12
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I dunno if it's been said before but I feel as if it's been long overdue that someone just hits Ryan Dancey with a stick. Not to like aggrieve him or wound him, not to incapacitate him or permanently debilitate him, not to assault him or batter him, merely take a flexible stick you found on the ground and just smack him with it. He's a dingus rear end in a top hat businessman that needs an abrupt smack with a thin flexible tree branch for all of his horseshit and lying like he's your little brother and at the moment you feel like he sucks but he doesn't suck enough to punch him or spring a fight on him. This is a metaphor and I just want something bad to happen to him in a business or industry sense that isn't him walking away barely avoiding being tarred and feathered for the last bad business decision he made.
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Jan 15, 2023 21:28
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Mirthless posted:You can explicitly interact with plenty of the mechanics, you can't explicitly invoke D&D/wotc's trade dress Except the obvious conclusion is that WotC is making these changes because they want to is stop the things that were previously understood to be covered, and that leads to a higher likelihood of them actually suing someone. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a lawsuit (or at least a threat of a lawsuit if it isn't taken down) against someone that WotC thinks is using too much of D&Disms Piell fucked around with this message at 22:18 on Jan 15, 2023 |
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Jan 15, 2023 22:07
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sweet geek swag posted:You could actually pretty easily make a barebones VTT that doesn't reference any specific items or spells and is just set up for the mechanics of D&D, making users responsible for setting up the actual descriptions. If Wizards started making a stink about things being too close to their copyrights, the VTT could just blank the user's description and tell the user "make this more different" and they would be completely in the bounds of modern copyright law. Well yeah you could do that at any time you want. The point is that you previously did not have to do something like that if you wanted to make explicitly D&D based VTT content. It's not just character sheets that are effected. It's anything that isn't a static pdf or print book.
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Jan 15, 2023 22:31
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Thanlis posted:Ah, how quickly we forget. Pathfinder wasn't published under the d20 STL
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Jan 15, 2023 22:35
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I think the big thing that the Legal Eagle video misses in regards to VTTs and other products where you would want to directly refer to the mechanics of the game is that the specific wording of rules, the Expression, IS the mechanics in a game like D&D that relies on naturalistic language. If you rephrase things you risk changing what the RaW is, or at at the very least close off certain avenues of interpretation on rules. What about when WotC gives errata that specifies vague rules, is that also protected expression one would need to find their own way to express? (thus potentially making the errata less clear)
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Jan 15, 2023 23:50
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Worth pointing out also that Pathfinder wasn't the first entirely new game published under the OGL. Nor even the first from a major competitor. White Wolf brought out the Everquest RPG in 2002.
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Jan 16, 2023 00:04
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Ash Rose posted:I think the big thing that the Legal Eagle video misses in regards to VTTs and other products where you would want to directly refer to the mechanics of the game is that the specific wording of rules, the Expression, IS the mechanics in a game like D&D that relies on naturalistic language. If you rephrase things you risk changing what the RaW is, or at at the very least close off certain avenues of interpretation on rules. What about when WotC gives errata that specifies vague rules, is that also protected expression one would need to find their own way to express? (thus potentially making the errata less clear) If rephrasing changes how the rule works then the phrasing isn't copyrightable, is my understanding.
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Jan 16, 2023 00:16
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There's another layer that I think many lawyers looking-in kind of miss. If you listen to the history of WotC before they bought TSR you also kind of get an idea of what the OGL was supposed to represent. WotC in it's early days got sued because one of their rule books edged too closely to another company's IP (I believe it was Palladium) and it would have been a loving chore to work it out in court, so they settled out of court and had to attach stickers to their book saying it was an unauthorized rip-off or something like that. The OGL was meant to solve many problems, but one of them was a certain "gentlemen's agreement" between the gaming companies that WotC wasn't going to throw around lawsuits if companies used the material in the OGL and those companies would then agree to stick to the OGL when utilizing 3e's content. Lawyers keep approaching this and saying "The OGL was never necessary! You can't copyright game rules!" and they are absolutely right. The idea wasn't that the OGL was needed for companies to copy 3e, but that WotC was agreeing that companies were totally allowed to copy certain content freely without WotC suing when things got too close for their comfort. Without the OGL, yes, companies can freely copy everything that's totally legal for them to sell, but there also isn't any protection from things sliding back to the pre-OGL times, when bigger companies sue even though the content is legal to produced just because the smaller companies can't afford to fight it out in court. Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Jan 16, 2023 |
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Jan 16, 2023 00:21
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Absurd Alhazred posted:"The D20 System Trademark License" is not the OGL. No poo poo? It’s like you didn’t read the rest of my post. WotC didn’t want people to publish stand-alone rulebooks. They added a whole extra license to discourage it.
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Jan 16, 2023 00:23
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Absurd Alhazred posted:If rephrasing changes how the rule works then the phrasing isn't copyrightable, is my understanding. Interesting, though that seems pretty hard to prove in court.
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Jan 16, 2023 00:25
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Ash Rose posted:Interesting, though that seems pretty hard to prove in court. That's what expert witnesses are for, whether you're talking about gaming, programming, or a particular arrangement of plumbing.
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Jan 16, 2023 00:31
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Thanlis posted:No poo poo? It’s like you didn’t read the rest of my post. quote:WotC didn’t want people to publish stand-alone rulebooks. They added a whole extra license to discourage it. How does adding another, more restrictive license, change what "they" wanted people to do with the original, less restrictive license? You're not making sense.
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Jan 16, 2023 00:33
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Ash Rose posted:Interesting, though that seems pretty hard to prove in court. Proving stuff is the core function of courts
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Jan 16, 2023 00:37
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I also read the post you were responding to. Did you? Yeah. It said that “Paizo was doing exactly what the original OGL was intended to allow them to do, as stated by the actual people who wrote it.” That’s revisionist: Dancey did not want people publishing their own core rulebooks and in interviews at the time he said that he didn’t think it would be practical. The original OGL was intended to get people publishing adventures, to WotC’s benefit. Dancey also hoped it would discourage non-WotC games. Paizo publishing a successful D&D alternative was not his intention at all.
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Jan 16, 2023 00:45
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Thanlis posted:Yeah. It said that “Paizo was doing exactly what the original OGL was intended to allow them to do, as stated by the actual people who wrote it.” That’s revisionist: Dancey did not want people publishing their own core rulebooks and in interviews at the time he said that he didn’t think it would be practical. Do you have evidence of Dancey saying the things you think he believed about the OGL, or do you only have him talking about the STL, a distinct license? Because if all you have is the latter, then your argument isn't supported.
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Jan 16, 2023 00:52
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Do you have evidence of Dancey saying the things you think he believed about the OGL, or do you only have him talking about the STL, a distinct license? Because if all you have is the latter, then your argument isn't supported. Nope, you’re right, Ryan Dancey was a total saint who did not think he’d figured out a way to reduce the number of non-D20 games in the world.
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Jan 16, 2023 00:57
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Megazver posted:good job having as ignorant a take as that podcast episode I would be more than happy to read well-reasoned and researched refutations with sources from people who actually understand the law, instead of a bunch of rapid redditors saying NO UH.
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Jan 16, 2023 01:00
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Do you have evidence of Dancey saying the things you think he believed about the OGL, or do you only have him talking about the STL, a distinct license? Because if all you have is the latter, then your argument isn't supported. From this article it seems to me that he thought that any game based on the OGL would still required you to purchase the D&D PHB to run it quote:3. Create a genre-specific game (say, a Wild West or Gothic Horror game) that was based on the D20 System game.
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Jan 16, 2023 01:01
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sebmojo posted:Proving stuff is the core function of courts I see you're not a member of the Federalist Society.
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Jan 16, 2023 01:02
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Piell posted:From this article it seems to me that he thought that any game based on the OGL would still required you to purchase the D&D PHB to run it This section is still about the STL.
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Jan 16, 2023 01:08
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Absurd Alhazred posted:This section is still about the STL. After a closer reading, you are correct, whoops
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Jan 16, 2023 01:12
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Piell posted:Except the obvious conclusion is that WotC is making these changes because they want to is stop the things that were previously understood to be covered, and that leads to a higher likelihood of them actually suing someone. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a lawsuit (or at least a threat of a lawsuit if it isn't taken down) against someone that WotC thinks is using too much of D&Disms I don’t imagine any major lawsuits coming after this. Given Wizards appears to be backing off.
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Jan 16, 2023 01:49
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Can people stop bringing up the STL and muddling the issue? It's one, a completely different license and two, hasn't applied since 3.5. The OGL was written as kind of an escape clause by Dancy et Al so they could continue to produce their own D&D books when they were inevitably tossed out of Wizards or left on their own volition without having to abide by the restrictive D20 STL. Whether this was intentional or not we don't know but practically it lead to the creation of Pathfinder.
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Jan 16, 2023 02:01
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