5 ms·

While I understand the desire to define things legally - both by those who want the games to be open and by those who want to control them - game mechanics and

While I understand the desire to define things legally - both by those who want the games to be open and by those who want to control them - game mechanics and rules are NOT copyrightable. We never needed OGL to publish material compatible with D&D (or any other system) in the first place [0]. [0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-h...

coremoff 4y ago
compounded by, in D&D's case, the fact that most of their core material uses completely generic terms; fighter, cleric, strength, wisdom. 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.)
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  Funnily enough, a lot of iconic dnd monsters like rust monster and owlbear was Gary gygax buying bags of random plastic toys and giving them statblocks. So they were themselves just statblocks for others copyrighted works.
Sakos 4y ago
Even if this is the case, I don't think there are any companies in the space with deep enough pockets to go up against WotC and challenge it. Just the fear of legal reprisal is a huge problem and has a significant chilling effect that can't be ignored. A new license is absolutely necessary in the context of the modern court system.
mcv 4y ago
Even if you're certain you'd win a lawsuit, you'd still have to be able to afford that lawsuit. As we saw in the Google vs Amazon case of the Java API, such lawsuits can be long and complex, and most RPG publishers are tiny. WotC is probably bigger than the entire rest of the industry put together. 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.
- sswezey 4y ago
  I think you mean Google vs Oracle for the Java API copyright lawsuit.
  - Pet_Ant 4y ago
    No, if precedent wasn’t a thing, then I’d be for Oracle vs Google. Google wanted to free-ride without contributing. If they could have they’d have made their own language from the beginning. Even then, they didn’t really support real Java but it’s evil twin brother Dalvik. When you are Google-scale you should pay. Noblesse oblige.
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      Uh, no. Hard no. Literally any legal principle in which Google has to pay for 20 lines of API declarations (which is the thing that Oracle was able to claim copyright over in court) means pretty much the end of software freedom, since reimplementation is how FOSS was bootstrapped. This means that Microsoft could sue Valve for offering Proton on the Steam Deck. GNU and BSD become legally radioactive. Ruffle survives only through detrimental reliance[0]. The entire console emulation community gets sued for hilariously large sums. 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.
      - Pet_Ant 4y ago
        > if precedent wasn’t a thing 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.
        kmeisthax 4y ago
hef19898 4y ago
One good example are Battletech's Unseen Mech models. The stats were ok, the drawings were owned by some folks in Japan. Liscense agreements were impossible, so instead of risking a law suit, Battletech switched Mechs. And that required an in-universe retcon of sorts to explain why the Mechs everybody used and inhereted from their great-great-grandparents weren't there anymore.
mhd 4y ago
> We never needed OGL to publish material compatible with D&D 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.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  Magic missile by itself is questionable since that language never gets used outside of D&D references, but it is also suitably generic. If you also used Strength, Intelligence, Constitution, Charisma and Wisdom as stats, and had hit dice, and so on, that would be problematic. If you chose new names for everything but the rules were otherwise identical that would be completely safe. 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.
  - mhd 4y ago
    > If you chose new names for everything but the rules were otherwise identical that would be completely safe 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…
miiiiiike 4y ago
> [...] game mechanics and rules are NOT copyrightable. We never needed OGL to publish material compatible with D&D (or any other system) in the first place. 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.
- rkangel 4y ago
  > 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 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"?
shagie 4y ago
> game mechanics and rules are NOT copyrightable. Correct. This is where patents come into place. For example https://patents.google.com/patent/US7264242 https://patents.google.com/patent/US7264242 and https://generalpatent.com/professor-s-company-wins-1-6-million-patent-infringement-lawsuit-over-board-games.html https://generalpatent.com/professor-s-company-wins-1-6-milli... https://patents.google.com/patent/US3208754A/en 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 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://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/m/magic-missile/ https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Magic%20Missile#content 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).
- BerislavLopac 4y ago
  This question is basically what the article linked in my comment above is all about.
musicale 4y ago
Great point, but it seems like it would be a huge pain to have to change all of the spell and monster lists and D&D-specific terms from the SRD into generic equivalents. 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.

coremoff 4y ago

compounded by, in D&D's case, the fact that most of their core material uses completely generic terms; fighter, cleric, strength, wisdom. 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.)

thatguy0900 4y ago
Funnily enough, a lot of iconic dnd monsters like rust monster and owlbear was Gary gygax buying bags of random plastic toys and giving them statblocks. So they were themselves just statblocks for others copyrighted works.

Sakos 4y ago

Even if this is the case, I don't think there are any companies in the space with deep enough pockets to go up against WotC and challenge it. Just the fear of legal reprisal is a huge problem and has a significant chilling effect that can't be ignored. A new license is absolutely necessary in the context of the modern court system.

mcv 4y ago

Even if you're certain you'd win a lawsuit, you'd still have to be able to afford that lawsuit. As we saw in the Google vs Amazon case of the Java API, such lawsuits can be long and complex, and most RPG publishers are tiny. WotC is probably bigger than the entire rest of the industry put together. 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.

sswezey 4y ago
I think you mean Google vs Oracle for the Java API copyright lawsuit.
- Pet_Ant 4y ago
  No, if precedent wasn’t a thing, then I’d be for Oracle vs Google. Google wanted to free-ride without contributing. If they could have they’d have made their own language from the beginning. Even then, they didn’t really support real Java but it’s evil twin brother Dalvik. When you are Google-scale you should pay. Noblesse oblige.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    Uh, no. Hard no. Literally any legal principle in which Google has to pay for 20 lines of API declarations (which is the thing that Oracle was able to claim copyright over in court) means pretty much the end of software freedom, since reimplementation is how FOSS was bootstrapped. This means that Microsoft could sue Valve for offering Proton on the Steam Deck. GNU and BSD become legally radioactive. Ruffle survives only through detrimental reliance[0]. The entire console emulation community gets sued for hilariously large sums. 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.
    - Pet_Ant 4y ago
      > if precedent wasn’t a thing 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.
      - kmeisthax 4y ago

hef19898 4y ago

One good example are Battletech's Unseen Mech models. The stats were ok, the drawings were owned by some folks in Japan. Liscense agreements were impossible, so instead of risking a law suit, Battletech switched Mechs. And that required an in-universe retcon of sorts to explain why the Mechs everybody used and inhereted from their great-great-grandparents weren't there anymore.

mhd 4y ago

> We never needed OGL to publish material compatible with D&D 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.

CuriouslyC 4y ago
Magic missile by itself is questionable since that language never gets used outside of D&D references, but it is also suitably generic. If you also used Strength, Intelligence, Constitution, Charisma and Wisdom as stats, and had hit dice, and so on, that would be problematic. If you chose new names for everything but the rules were otherwise identical that would be completely safe. 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.
- mhd 4y ago
  > If you chose new names for everything but the rules were otherwise identical that would be completely safe 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…

miiiiiike 4y ago

> [...] game mechanics and rules are NOT copyrightable. We never needed OGL to publish material compatible with D&D (or any other system) in the first place. 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.

rkangel 4y ago
> 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 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"?

shagie 4y ago

> game mechanics and rules are NOT copyrightable. Correct. This is where patents come into place. For example https://patents.google.com/patent/US7264242 https://patents.google.com/patent/US7264242 and https://generalpatent.com/professor-s-company-wins-1-6-million-patent-infringement-lawsuit-over-board-games.html https://generalpatent.com/professor-s-company-wins-1-6-milli... https://patents.google.com/patent/US3208754A/en 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 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://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/m/magic-missile/ https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Magic%20Missile#content 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).

BerislavLopac 4y ago
This question is basically what the article linked in my comment above is all about.

musicale 4y ago

Great point, but it seems like it would be a huge pain to have to change all of the spell and monster lists and D&D-specific terms from the SRD into generic equivalents. 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.